Kit-Tai Hau

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong

Endogeneity is a critical concern in research methodologies, yet it has been insufficiently addressed in longitudinal cross-lagged models, leading to potentially biased outcomes. This study scrutinized the endogeneity inherent in the cross-lagged panel model (CLPM), a prevalent and representative framework in longitudinal studies. We evaluated the...

This study employed latent profile analysis (LPA) to identify emotion profiles among foreign language (FL) learners and explored their relationship with FL achievement and subjective well-being, drawing on control-value theory. The participants included 4,109 Chinese secondary students who completed an English achievement test and online questionna...

The popularity of self-report surveys brings to light the issue of insufficient effort responding (IER), where participants lack motivation to respond thoughtfully, thereby compromising data quality. A prevalent form of IER, known as straightlining, occurs when participants consistently select the same response for multiple items, leading to potent...

Introduction The supply of elite professionals is crucial for economic development, yet little is understood about the appeal and influencing factors of these careers among young people across different economies. It remains unclear whether adolescents in academically high‐performing economies growingly expect emerging technological jobs in respons...

Currently, dynamic structural equation modeling (DSEM) and residual DSEM (RDSEM) are commonly used in testing intensive longitudinal data (ILD). Researchers are interested in ILD mediation models, but their analyses are challenging. The present paper mathematically derived, empirically compared, and step-by-step demonstrated three types (i.e., 1-1-...

Multistage adaptive testing (MST) has been recently adopted for international large‐scale assessments such as Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). MST offers improved measurement efficiency over traditional nonadaptive tests and improved practical convenience over single‐item‐adaptive computerized adaptive testing (CAT). As a thir...

Linear mixed-effects models have been increasingly used to analyze dependent data in psychological research. Despite their many advantages over ANOVA, critical issues in their analyses remain. Due to increasing random effects and model complexity, estimation computation is demanding, and convergence becomes challenging. Applied users need help choo...

Short scales are time‐efficient for participants and cost‐effective in research. However, researchers often mistakenly expect short scales to have the same reliability as long ones without considering the effect of scale length. We argue that applying a universal benchmark for alpha is problematic as the impact of low‐quality items is greater on sh...

We compared coefficient alpha with five alternatives (omega total, omega RT, omega h, GLB, and coefficient H) in two simulation studies. Results showed for unidimensional scales, (a) all indices except omega h performed similarly well for most conditions; (b) alpha is still good; (c) GLB and coefficient H overestimated reliability with small sample...

With the COVID-19 outbreak, emergency remote teaching – an unprepared distant mode of education became the only possible alternative for schools. The present large-scale survey with 3,672 Grade 3 and 9 students, their parents, and 863 teachers/principals was conducted in the metropolitan city of Hong Kong after half a year of school lockdown. Resul...

Research has confirmed the importance of teacher feedback on student learning. The mechanism of how they are related, however, is not clear enough. In this study, we explored this relation with 60,501 fifteen-year-old students from collectivistic and individualistic cultures in PISA 2018. Importantly, we examined the possible mediating role of read...

Critical thinking is one of the important higher-order skills very much treasured in education, but hard to be measured using paper-pencil tests. In line with recent recommendation to measure high-order thinking skills with interactive tasks (vs. static one set of questions), in this study we developed an interactive and automated game-based assess...

We examined the performance of coefficient alpha and its potential competitors (ordinal alpha, omega total, Revelle’s omega total [omega RT], omega hierarchical [omega h], greatest lower bound [GLB], and coefficient H) with continuous and discrete data having different types of non-normality. Results showed the estimation bias was acceptable for co...

Background Body constitution is a fundamental concept in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) for clinical diagnosis, treatment of illness, and community-based health promotion. Clinical assessment of patients’ body constitutions, however, has never been easy and consistent, even by well-trained clinicians and TCM practitioners. Therefore, questionna...

The big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE), the negative effect of school-/class-average achievement on academic self-concept, is one of educational psychology’s most universal findings. However, critiques of this research have proposed moderators based on achievement motivation theories. Nevertheless, because these motivational theories are not suffi...

Murphy (2021) argues that the field of Industrial-Organizational (I/O) Psychology needs to pay more attention to descriptive statistics (“Table 1”; e.g., M, SD, reliability, correlations) when reporting and interpreting results. We agree that authors need to present a clear and transparent description of their data and that descriptive statistics a...

In exploratory factor analysis (EFA), cross-loadings frequently occur in empirical research, but its effects on determining the number of factors to retain are seldom known. In this paper, we analyzed whether and how cross-loadings affected the performance of the parallel analysis (PA), the empirical Kaiser criterion (EKC), the likelihood ratio tes...

In large-scale low-stake assessment such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), students may skip items (missingness) which are within their ability to complete. The detection and taking care of these noneffortful responses, as a measure of test-taking motivation, is an important issue in modern psychometric models. Tradition...

This study investigated the mediating roles of self-efficacy and anxiety on the effects of teacher–student relationship on mathematical problem-solving ability. A total of 1667 fifth graders from central China participated in the large-scale survey. The findings indicated that (1) teacher–student relationship had a direct and positive effect on stu...

Objective: For Chinese students, learning is seen as their duty and obligation to the society and their parents. Thus, in contrast to the Western students, the effects of extrinsic motivation on academic performance may not necessarily be always negative. The present study examined the effects of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, as well as thei...

We compared six common methods in estimating the 2-1-1 (level-2 independent, level-1 mediator, level-1 dependent) multilevel mediation model with a random slope. They were the Bayesian with informative priors, the Bayesian with non-informative priors, the Monte-Carlo, the distribution of the product, the bias-corrected, and the bias-uncorrected par...

Minor cross-loadings on non-targeted factors are often found in psychological or other instruments. Forcing them to zero in confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) leads to biased estimates and distorted structures. Alternatively, exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) and Bayesian structural equation modeling (BSEM) have been proposed. In this...

This research examined the possible long-term effects of autonomous motivation on educational outcomes in the large scale High School Longitudinal Study 2009 (HSLS:09) data. We used a three-wave cross-lagged model to examine the longitudinal effects of intrinsic and identified motivation on 18,132 students in the mathematics domain and 16,684 stude...

The research examines possible differences in the mutual reinforcement (i.e. multiplicative) effect between intrinsic and instrumental motivation on academic performance across different cultures. Eight representative countries and economies from two large‐scale databases—the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2011 and th...

The present study examined the link between teacher–student relationship at the class level and academic achievement via the serial multiple mediation effect of self-efficacy and learning strategy in Chinese EFL context with 11,036 eighth graders. Student-reported measures of teacher–student relationship, English self-efficacy, learning strategy an...

We investigated the relationships between leaders' and their followers' psychological capital and organizational identification in a Chinese community. Participants included 423 followers on 34 work teams, each with its respective team leader. Hierarchical linear models (HLM) were used in the analyses to delineate the relationships among participan...

Two groups of 12-year-old ethnic minority (EM) users of alphasyllabary (66 Tibetan and 45 Yi) were compared with 42 Han Chinese students in comprehending Chinese narrative and expository texts, each with inferential questions requiring short open-ended written answers. Three constructs (verbal working memory, orthographic and sentential processing)...

The present study examined the reading ability development of children in the large scale Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 data; Tourangeau et al., 2009) under the dynamic systems. To depict children's growth pattern, we extended the measurement part of latent transition analysis to the growth mixture model and foun...

Positive academic self-concept has been considered one of the most important indicators of educational success. Empirical evidence across divergent educational and cultural contexts supports (1) a hierarchical multidimensional model of self-concept, (2) reciprocal causal relations between academic achievement and corresponding self-concepts, (3) th...

Background With the proportion of older adults in Hong Kong projected to double in size in the next 30 years, it is important to develop measures for detecting individuals in the earliest stage of Alzheimer's disease (AD, 0.5 in Clinical Dementia Rating, CDR). We tested the utility of a non-verbal prospective memory task (PM, ability to remember wh...

Personal epistemology describes an individual's beliefs about the structure, stability and sources of knowledge and knowing. These beliefs contribute to how we interpret information, weigh evidence and justify an argument. In this study, we examined whether exposure to information from an authoritative source affects Chinese students’ performance i...

The purpose of this investigation is to compare and evaluate 2 approaches for estimating interaction effects in latent growth models (LGMs): the unconstrained approach and the latent moderated structural equations (LMS) approach. To reduce the complexity of modeling interactions in LGMs, we created difference-product indicators to replace the tradi...

The present study investigated multidimensional motivation and engagement among Chinese middle school students in Australia (N = 273), Hong Kong (N = 528), and Mainland China (N = 2106; randomly selected N = 528). Findings showed that a multidimensional model of motivation and engagement fit very well for all three groups. Multi-group invariance te...

Many mechanistic rules of thumb for evaluating the goodness of fit of structural equation models (SEM) emphasize model parsimony; all other things being equal, a simpler, more parsimonious model with fewer estimated parameters is better than a more complex model Although this is usually good advice, in the present article a heuristic counterexample...

Critical thinking is a unifying goal of modern education. While past research has mostly examined the efficacy of a single instructional approach to teaching critical thinking, recent literature has begun discussing mixed teaching approaches. The present study examines three modes of instruction, featuring the direct instruction approach and the in...

Background: Education has a profound effect on older adults' cognitive performance. In Hong Kong, some dementia screening tasks were originally designed for developed population with, on average, higher education. Methods: We compared the screening power of these tasks for Chinese older adults with different levels of education. Community-dwelli...

The present study revisited the unresolved issue of the long-term effects of part-time working intensity during high school on students’ achievement, participation in postsecondary education, time allocation, and work-related values and expectations. Using data from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (N = 14,654), the effects of part-time w...

Typically, the effects of single-sex schooling are small at best, and tend to be statistically non-significant once pre-existing differences are taken into account. However, researchers often have had to rely on observational studies based on small non-representative samples and have not used more advanced propensity score methods to control the po...

This Monte Carlo simulation study investigated different strategies for forming product indicators for the unconstrained approach in analyzing latent interaction models when the exogenous factors are measured by unequal numbers of indicators under both normal and nonnormal conditions. Product indicators were created by (a) multiplying parcels of th...

The present study examined pedagogic components of Chinese reading literacy in a representative sample of 1164 Grades 7, 9 and 11 Chinese students (mean age of 15 years) from 11 secondary schools in Hong Kong with each student tested for about 2.5 hours. Multiple group confirmatory factor analyses showed that across the three grade levels, the eigh...

The internal/external frame of reference (I/E) model (Marsh, 1986) posits that the effects of contrasting math and verbal domains of achievement are positive for matching academic self-concepts (ASCs) but negative for nonmatching ASCs (i.e., math achievement on verbal ASC; verbal achievement on math ASC). We extend the classic I/E model by contrast...

Background: In Hong Kong, older Chinese adults generally have a low level of education. This study examined the effect of education on very mild Alzheimer's disease (AD), as quantified by Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) scale (CDR 0.5 versus 0), in a Chinese community. The Cantonese version of the Mini-Mental State Examination (C-MMSE) was used to...

This article reviews recent evidences about Chinese students' outstanding academic performance and discusses the major themes and issues arising from the study of their motivational characteristics. Despite Chinese students' high academic achievement, research has shown that they actually display a generally lower sense of efficacy than their Weste...

Structural equation models are extensively used in environmental research. To assess Goodness of Fit in structural equation modeling, one can report the upper-bound of RMSEA confidence interval (e.g., .043) at a commonly used probability criterion (e.g., 90% confidence level). Alternatively one can report the p-value using a popular RMSEA close-fit...

The short version of the World Health Organization's Quality of Life Instrument (WHOQOL-BREF) is widely validated and popularly used in assessing the subjective quality of life (QOL) of patients and the general public. We examined its psychometric properties in a large sample of community residents in mainland China. The WHOQOL-BREF was administere...

Expectancy-value theory (EVT) is a dominant theory of human motivation. Historically, the Expectancy × Value interaction, in which motivation is high only if both expectancy and value are high, was central to EVT. However, the Expectancy × Value interaction mysteriously disappeared from published research more than 25 years ago. Using large represe...

In “Unforgiving Confucian culture: A breeding ground for high academic achievement, test anxiety and self-doubt?” Stankov (in press) provides three reasons for caution against over-glorifying the academic excellence of Confucian Asian learners, namely that it may lead to a reluctance to change their rote learning approach which is not conducive to...

The present study explored motivation and engagement among Chinese and Australian school students. Based on a sample of 528 Hong Kong Chinese 12–13 year olds and an archive sample of 6,366 Australian 12–13 year olds, achievement motivation was assessed using the Motivation and Engagement Scale–High School (MES-HS). Confirmatory factor analysis and...

Standardized parameter estimates are routinely used to summarize the results of multiple regression models of manifest variables and structural equation models of latent variables, because they facilitate interpretation. Although the typical standardization of interaction terms is not appropriate for multiple regression models, straightforward alte...

Previous studies have suggested that Western constructs of academic motivation may operate in different ways in Asian contexts due to differences in the cultural environment. In the present study, the integrative effects of achievement goals, strategy orientations, and effort expenditure on achievement outcomes were examined among 1950 seventh-grad...

The aim of this study was to examine the effects of a 6-week diet and exercise program, with emphasis on strength training, on the physical self-concept, body composition, and physical fitness of young overweight and obese children. Eighty-two overweight and obese children aged 8-11 years were randomized into a diet-only or a diet-and-strength trai...

The present study examined the role of verbal working memory (memory span, tongue twister), 2-character Chinese pseudoword reading, rapid automatized naming (letters, numbers), and phonological segmentation (deletion of rimes and onsets) in inferential text comprehension in Chinese in 518 Chinese children in Hong Kong in Grades 3 to 5. It was hypot...

The big-fish–little-pond effect (BFLPE) predicts that equally able students have lower academic self-concepts (ASCs) when attending schools where the average ability levels of classmates is high, and higher ASCs when attending schools where the school-average ability is low. BFLPE findings are remarkably robust, generalizing over a wide variety of...

Little, Bovaird and Widaman (2006) proposed an unconstrained approach with residual centering for estimating latent interaction effects as an alternative to the mean-centered approach proposed by Marsh, Wen, and Hau (2004, 2006). Little et al. also differed from Marsh et al. in the number of indicators used to infer the latent interaction factor an...

The present study examined the role of verbal working memory (memory span and tongue-twister), two-character Chinese pseudoword reading (two tasks), rapid automatized naming (RAN) (letters and numbers), and phonological segmentation (deletion of rimes and onsets) in inferential text comprehension in Chinese in 31 less competent comprehenders compar...

Childhood obesity is increasingly prevalent in Western and non-Western societies. The authors related multiple dimensions of physical self-concept to body composition for 763 Chinese children aged 8 to 15 and compared the results with Western research. Compared with Western research, gender differences favoring boys were generally much smaller for...

As emphasized in the call for papers by Jonna Kulikowich and Gregory Hancock, the primary goal of this special issue of Contemporary Educational Psychology is to assemble a collection of illustrative empirical studies in educational psychology that utilize one or more state-of-the-art latent variable modeling procedures. Distinguishing these articl...

Education is so strongly emphasized in the Chinese culture that academic success is widely regarded as the only indicator of success, while too much physical activity is often discouraged because it drains energy and affects academic concentration. This study investigated the relations among academic achievement, self‐esteem, school conduct and phy...

Through a rigorous process of selecting educational psychology’s most useful affective constructs, the OECD constructed the Students’ Approaches to Learning (SAL) instrument, which requires only 10 minutes to measure 14 factors that assess self-regulated learning strategies, self-beliefs, motivation, and learning preferences. Here we evaluate SAL r...

In this chapter the authors begin with a brief overview of the construct validity approach that underpins their multimethod perspective to self-concept research. After briefly reviewing the theoretical basis for their self-concept research, the authors provide an overview of the different multimethod approaches used in this research program. They h...

A case study of an undergraduate Educational Psychology course that incorporated both constructivist and teacher‐centred teaching was conducted. The learning processes and higher‐level learning outcomes were examined through participant observation, interviews with students and analyses of student assignments. The lessons were audio recorded and tr...

This study examines the effect of public self-consciousness on the expression of gender-role attitudes. It was hypothesized that high publics were more likely to alter their gender-view expressions to meet situational expectations than were high privates and that, under an activated state of public self-attention, people were more likely to alter t...

In computerized adaptive testing (CAT), traditionally the most discriminating items are selected to provide the maximum information so as to attain the highest efficiency in trait (theta) estimation. The maximum information (MI) approach typically results in unbalanced item exposure and hence high item-overlap rates across examinees. Recently, Yi a...

In a 2-wave study of a cohort of 108 Chinese students (10- to 11-year-olds) learning English as a second language, the authors examined the relative effects of three Time 1 latent constructs-- orthographic knowledge, phonological sensitivity, and word identification (reading and spelling of regular and exception words)--on the respective Time 2 per...

To compare self-perceptions of physical competences in overweight and in normal weight preadolescent Chinese children. Cross-sectional study. Three primary schools and a university hospital in Hong Kong. A total of 634 children, comprising 558 (462 normal weight, 96 overweight) aged 8-12 y randomly sampled from three primary schools, and 76 similar...

Following the introduction, we divide the discussion of goodness of fit (GOF) into three broad sections. In the first and the most substantial (in terms of length) section, we provide a technical summary of the GOF literature. In this section we take a reasonably uncritical perspective on the role of GOF testing, providing an almost encyclopedic su...

This study examined the structural relationships between (a) the latent independent constructs of orthographic and lexical knowledge and phonological sensitivity and (b) the effect of these constructs on the latent construct of literacy manifested by reading aloud and spelling regular and exception English words in 156 Cantonese-speaking Chinese st...

The concepts and analyses of the moderator and mediator effects were discussed. Approaches in estimation and testing of moderating and mediating effects were summarized with recommendations for appropriate choices. The moderator and mediator as well as their effects were compared in terms of their implications, intentions, functions, implied models...

Maximum likelihood estimation in confirmatory factor analysis requires large sample sizes, normally distributed item responses, and reliable indicators of each latent construct, but these ideals are rarely met. We examine alternative strategies for dealing with non-normal data, particularly when the sample size is small. In two simulation studies,...

Interactions between (multiple indicator) latent variables are rarely used because of implementation complexity and competing strategies. Based on 4 simulation studies, the traditional constrained approach performed more poorly than did 3 new approaches--unconstrained, generalized appended product indicator, and quasi-maximum-likelihood (QML). The...

Goodness-of-fit (GOF) indexes provide "rules of thumb"—recommended cutoff values for assessing fit in structural equation modeling. Hu and Bentler (1999) proposed a more rigorous approach to evaluating decision rules based on GOF indexes and, on this basis, proposed new and more stringent cutoff values for many indexes. This article discusses poten...

Responds to comments made by Dai (see record 2004-14303-011) and Plucker et al (200414303-012) on the current authors' original article (see record 2003-06802-005) on the big-fish--little-pond effect (BFLPE). In its simplest form the BFLPE predicts that equally able students have lower academic self-concepts when attending schools where the avera...

The present research examined and compared Australian and Chinese teachers’ personal efficacy in instruction, discipline, guidance and beliefs about external influences. Two staged studies were conducted with the participation of 316 Australian teachers (108, 208 in first and second stages, respectively) and 411 Hong Kong Chinese teachers (138, 273...

The internal/external frame of reference (I/E) model explains a seemingly paradoxical pattern of relations between math and verbal self-concepts and corresponding measures of achievement, extends social comparison theory, and has important educational implications. In a cross-cultural study of nationally representative samples of 15-year-olds from...

Content balancing is often a practical consideration in the design of computerized adaptive testing (CAT). This study compared three content balancing methods, namely, the constrained CAT (CCAT), the modified constrained CAT (MCCAT), and the modified multinomial model (MMM), under various conditions of test length and target maximum exposure rate....

Academically selective schools are intended to affect academic self-concept positively, but theoretical and empirical research demonstrates that the effects are negative. The big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE), an application of social comparison theory to educational settings, posits that a student will have a lower academic self-concept in an ac...

Academically selective schools are intended to affect academic self-concept positively, but theoretical and empirical research demonstrates that the effects are negative. The big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE), an application of social comparison theory to educational settings, posits that a student will have a lower academic self-concept in an ac...

Students' subjective beliefs on whether intelligence and other personal attributes (personality, creativity, emotional intelligence, morality) can be changed will affect their learning and motivational behavior. In two related studies, we examined the generality of such beliefs across different personal attributes and age groups. The first study in...

In computerized adaptive testing, the multistage a-stratified design advocates a new philosophy on pool management and item selection in which, contradictory to common practice, less discriminating items are used first. The method is effective in reducing item-overlap rate and enhancing pool utilization. This stratification method has been extended...

Item exposure control, test-overlap minimization, and the efficient use of item pool are some of the important issues in computerized adaptive testing (CAT) designs. The overexposure of some items and high test-overlap rate may cause both item and test security problems. Previously these problems associated with the maximum information (Max-I) item...