Identifying the top predictors of student well-being across cultures using machine learning and conventional statistics.

Alongside academic learning, there is increasing recognition that educational systems must also cater to students' well-being. This study examines the key factors that predict adolescent students' subjective well-being, indexed by life satisfaction, positive affect, and negative affect. Data from 522,836 secondary school students from 71 countries/regions across eight different cultural contexts were analyzed.

Socio-economic status, mastery-approach goals and learning-related outcomes: Mediation and moderation.

Background: Socio-economic status is one of the most important factors shaping students' motivation and achievement but has seldom been explored in relation to achievement goals.

Aims: This study aimed to investigate whether mastery-approach goals explain the link between SES and key learning-related outcomes (mediation) and whether SES modifies the relationship between mastery-approach goals and these outcomes (moderation).

Sample: Data came from 595,444 students nested in 21,322 schools across 77 countries.

Simple use of BIC to Assess Model Selection Uncertainty: An Illustration using Mediation and Moderation Models.

The Bayesian information criterion (BIC) has been used sometimes in SEM, even adopting a frequentist approach. Using simple mediation and moderation models as examples, we form posterior probability distribution via using BIC, which we call the BIC posterior, to assess model selection uncertainty of a finite number of models. This is simple but rarely used.

Bifactor Structure for the Categorical Chinese Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale.

Recently, the bifactor model was suggested for the latent structure of the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES). The present paper investigates (i) the differences among bifactor, bifactor negative and other models; (ii) the effects of treating data as both categorical vs continuous; (iii) whether a problematic item in the Chinese RSES should be removed; and (iv) whether the final scoring would be affected. With a sample of 1.

Application of latent variable model in Rosenberg self-esteem scale.

Latent Variable Models (LVM) are applied to Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES). Parameter estimations automatically give negative signs hence no recoding is necessary for negatively scored items. Bad items can be located through parameter estimate, item characteristic curves and other measures.

Perceived level of knowledge and difficulty in applying family assessment among senior undergraduate nursing students.

Because the structure, development, and functioning of a family plays an important role in health and illness, preparing nursing students to assess families in health care settings is of critical importance. A quasi-experimental design using a pre- and postcourse questionnaire was used to examine students' perceived knowledge about family assessment and perceived difficulty applying family assessment in the clinical setting. The Calgary Family Assessment Model (CFAM) was taught in an elective nursing course, "Families in Health and Illness," offered at the University of Hong Kong.

The acquisition of Cantonese classifiers by preschool children in Hong Kong.

The Cantonese language has a complex classifier system and young learners need to pay attention to both the semantics and syntax of classifiers. This study investigated the repertoire of classifiers produced by 492 Cantonese-speaking preschoolers in three age groups (3;0, 4;0 and 5;0). Spontaneous utterances produced in 30-minute toy-play contexts were collected and transcribed.

A goodness of fit test for sparse 2p contingency tables.

When a model is fitted to data in a 2p contingency table many cells are likely to have very small expected frequencies. This sparseness invalidates the usual approximation to the distribution of the chi-squared or log-likelihood tests of goodness of fit. We present a solution to this problem by proposing a test based on a comparison of the observed and expected frequencies of the second-order margins of the table.