Pui-Wa Lei

Pennsylvania State University | Penn State · Department of Educational Psychology, Counseling and Special Education

Effective universal social skills programs are intended to facilitate the development of students' social competencies and enhance classroom learning. As such, the present study sought to provide additional insights and a more nuanced understanding of the impacts of one such universal program, the Social Skills Improvement System Classwide Interven...

Although children use social and emotional learning skills (SEL) across the world, the expression of these skills may vary across cultures and developmental levels. Such variability complicates the process of assessing SEL competencies with consequences for understanding differences in SEL skills and developing interventions. To address these chall...

Efficient and intuitive interpretive frameworks for social-emotional learning (SEL) measures are necessary for identifying student needs and informing programming decisions across multitiered systems of support in schools. Though familiar to educators and often used with standardized tests of academic achievement, criterion-referenced frameworks ar...

Chinese is a morphologically rich language and converging evidence demonstrates that knowledge of Chinese morphology holds significant relations to several literacy-related skills. However, an area of morphology that has been relatively under-investigated is derivational awareness. Investigations of Chinese derivational morphology have been limited...

The SSIS SEL Brief Scales (SSIS SELb) are multi-informant (teacher, parent, and student) measures that were developed to efficiently assess the SEL competencies of school-age youth in the United States. Recently, the SSIS SELb was translated into multiple languages for use in a multi-site study across six European countries (Croatia, Greece, Italy,...

Until children can produce letters quickly and accurately, it is assumed that handwriting disrupts and limits the quality of their text. This investigation is the largest study to date (2596 girls, 2354 boys) assessing the association between handwriting fluency and writing quality. We tested whether handwriting fluency made a statistically unique...

Objective The objective of this research was to develop a brief version of the well-established Social Skills Improvement System Social Emotional Learning (SSIS SEL) Parent Rating Form (2017) so that parents' voices are heard by schools where programs to facilitate children's social emotional learning (SEL) are increasingly popular. Background Par...

Implementation of evidence-based practices is a critical factor in whether afterschool programs are successful in having a positive impact upon risk reduction and positive youth development. However, important prevention research reveals that contextual and organizational factors can affect implementation (Bradshaw & Pas in School Psychology Review...

Parents play a major role in children’s development and have unique opportunities to observe a wide range of their children’s social–emotional behavior at home and in their communities. Yet parents’ input via universal screening assessments into school-based social–emotional learning (SEL) programs for their children has been limited by a paucity o...

Although universal social–emotional learning programs are increasingly implemented across the USA, few studies have examined the effects of sustained exposure to the same program across multiple grade levels. As such, the goal of this study was to isolate the effects of sustained exposure to a universal social–emotional learning program (Elliott &...

Universal screening of students is increasing as programs are implemented for improving social emotional learning (SEL) skills. Assessments used to conduct SEL screenings focus on social emotional strengths; however, such assessments can provide a broader characterization of students’ wellbeing by concurrently screening for emotional behavior conce...

Background Morphological analysis skill is the ability to problem‐solve meanings of unfamiliar words by applying knowledge of morphological constituents. For vocabulary words from the academic layer of English, the major, meaning‐carrying morphological contituents are Latin roots (nov meaning ‘new’ in innovative). The degree to which morphological...

Despite the need for assessments targeting social and emotional learning (SEL) skills within multi-tiered systems of support, there are few brief SEL measures available. To address this need, this article describes the development of the SSIS SEL Brief Scales – Teacher Form (SSIS SELb-T), a significantly shorter version of the SSIS SEL Edition Rati...

Interest in social and emotional learning (SEL) skills is growing rapidly with all 50 states adopting SEL standards for preschool children. However, data on these type of skills for young children are limited due to a paucity of psychometrically-sound assessments. Further, most available assessments are lengthy and minimally aligned with widely use...

The SSIS SEL Brief Scales–Student Form (SSIS SELb-S) was developed to create an efficient assessment of students’ social and emotional learning (SEL). Using item response theory with ratings from 800 students in Grades 3–12 from the standardization sample, 20 items were selected from the full-length SSIS SEL Rating Form - Student to maximize score...

Little research has been done on the effects of peer raters’ quality characteristics on peer rating qualities. This study aims to address this gap and investigate the effects of key variables related to peer raters’ qualities, including content knowledge, previous rating experience, training on rating tasks, and rating motivation. In an experiment...

Although the promise of universal social-emotional learning (SEL) programs enhancing student academic outcomes has captured public attention, there has been limited research regarding such programs’ impact on students’ state test scores. We used multilevel modeling of follow-up data from a multiyear, multisite cluster-randomized efficacy trial to i...

Given that words from the academic layer of English typically carry bound roots (min in diminish) rather than free-standing base words (small in smaller), there is a need to understand the factors that make bound roots more or less accessible for morphological problem-solving unfamiliar words. We investigated the contributions of learner characteri...

Missing data and ordinal indicators are common in applied research involving latent constructs. Unfortunately, ordinal indicators violate the linearity assumption for conventional CFA that is routinely used to provide structural validity evidence for measurement instruments. Although robust maximum likelihood estimator (MLR) can deal with both miss...

The effects of teaching the text structure strategy using a web‐based Intelligent Tutoring System for the Text Structure Strategy (ITSS) were examined with fourth‐ and fifth‐grade children scoring below the 25th percentile on comprehension measures using the Gray Silent Reading Test (GSRT) and researcher designed assessment from 130 fourth‐grade an...

A core tenet of the model of domain learning is that learning is shaped by cognitive and motivational forces. In writing, these catalysts include learners’ knowledge, motivation, strategic behaviors, and skills. This study tested this proposition at two time points (Fall and Spring) with 179 fifth-grade students (52% were girls), examining if writi...

This study tested whether writing skills, knowledge, motivation, and strategic behaviors (within the context of robust writing instruction) each made a statistically unique contribution to predicting fifth-grade students’ (123 girls, 104 boys) composition quality and length on a persuasive writing task involving source material, after variance due...

Reading and comprehending content area texts is important for academic and professional success as well as life skills necessary to maintain good health and quality lifestyle. Spanish speaking English language learners have shown poor performance on high-stakes assessments in reading comprehension. The number of Spanish speaking English learners (E...

Explicit signals of important relationships in expository texts can provide efficient processing instructions for readers with strategic knowledge about text structures. However, such signal words do not help readers without strategic knowledge about use of text structures and signal words. This study provided the first detailed investigation about...

Latent transition analysis (LTA) was conducted on data from a recent cluster randomized controlled study of 1808 seventh-grade students’ use of a web-based intelligent tutoring system (ITSS). This analysis goes beyond traditional variable-centered methods to focus on profiles of learners and changes in reading class membership between pre- and post...

A training program to improve clinical supervision behavior, knowledge, self-efficacy, and working alliance among state vocational rehabilitation supervisors (SVRS) was studied. SVRS (n = 180) were randomly assigned to either the control or experimental group. To further validate training effectiveness, counselors (n = 350) who were assigned to bot...

The purpose of this study was to examine the social validity of the Social Skills Improvement System-Classwide Intervention Program (SSIS-CIP) for teachers in the primary grades. Participants included 45 first and second grade teachers who completed a 16-item social validity questionnaire during each year of the SSIS-CIP efficacy trial. Findings in...

Reading and comprehending content area texts require learners to effectively select and encode with hierarchically strategic memory structures in order to combine new information with prior knowledge. Unfortunately, evidence from state and national tests shows that children fail to successfully navigate the reading comprehension challenges they fac...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of a universal social skills program, the Social Skills Improvement System Classwide Intervention Program (SSIS-CIP; Elliott & Gresham, 2007), for students in first grade. Classrooms from 6 elementary schools were randomly assigned to treatment or business-as-usual control conditions. Teachers...

Reading comprehension in the content areas is a challenge for many middle grade students. Text structure-based instruction has yielded positive outcomes in reading comprehension at all grade levels in small and large studies. The text structure strategy delivered via the web, called Intelligent Tutoring System for the Text Structure Strategy (ITSS)...

The relation between metabolic control (HbA1c) and achievement (grade point average [GPA]) was examined over a period of 2.5 years (every 6 months) employing a dynamical systems approach that allowed for the examination of whether HbA1c was associated with change in subsequent GPA and vice versa. Metabolic control tends to deteriorate (i.e., with h...

In recent years, students’ test scores have been used to evaluate teachers’ performance. The assumption underlying this practice is that students’ test performance reflects teachers’ instruction. However, this assumption is generally not empirically tested. In this study, we examine the effect of teachers’ instruction on test performance at the ite...

Reading in the content areas of science, social studies, and current events is a difficult task that is even more elusive to Spanish-speaking English language learners. There is a huge increase in children transitioning from their L1 (e.g., Spanish) to L2 (e.g., English) in classrooms across the USA. These ELs face challenges due to a lack of fluen...

This study examined the internal structure of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS; K–3 version). The original CLASS K–3 model (Pianta, La Paro, & Hamre, 2008) and 5 alternative models were tested using confirmatory factor analysis with a sample of first- and second-grade classrooms (N = 141). Findings indicated that a slightly modified v...

In applications of cognitive diagnostic models (CDMs), practitioners usually face the difficulty of choosing appropriate CDMs and building accurate Q-matrices. However, functions of model-fit indices that are supposed to inform model and Q-matrix choices are not well understood. This study examines the performance of several promising model fit ind...

Measurement efficiency is an important consideration when developing behavior rating scales for use in research and practice. Although most published scales have been developed within a Classical Test Theory (CTT) framework, Item Response Theory (IRT) offers several advantages for developing scales that maximize measurement efficiency. The current...

The purpose of the current study was to examine dimensionality and concurrent validity evidence of the EARLI numeracy measures, which were developed to assess key skills such as number identification, counting, and basic arithmetic. Two methods (NOHARM with approximate chi-square test and DIMTEST with DETECT classifications) were used to examine th...

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to amend and extend the emerging research that has utilized an employee-focused approach to examining the service recovery process. In doing so, we examine the influences of supervisor and coworker support for error management on two measures of employee service performance: service recovery performance and hel...

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of a universal program to promote positive classroom behavior on students’ approaches to learning and early academic skills. Second grade classrooms (N = 39) were randomly assigned to treatment and business-as-usual control conditions. Teachers in intervention classrooms implemented the Social Ski...

Cognitive diagnostic models (CDMs) have great promise for providing diagnostic information to aid learning and instruction, and a large number of CDMs have been proposed. However, the assumptions and performances of different CDMs and their applications in regard to reading comprehension tests are not fully understood. In the present study, we comp...

This study examined the impact of two types of team knowledge on team effectiveness. The study assessed the impact of taskwork knowledge and teamwork knowledge on team satisfaction and performance. A longitudinal study was conducted with 27 service-management teams involving 178 students in a real-life restaurant setting. Teamwork knowledge was fou...

A multisite cluster randomized trial was conducted to examine the effects of the Social Skills Improvement System Classwide Intervention Program (SSIS-CIP; Elliott & Gresham, 2007) on students' classroom social behavior. The final sample included 432 students across 38 second grade classrooms. Social skills and problem behaviors were measured via t...

This article proposed a new online test overlap control algorithm that is an improvement of Chen's algorithm in controlling general test overlap rate for item pooling among a group of examinees. Chen's algorithm is not very efficient in that not only item pooling between current examinee and prior examinees is controlled for but also item pooling b...

This paper reports on a large scale randomized controlled trial to study the efficacy of a web-based intelligent tutoring system for the structure strategy designed to improve content area reading comprehension. The research was conducted with 128 fifth grade classrooms within 12 school districts in rural and suburban settings. Classrooms within ea...

Purpose – This study aims to examine the role that psychological empowerment (PE) and employee satisfaction (ES) play in the relationship between leader empowering behaviors (LEB) and customer satisfaction (CS) and employees' organizational commitment (OC). Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected from 365 frontline employees and 2,915 cu...

Despite growing interest in early intervention, there are few measures available to monitor the progress of early academic skills in preschoolers. The Early Arithmetic, Reading, and Learning Indicators (EARLI; DiPerna, Morgan, & Lei, 2007) were developed as brief assessments of critical early literacy and numeracy skills. The purpose of the current...

The purpose of this study was to examine early mathematical skill differences among preschool children in US Head Start classrooms. Latent class analysis based on six early mathematical subtest scores (i.e. counting aloud, measurement, counting objects, numbers and shapes, pattern recognition, and grouping) from a sample of 279 Head Start children...

Reading in the content areas of science, social studies, and current events is a difficult task that is even more elusive to Spanish speaking English language learners. There is a huge increase in children transitioning from their L1 (e.g., Spanish) to L2 (e.g., English) in classrooms across the US. These ELs face challenges due to a lack of fluenc...

Technologies and their effectiveness are impacted by how well they are implemented. A large scale randomized controlled trial was conducted to study the efficacy of a web-based intelligent tutoring system to deliver the structure strategy to improve content area reading comprehension. We present our theory of change focusing on the theoretical fram...

Based on different language systems and educational practices of their respective countries, hypotheses were made regarding how 15-year-old students from Shanghai-China and the US might differ in the 5 reading subskills designated in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) when they have the same overall reading ability (i.e., whe...

Minimum sample sizes of about 200 to 250 per group are often recommended for differential item functioning (DIF) analyses. However, there are times when sample sizes for one or both groups of interest are smaller than 200 due to practical constraints. This study attempts to examine the performance of Simultaneous Item Bias Test (SIBTEST), Cochran’s...

Reading comprehension is a challenge for K-12 learners and adults. Nonfiction texts, such as expository texts that inform and explain, are particularly challenging and vital for students’ understanding because of their frequent use in formal schooling (e.g., textbooks) as well as everyday life (e.g., newspapers, magazines, and medical information)....

The purpose of the present study was to determine whether there are systematic differences in literacy skills among children from less-advantaged households, using latent profile analysis. Early reading skills were measured using the Early Arithmetic, Reading, and Learning Indicators (EARLI; DiPerna, Morgan, & Lei, 2007) literacy tasks. Participant...

A short version of the Counseling Center Assessment of Psychological Symptoms–62 (CCAPS-62) was created via three studies. The final short version (CCAPS-34), which contains 34 items and 7 subscales, demonstrated good discrimination power, support for the proposed factor structure, strong initial convergent validity, and adequate test–retest stabil...

Vertical scaling is necessary to facilitate comparison of scores from test forms of different difficulty levels. It is widely used to enable the tracking of student growth in academic performance over time. Most previous studies on vertical scaling methods assume relatively long tests and large samples. Little is known about their performance when...

Data analyses are statistical manipulations of numbers to help discern patterns in the data. As such, they need guidance from substantive theories in order to decide what patterns to look for, and to make sense of these patterns. The core outcomes of these manipulations are summary descriptors used to reduce the amount of information a researcher n...

The purpose of this study was to examine response dimensionality for a new measure of young children's early literacy skills. The Early Arithmetic, Reading, and Learning Indicators (EARLI) include six brief measures of early literacy skills. These measures were administered at three time points (October, January, and April) to children enrolled in...

Purpose – This paper aims to integrate the knowledge management and marketing literatures to examine the relationships between knowledge management (KM) practices during a service exchange and customers' satisfaction and behavioral intentions. Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected in an experimental setting using video scenarios; hypoth...

Few instruments have been designed specifically to address the needs of college counseling centers. This article reviews existing instruments and presents 4 studies that describe the development and psychometric properties of a new instrument, the Counseling Center Assessment of Psychological Symptoms-62 (CCAPS-62). Study 1 describes the initial it...

This study investigated the effects of different versions of Web-based instruction focused on text structure on fifth- and seventh-grade students' reading comprehension. Stratified random assignment was employed in a two-factor experiment embedded within a pretest and multiple posttests design (immediate and four-month delayed posttests). The two f...

The purpose of this study was to examine the reliability and validity of scores from six early literacy probes developed for use with preschool-age children. The literacy probes were administered to 84 preschoolers at three time points over a 6-month period. Also, a criterion measure of early literacy skills was administered to a subset of students...

Currently, few measures are available to monitor young children’s progress in acquiring key early academic skills. In response to this need, the authors have begun developing measures (i.e., the Early Arithmetic, Reading and Learning Indicators, or EARLI) of preschoolers’ numeracy skills. To accurately and efficiently monitor acquisition of early s...

To date, exposure control procedures that are designed to control item exposure and test overlap simultaneously are based on the assumption of item sharing between pairs of examinees. However, examinees may obtain test information from more than one examinee in practice. This larger scope of information sharing needs to be taken into account in ref...

This article examines the effectiveness of training facilitators in secondary schools to follow APA learner-centered principles to support learners in distance education. The study was a cluster-randomized control trial with 36 match pairs of schools and 246 students in the rural USA. The schools were selected at random and assigned at random to tr...

Conventional data collection and analyses to evaluate opportunity to learn (OTL) is time and energy intensive. We propose an extension of an alternative approach suggested by Winfield (1993) by using a method to detect differential item functioning (DIF) to select items. These items are then used as initial indicators of possible difference in OTL...

Structural equation modeling (SEM) is a versatile statistical modeling tool. Its estimation techniques, modeling capacities, and breadth of applications are expanding rapidly. This module introduces some common terminologies. General steps of SEM are discussed along with important considerations in each step. Simple examples are provided to illustr...

This article describes the functions of a SAS macro and an SPSS syntax that produce common statistics for conventional item analysis including Cronbach's alpha, item difficulty index (p-value or item mean), and item discrimination indices (D-index, point biserial and biserial correlations for dichotomous items and item-total correlation for polytom...

This paper proposes an on-line version of the Sympson and Hetter procedure with test overlap control (SHT) that can provide item exposure control at both the item and test levels on the fly without iterative simulations. The on-line procedure is similar to the SHT procedure in that exposure parameters are used for simultaneous control of item expos...

This study examines the differential item functioning (DIF) of the English version and the Japanese-translated version of the Multiple Affect Adjective Check List-Revised (MAACL-R) using the logistic regression (LR) procedure. The results of the LR are supplemented by multiple group confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA). A total of five items are co...

This study examined the performance of two alternative estimation approaches in structural equation modeling for ordinal data under different levels of model misspecification, score skewness, sample size, and model size. Both approaches involve analyzing a polychoric correlation matrix as well as adjusting standard error estimates and model chi-squ...

Direct observation of behaviors is a data collection method customarily used in clinical and educational settings. Repeated measures and small samples are inherent characteristics of observational studies that pose challenges to the numerical estimation of reliability for observational data. In this article, we review some debates about the use of...

This study examined longitudinal predictive relationships between young children's classroom behaviors and their growth in mathematics skills during the primary grades. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study--Kindergarten cohort, the authors tested a longitudinal model featuring positive (interpersonal skills and approaches to learning) and n...

Fiorello et al. (this issue) asserted that as subtest or factor-score variability increases, the overall ability score becomes a less viable predictor of achievement—and that this is especially the case for clinical populations. The present study tested the contention that global IQ scores are invalid predictors of achievement in the presence of si...

Lawmakers at the state level require good estimates of those without health insurance in the areas they serve to inform policy decisions. These estimates are often built on inadequate data from smaller geographic areas, such as counties. The Small Area Estimates Branch of the U.S. Census Bureau developed a method to generate stable estimates at the...

There has been considerable debate regarding the causal precedence of intelligence and academic achievement. Some researchers view intelligence and achievement as identical constructs. Others believe that the relationship between intelligence and achievement is reciprocal. Still others assert that intelligence is causally related to achievement. Th...

Efforts to improve performance in mathematics have put pressure on educational evaluators to improve the rigor of their evaluation designs. This paper reports the results of a rigorous evaluation of the Cognitive Tutor Algebra I curriculum, which is substantially based on an intelligent tutoring system. We emphasize the importance of presenting det...

Mantel-Haenszel and SIBTEST, which have known difficulty in detecting non-unidirectional differential item functioning (DIF), have been adapted with some success for computerized adaptive testing (CAT). This study adapts logistic regression (LR) and the item-response-theory-likelihood-ratio test (IRT-LRT), capable of detecting both unidirectional a...

This study compares the parametric multiple-choice model and the nonparametric kernel smoothing approach to estimating option characteristic functions (OCCs) using an empirical criterion, the stability of curve estimates over occasions that represents random error. The potential utility of graphical OCCs in item analysis was illustrated with select...

Intraindividual variability in positive and negative affect was assessed by the positive affect (Contentment, Joy, Vigor, Love, and Excitement) and negative affect (Depression, Hostility, Anxiety, Agitation, and Social Anxiety) subscales of the state version of the Comprehensive Personality and Affect Scales (COPAS) during a 3-week period. Using th...