No abstract

Although several measures exist for frequently monitoring early reading progress, little research has specifically investigated their technical properties when administered on a frequent basis with kindergarten students. In this study, kindergarten students ( N = 137) of whom the majority was receiving supplemental intervention for reading skills were monitored using Letter Sound Fluency, Phoneme Segmentation Fluency, Word Reading Fluency, Nonsense Word Fluency, Highly Decodable Passages, and Spelling on a biweekly basis between February and May. Acceptable reliability was observed for all measures. Analyses of slope validity using latent growth models, latent change score models, and slope differences according to level of year-end achievement indicated that the relation of slope to overall reading skills varied across the measures. A suggested approach to kindergarten students' reading progress is offered that includes Letter Sound Fluency and a measure of word-reading skills to provide a comprehensive picture of student growth toward important year-end reading outcomes.

Objective-We examined the prospective influence of the resilient, undercontrolled, and overcontrolled personality prototypes on depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms among Iraq/Afghanistan war veterans. After accounting for the possible influence of combat exposure, we expected that the resilient prototype would predict lower depression and PTSD over time and would be associated with adaptive coping strategies, higher social support, lower psychological inflexibility, and higher self-reported resilience relative to the overcontrolled and undercontrolled prototypes, independent of TBI status.

Moderation effect is a commonly used concept in the field of social and behavioral science. Several studies regarding the implication of moderation effects have been done; however, little is known about how partial measurement invariance influences the properties of tests for moderation effects when categorical moderators were used. Additionally, whether the impact is the same across single and multilevel data is still unknown. Hence, the purpose of the present study is twofold: (a) To investigate the performance of the moderation test in single-level studies when measurement invariance does not hold; (b) To examine whether unique features of multilevel data, such as intraclass correlation (ICC) and number of clusters, influence the effect of measurement non-invariance on the performance of tests for moderation. Simulation results indicated that falsely assuming measurement invariance lead to biased estimates, inflated Type I error rates, and more gain or more loss in power (depends on simulation conditions) for the test of moderation effects. Such patterns were more salient as sample size and the number of non-invariant items increase for both single- and multi-level data. With multilevel data, the cluster size seemed to have a larger impact than the number of clusters when falsely assuming measurement invariance in the moderation estimation. ICC was trivially related to the moderation estimates. Overall, when testing moderation effects with categorical moderators, employing a model that accounts for the measurement (non)invariance structure of the predictor and/or the outcome is recommended.

Objectives: Although many Iraq/Afghanistan warzone veterans report few problems with adjustment, a substantial proportion report debilitating mental health symptoms and functional impairment, suggesting the influence of personal factors that may promote adjustment. A significant minority also incur warzone-related traumatic brain injury (TBI), the majority of which are of mild severity (mTBI). We tested direct and indirect pathways through which a resilient personality prototype predicts adjustment of warzone veterans with and without mTBI over time. Method: A sample of 264 war veterans (181 men) completed measures of lifetime and warzone-related TBIs, personality traits, psychological adjustment, quality of life, and functional impairment. Social support, coping, and psychological flexibility were examined as mediators of the resilience-adjustment relationship. Instruments were administered at baseline, 4-, 8-, and 12-month assessments. Structural equation models accounted for combat exposure and response style. Results: Compared with a nonresilient personality prototype, a resilient prototype was directly associated with lower PTSD, depression, and functional disability, and higher quality of life at This article was published Online First June 27, 2019.