■Many researchers have suggested that meeting time, scope, and budget goals, sometimes called 'project efficiency,' is not the comprehensive measure of project success.
The authors surveyed exploratory factor analysis (EFA) practices in three organizational journals from 1985 to 1999 to investigate purposes for conducting EFA and to update and extend Ford, MacCallum, and Tait’s (1986) review. Ford et al. surveyed the same journals from 1975 to 1984, concluding that researchers often applied EFA poorly (e.g., relying too heavily on principal components analysis [PCA], eigenvalues greater than 1 to choose the number of factors, and orthogonal rotations). Fabrigar, Wegener, MacCallum, and Strahan (1999) reached a similar conclusion based on a much smaller sample of studies. This review of 371 studies shows reason for greater optimism. The tendency to use multiple number-of-factors criteria and oblique rotations has increased somewhat. Most important, the authors find that researchers tend to make better decisions when EFA plays a more consequential role in the research. They stress the importance of careful and thoughtful analysis, including decisions about whether and how EFA should be used.
There has been a growing interest in understanding what constructs are assessed in the employment interview and the properties of those assessments. To address these issues, the authors developed a comprehensive taxonomy of 7 types of constructs that the interview could assess. Analysis of 338 ratings from 47 actual interview studies indicated that basic personality and applied social skills were the most frequently rated constructs in this taxonomy, followed by mental capability and job knowledge and skills. Further analysis suggested that high- and low-structure interviews tend to focus on different constructs. Taking both frequency and validity results into consideration, the findings suggest that at least part of the reason why structured interviews tend to have higher validity is because they focus more on constructs that have a stronger relationship with job performance. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed.
Service learning places teaching and learning in a social context, facilitating socially responsive knowledge. The purposes of this meta-analysis were to summarize evidence on (a) extent and types of change in participants in service learning programs, (b) specific program elements (moderators) that affect the amount of change in participants, and (c) generalizability of results across educational levels and curricular versus noncurricular service. We included 103 samples and found positive changes for all types of outcomes. Changes were moderate for academic outcomes, small for personal outcomes and citizenship outcomes, and in between for social outcomes. Programs with structured reflection showed larger changes and effects generalized across educational levels. We call for psychologists to increase their use of service learning, and we discuss resources for doing so.
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