Quarterly of Educational Measurement

Abstract The aim of the present study was to test the latent growth curve model of reading motivation and attitude towards reading by controlling the amount of reading, gender and socio-economic status in elementary school students in Yazd city, in the form of a longitudinal study. The latent growth curve model was used to answer the research questions. The statistical population of this research included all students studying in the fourth grades of Yazd city in the academic year 2021 to 2022. The sampling method was multi-stage random. For this purpose, first of all, a district was selected between the 2 districts of Yazd city and by referring to the administration of that district, the number of 20 schools (10 girls' schools and 10 boys' schools) was selected and in each school, two classes were selectd from among the available classes (fourth grade). And 15 people were randomly selected from each class. The sample of this research is 300 girls and 300 boys. In this research, from the Reading Motivation Questionnaire (RMQ) from Sheifel and Shafner (2016), the Attitude towards Reading Questionnaire from McKenna and Keir (1990), the Reading Quantity Inventory from Becker et al. (2010) and the Socio-Economic Status Questionnaire from Garmarodi. and Moradi (2010) were used. Latent growth curve statistical method was used for data analysis. The results of the research indicated that the growth curve of reading motivation and attitude towards reading is linear and both the variables of reading motivation and attitude towards reading were decreasing during the four measurement stages. Gender was also a good predictor of motivation to read and motivation to read was more among girls than boys. Although gender was a significant predictor for attitude towards reading at the beginning, it was not a significant predictor during the 4 measurements. Socio-economic status was a significant predictor of reading motivation both at the beginning of reading motivation measurement and during the 4 stages of measurement. Socio-economic status neither at the beginning nor during the 4 stages of measurement was not a significant predictor for measuring attitude towards reading. The amount of reading both at the beginning of the assessment and at the end of the 4 stages of the assessment was a significant predictor variable for reading motivation and attitude towards reading. In the end, this research found strong inter-individual differences in reading motivation and attitude towards reading at the beginning of the fourth grade (width from the origin) and during the 4 stages of measurement (slope) in students. The results of this research can have practical implications for teaching reading.

Abstract Dimensionality analysis or specify the number of latent traits that affect the data from the implementation of a scale or test and the study of local independency and monotonicity assumptions is of the important presuppositions to apply a item response theory model on a set of data. In this research, after a brief explanation of the local dependency indices and its models, In order to modeling the structure of cognitive abilities based on the data obtained from the implementation of the scale of cognitive abilities on a sample of 1105 students from the 9th grade students of Ahwaz selected by proportional stratified random sampling, after examining the hypothesis local independency through local dependency indices, monotonicity hypothesis and estimation of parameters of two one-dimensional and two-dimensional models and their comparison, The dimensionality of cognitive abilities was determined. The results showed that the dependency model observed between the data is perfectly locally dependent and Comparison of fitness indices of one-dimensional and two-dimensional model of Samejima graded response model showed that the two-dimensional model has better fit to the data than the one-dimensional model. In the following, using the concept of dimensionality factor space, a kind of comparison between the two classical test theories (CTT) and multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) was created and a kind of convergence in the results was obtained. The results showed that the fitness indices of classical theory alone were not able to characterize the structure of cognitive abilities, and methods based on item response theory in this field can be solved. The results of dimensionality analysis showed that the structure of cognitive abilities was two-dimensional; the first dimension of non-social cognition and the second dimension of social cognition were named and it was observed that these results converge with the results in the field of neuroscience.