This research was aimed to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the green entrepreneurial intention of college students through green entrepreneurial self-efficacy, optimism, ecological values, and social responsibility, as well as the mediating role of green entrepreneurial motivation. This study used structural equation model to test the hypothesis on samples of 410 Chinese colleges’ students. COVID-19 has a strong beneficial effect on green entrepreneurial self-efficacy, optimism, ecological values, and social responsibility, according to the research findings. Optimism and social (...) responsibility also were found to have a significant positive impact on green entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Moreover, green entrepreneurial motivations moderated the relationship between optimism, ecological values, social responsibility, and green entrepreneurial intention in a positive and significant way. Finally, the findings indicate that a significant positive correlation exists between green entrepreneurial self-efficacy and optimism, as well as a significant positive correlation between ecological values and social responsibility. (shrink)

This paper is a complete student-led, student-edited collective writing project (CWP) conducted virtually in Spring 2022 throughout the course Knowledge Socialism taught by professor Michael Peters for the Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal university. The CWP involves 4 international, 5 domestic Ph.D. students, and 2 senior Western scholars as reviewers, revealing their thoughts, arguments, understanding, and criticisms towards the creative economy status in East Asian countries (Japan and China mostly) higher education as reflected in the knowledge socialism narratives. Xiyuan as (...) the lead author, co-editing with Woraport and Stefan, assigned each section to other authors and successfully devoted themself to organizing, proofreading, and revising the paper. Through a month of collective work, the final version of the paper elaborates on the contribution of East Asian creative universities and the economy as a whole to the knowledge socialism through co(labor)ation, with implications to the creative labors cultivation and shifted roles of students. (shrink)

This study aims to examine the perceptions of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic staff in English local government on the ethical nature of their treatment at work, and its mediating effect on their Public Service Motivation. This is a particular imperative in a sector which itself delivers social justice within a strong regulatory system designed to ensure workplace equality and therefore is expected to be a model employer for other organisations. Employees place great importance on their fair treatment by their (...) employers and, in particular, the endeavour of managerial authority to implement equality at work based on their discretionary powers. 2580 valid responses were collected from 15,000 questionnaires sent to staff in five local councils in England. Our analyses show that BAME employees have a significantly stronger PSM than their white colleagues; however, this has been eroded by their perception of unfair treatment: being underpaid allied with a lack of effort from management to ensure an equal work environment, to be specific, to prevent discrimination, bullying, and racism at workplace. Most importantly, the perceived exertion made by management to ensure an equal work environment has a significantly strong mediating effect on PSM and a compensational effect on perceived lower pay. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

Live streaming shopping, the streaming of real-time videos promoting products that consumers can purchase online, has recently been a booming area of e-commerce, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The success of live streaming e-commerce largely relies on the extent to which the broadcaster can get consumers engaged by the live stream. Thus, it is important to discover the antecedents of consumer engagement in such a context. Drawing on consumer engagement and neuroscience literature, this study used electroencephalography inter-subject correlation to explore (...) how broadcasters' entrepreneurial passion during live streaming videos influenced consumers' neural engagement as they watched the live streaming videos. We used the framework of displayed passion and preparedness from the entrepreneurial passion literature to predict consumer engagement. We found significant ISC for strong displayed passion, while preparedness had partially significant effects on the first, second, and summed components of ISC. The interaction effects of these two factors on the first and summed components of ISC were partially significant. Strong displayed passion and preparedness activated the left and right prefrontal regions of the consumers' brains. These findings indicate that broadcasters' displayed passion and preparedness can influence consumer engagement in live streaming e-commerce settings. Our findings suggest that a scientific approach could be used to improve a broadcaster's performance by testing ISC during rehearsals before live streaming. (shrink)

Neural network models have recently made striking progress in natural language processing, but they are typically trained on orders of magnitude more language input than children receive. What can these neural networks, which are primarily distributional learners, learn from a naturalistic subset of a single child's experience? We examine this question using a recent longitudinal dataset collected from a single child, consisting of egocentric visual data paired with text transcripts. We train both language-only and vision-and-language neural networks and analyze the (...) linguistic knowledge they acquire. In parallel with findings from Jeffrey Elman's seminal work, the neural networks form emergent clusters of words corresponding to syntactic (nouns, transitive and intransitive verbs) and semantic categories (e.g., animals and clothing), based solely on one child's linguistic input. The networks also acquire sensitivity to acceptability contrasts from linguistic phenomena, such as determiner-noun agreement and argument structure. We find that incorporating visual information produces an incremental gain in predicting words in context, especially for syntactic categories that are comparatively more easily grounded, such as nouns and verbs, but the underlying linguistic representations are not fundamentally altered. Our findings demonstrate which kinds of linguistic knowledge are learnable from a snapshot of a single child's real developmental experience. (shrink)

The importance imposed on corporate social responsibility is greater in developed economies than in emerging markets. The pressures from various stakeholder groups on the CSR are expected to have substantial spillover impact on companies domiciled in emerging economies that obtain revenues from companies in developed economies. Based on the data from 1,330 listed companies in China, the largest emerging economy in the world, this study provides evidence that the CSR performance of China firms is positively related to the degree of (...) their internationalization, and such a positive association is less pronounced for state-owned enterprises. Our findings support the hypothesis that internationalized companies in emerging economies are motivated to improve their CSR practices to address concerns from their importers or outsourcers in developed economies. (shrink)

Articulated arm coordinate measuring machine is a specific robotic structural instrument, which uses D-H method for the purpose of kinematic modeling and error compensation. However, it is difficult for the existing error compensation models to describe various factors, which affects the accuracy of AACMM. In this paper, a modeling and error compensation method for AACMM is proposed based on BP Neural Networks. According to the available measurements, the poses of the AACMM are used as the input, and the coordinates of (...) the probe are used as the output of neural network. To avoid tedious training and improve the training efficiency and prediction accuracy, a data acquisition strategy is developed according to the actual measurement behavior in the joint space. A neural network model is proposed and analyzed by using the data generated via Monte-Carlo method in simulations. The structure and parameter settings of neural network are optimized to improve the prediction accuracy and training speed. Experimental studies have been conducted to verify the proposed algorithm with neural network compensation, which shows that 97% error of the AACMM can be eliminated after compensation. These experimental results have revealed the effectiveness of the proposed modeling and compensation method for AACMM. (shrink)

This study investigates the impact of labor unionization on stock price crash risk. We find that labor unionization is negatively associated with stock price crash risk. Such negative relation is more pronounced when firms can intimate more credible evidence on unfavorable prospects and when firms face more powerful labor unions. Our findings are consistent with the notion that firms take strategic actions to reduce the bargaining advantages enjoyed by labor unions and that labor unions force firms to take less risky (...) investments and discontinue underperformed projects more timely, which leads to lower stock price crash risk. (shrink)

Based on a sample of firms from 20 countries around the world, this study investigates how the relationship between corporate social responsibility and bank loan pricing is affected by the degree of national stakeholder orientation. We find that firms with superior CSR performance are more likely to enjoy lower loan costs in more stakeholder-oriented countries than are their counterparts in less stakeholder-oriented countries. This study contributes to the CSR literature by highlighting the importance of national institutional environments in determining the (...) economic consequences of CSR practices. (shrink)

Video surveillance plays a vital role in maintaining the social security although, until now, large uncertainty still exists in danger understanding and recognition, which can be partly attributed to intractable environment changes in the backgrounds. This article presents a brain-inspired computing of attention value of surrounding environment changes with a processes-based cognition model by introducing a ratio valueλof EC-implications within considered periods. Theoretical models for computation of warning level of EC-implications to the universal video recognition efficiency are further established. Imbedding (...) proposed models into the online algorithms is suggested as a future research priority towards precision security for critical applications and, furthermore, schemes for a practical implementation of such integration are also preliminarily discussed. (shrink)

Frequent pattern mining is an effective approach for spatiotemporal association analysis of mobile trajectory big data in data-driven intelligent transportation systems. While existing parallel algorithms have been successfully applied to frequent pattern mining of large-scale trajectory data, two major challenges are how to overcome the inherent defects of Hadoop to cope with taxi trajectory big data including massive small files and how to discover the implicitly spatiotemporal frequent patterns with MapReduce. To conquer these challenges, this paper presents a MapReduce-based Parallel (...) Frequent Pattern growth algorithm to analyze the spatiotemporal characteristics of taxi operating using large-scale taxi trajectories with massive small file processing strategies on a Hadoop platform. More specifically, we first implement three methods, that is, Hadoop Archives, CombineFileInputFormat, and Sequence Files, to overcome the existing defects of Hadoop and then propose two strategies based on their performance evaluations. Next, we incorporate SF into Frequent Pattern growth algorithm and then implement the optimized FP-growth algorithm on a MapReduce framework. Finally, we analyze the characteristics of taxi operating in both spatial and temporal dimensions by MR-PFP in parallel. The results demonstrate that MR-PFP is superior to existing Parallel FP-growth algorithm in efficiency and scalability. (shrink)

The ideas of fixed points (Kripke in Recent essays on truth and the liar paradox. Clarendon Press, London, pp 53–81, 1975; Martin and Woodruff in Recent essays on truth and the liar paradox. Clarendon Press, London, pp 47–51, 1984) and revision sequences (Gupta and Belnap in The revision theory of truth. MIT, London, 1993; Gupta in The Blackwell guide to philosophical logic. Blackwell, London, pp 90–114, 2001) have been exploited to provide solutions to the semantic paradox and have achieved admirable (...) success. This happy situation naturally encourages one to look for other philosophical areas of their further applications where paradoxical results seem to follow from intuitively acceptable principles. In this paper, I propose to extend the use of these ideas to give two new treatments of abstract objects. Sections 1 and 2 below check several abstractionist theories and their main defects. Section 3 shows how the two ideas can be applied to generate consistent theories of abstract objects without any ad hoc restriction on any principle. (shrink)

Governing greenwashing in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure is an important issue, but relevant literature is scant. Based on the data on Chinese A-share listed firms from 2012 to 2021, we investigate the governance role of corporate digital transformation (DT) in ESG greenwashing and its influencing mechanism. We find that DT significantly inhibits ESG greenwashing. Moreover, DT mitigates ESG greenwashing by enhancing corporate green technology innovation (i.e., innovation channel), reducing information asymmetry (i.e., information channel), and increasing trade credit (i.e., (...) resource channel). From the perspective of investor attention, we find that both retail investors' online opinions and institutional investors' site visits strengthen the inhibitory effect of DT on ESG greenwashing. Furthermore, such an inhibitory effect is more pronounced in large firms, industries with high competition, and regions with strong intellectual property protection. This research provides new insights and policy suggestions for governing corporate ESG greenwashing behavior. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Physiognomy in Ming China: Fortune and the Body by Xing WangWenbin Wang (bio)Physiognomy in Ming China: Fortune and the Body. By Xing Wang. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Pp. x+ 325. Hardcover €114.00, ISBN 978-90-04-42954-3.Physiognomy (xiangshu 相術) as a technique of fortune-telling via the observation of the body has a long history in China and is still a living tradition. As a part of the traditional Chinese technological repertoire of (...) "Techniques and Methods" (fangshu 方術), records of performing physiognomy date back to the Spring and Autumn period (8th-5th centuries B.C.) (p. 31). According to Lisa Raphals, physiognomy was a crucial part of early Chinese philosophical discussion of the body, cosmology and human existence.1 Yet Wang Xing argues that despite its long history, our knowledge of Chinese physiognomy before the Ming dynasty is rather limited due to the small amount of pre-Ming physiognomy manuscripts still in existence. Chinese physiognomy as we know it today is largely based on its predecessors in late imperial China, and it was during the late Ming that most of the well-known extant physiognomy manuals were produced (p. 34). In contrast, the paucity of academic surveys of Ming physiognomy means that when it comes to scholarly examination of Chinese physiognomic texts and academic representation of physiognomic theories, misinterpretation often occurs. Wang is particularly critical of an early academic work on Chinese physiognomy by American anthropologist William Lessa, who made many dubious and broad assertions about the origin and characteristics of Chinese physiognomy (p. 15).2 In this context, Wang's Physiognomy in Ming China: Fortune and the Body is the first monograph in the English-speaking world primarily dedicated to the study of Chinese physiognomy in the Ming dynasty, including its social, textual, intellectual and technological history. It is also the first work in English that comprehensively introduces the history of Chinese physiognomy in early to late imperial China.Wang's investigation of this topic is two-fold. On the one hand he tackles physiognomy manuals and records of physiognomy practice from a historical perspective. Wang uses a very famous Ming physiognomic "encyclopedia," The Compendium of Divine Physiognomy (Shenxiang quanbian 神相全編), as the main text in his discussion of physiognomic knowledge, as well as a large amount of anecdotal writings from the Song to Ming periods. On the other hand, Wang consciously draws links between Chinese physiognomic theories and modern Western philosophical and anthropological debates on the body, symbolism and phenomenology. To push forward this conversation, Wang establishes a unique [End Page 1] framework for interpreting the conceptualization of the body, fortune and the cosmos in Ming physiognomic texts: the "homological" body on which time is "spatialized," discussed further below. It is this second facet of the argument that could most intrigue and inspire scholars of Chinese philosophy like myself. As Marta Hanson comments, Wang's work is an excellent example of how Chinese technical as well as cosmological works could problematize and challenge modern Euro-American academic theorizations of Asian culture and how professional sinological study could contribute to salient modern intellectual debates.3 When reading Wang's book, readers should always bear in mind his intention to bring together Ming physiognomic theories with broader contemporary philosophical discourse.Apart from the introduction, there are seven chapters in the book. The first two chapters serve as the historical section of the discussion (although historical analysis is also an indispensable part of later chapters). Chapter 1 provides readers with an overall background to physiognomy in China, especially its categorization as a form of elite knowledge in traditional catalogues, the development of core physiognomic theories and concepts in relation to traditional Chinese cosmology and medical theories, and the textual history of Ming physiognomy manuals. Beyond providing general information, in my view the author here makes three outstanding points: the first is that what we know as Chinese physiognomy is actually not merely a technique of human body divination, but also a method of predicting human future via observing the whole material world. Wang mentions a very important branch of physiognomy in historical catalogues called "physiognomy of things" (xiangwu 相物) (p. 27), in which anything from a horse... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 64-73 [Access article in PDF] Postmodern Approach to Art Appreciation for Integrated Study in Japan This essay aims to clarify the issues of art appreciation education in Japan, and to examine a viewpoint for considering the issues in relation to a "Period for Integrated Study" established in 2002. Though ideas of art educationhave expanded in recent years, we are facing the difficulty (...) of approximately |a 20% cut in the number of art classes offered in Japanese compulsory education. In addition to this, involvement of art with Integrated Study, a new attempt to transcend the conventional learning of subjects, has presented urgent issues in art education along with current educational reforms.Based on analyses of the developmental characteristics of Japanese students' aesthetic sensitivity, we consider the issues of art appreciation education, and present a vision for involvement of art appreciation with Integrated Study. For example, Japanese students show a keen interest in formal elements with an inclination for expressiveness as a legacy received from the study of modernism in art education. On the other hand, students also show weakness in skills in finding artistic contexts. This should be considered as the most important issue of art appreciation education in Japan. It is necessary to enhance students' viewing in relation to social and cultural contexts in order to address this issue. We propose that this can be achieved through Integrated Study. Art appreciation in Integrated Study should take a postmodern approach to Japanese art education, which now has a strong inclination toward modernism. Educational Reform and Integrated Study With a rapid decline in the number of children, a rapidly aging society, and the advent of computerization and globalization, we now face problems which cannot be solved by conventional systems presently in place in Japanese society. In order to address these problems, drastic reforms that also include educational reform must be undertaken. Specific reform in education [End Page 64] can be seen in changes in the Course of Study. The most notable feature in the latest revision of the Course of Study is the establishment of the Period for Integrated Study. Integrated Study was established as a new project for the most highly prioritized issue of how students can acquire the so-called "Zest for Living." 1 Integrated Study is a required subject, with 105 to 110 class hours/year in third grade and above in elementary school, and 70 to 130 class hours/year in junior high school. The Course of Study does not prescribe the contents in detail but the periods are organized and implemented by each school according to regions and schools. However, it is suggested that schools proceed with the study of international understanding, conversation in foreign languages, information, the environment, social welfare, and health in a comprehensive and interdisciplinary way. IntegratedStudy puts an emphasis on students' initiative in identifying issues forthemselves, and on the cultivation of their talent and ability to solve those issues. Based on students' own interests, great importance is placed on problem-solving, open-ended activities, and the cultivation of independent and creative attitudes. Unlike the conventional unilateral teaching of knowledge for subjects, Integrated Study's purpose is to shift the direction of education so students can learn and think for themselves. In addition, Integrated Study focuses on authentic way and develops the skills of collecting, investigating, and connecting information, and reporting, announcing, and discussing. 2On the other hand, in curricula for elementary and junior high schools, the hours of art classes were reduced so that Japanese art education was put in a more difficult situation compared to previous curricula. Respectivesubjects are designed for students to learn basic abilities for the development of Integrated Study. Therefore, while educational reform is underway in Japan, art education faces the problem of maintaining basic learning at the same level as previously, relating art to Integrated Study.Relations between Integrated Study and art education have been discussed in various ways. 3 Two general problems can be pointed out. One isour concern that the originality of art as... (shrink)

BackgroundThis study aimed to elucidate the influence of dementia etiologies on the degree of caregiver burden and determine which factors predict a high caregiving burden.MethodsThis 18-month retrospective cohort study enrolled 630 patients and their caregivers from the Dementia Center of Changhua Christian Hospital. The care team performed face-to-face interviews every 6 months, for 18 months from when a diagnosis of dementia was made. The primary outcome was the change in Zarit Burden Interview scores. Generalized estimating equations were used for the (...) longitudinal data analysis.ResultsParticipants with Lewy body disease had a significantly higher caregiving burden compared with those with Alzheimer's disease after adjusting for patient and caregiver features. Caregivers of mixed-type dementia and frontotemporal dementia experienced a greater burden than caregivers of AD, at 6- and 18-month follow-up. Patients with more severe dementia, neuropsychiatric symptoms, being cared for by more than two caregivers, or utilizing social resources were associated with higher ZBI scores; the depressive mood of caregiver also predicted higher ZBI scores.ConclusionThis longitudinal study demonstrated that caregiver burden was influenced by the underlying dementia etiology of patients. The dementia care team should provide personalized education and transfer patients and caregivers to appropriate resources, especially for high-risk populations. (shrink)

In order to reply to the contemporary skeptic’s argument for the conclusion that we don’t have any empirical knowledge about the external world, several authors have proposed different fallibilist theories of knowledge that reject the epistemic closure principle. Holliday, 1–62 2015a), however, shows that almost all of them suffer from either the problem of containment or the problem of vacuous knowledge or both. Furthermore, Holliday suggests that the fallibilist should allow a proposition to have multiple sets of relevant alternatives, each (...) of which is sufficient while none is necessary, if all its members are eliminated, for knowing that proposition. Not completely satisfied with Holliday’s multi-path reply to the skeptic, the author suggests a new single-path relevant-possibility theory of knowledge and argues that it can avoid both the problem of containment and the problem of vacuous knowledge of a certain sort while rejecting skepticism about the external world. (shrink)

With the development of the economy, family wealth continues to accumulate, and more and more consumers participate in financial management affairs. As an important way to improve financial knowledge, informal financial education is vital to consumer financial capability. Utilizing data from the 2012, 2015, and 2018 US National Financial Capability Study and the approaches of ordinary least squares and ordered probit regression are employed to produce more accurate estimates. Meanwhile, the study also explores the mediating effects of financial knowledge between (...) informal financial education and consumer financial capability. The results show that informal financial education has a positive effect on the improvement of consumer financial capability. Besides, financial knowledge partially mediates the nexus between informal financial education and consumer financial capability. Therefore, policymakers are encouraged to formulate measures to promote financial education programs not only in schools and universities but also in workplaces or communities. Companies also should offer more opportunities for their employees to receive financial education and further enhance their financial capability. Consumers should be aware of the importance of financial education and actively learn financial knowledge to improve financial capability and further enhance financial satisfaction. (shrink)

A decentralized adaptive control based on human linguistic is investigated to learn human behaviors for multiple robotic manipulators. Many experts’ words or sentences can be transferred into the control actions by employing membership functions in robot systems, which can be synthesized fuzzy controller by employing reasoning mechanism. For the unknown model dynamical robot manipulators, one adjustable parameter that relates to the approximation accuracy of fuzzy logic systems is introduced at first, which be utilized to deal with the unknown dynamics of (...) robot manipulators. Switching fuzzy adaptive controller is designed to overcome the limitation of logic structure that the number of adaptive laws only focus on fuzzy rules in conventional fuzzy logic systems. Another advantage of this design method is that the control with human linguistic extend the semi-global stability to global stability. Finally, effectiveness of the developed control design scheme has been shown in simulation example. (shrink)

With the increase in depth of coal mining, the hydrogeological complexity largely increases and water inrush accidents happen more frequently. For the safety of coal mining, horizontal directional drilling and grouting techniques have been implemented to detect and plug the fractures and conduits that deliver high-pressure groundwater to coal mine. Taking the grouting engineering performed at Xingdong coal mine at 980 m below sea level as an example, we collected the data of grouting quantity, the loss of drilling fluid, gamma (...) value, water temperature, average water absorption, distance between grouting loss points, water pressure on coal seam floor, and aquifuge thickness at 90 boreholes in the mine to conduct grey relational analysis, first. The analysis showed that the grouting quantity was highly correlated with all other factors. Subsequently, grey system evaluation was used to evaluate the risk of water inrush from the coal seam floor. The results of risk analysis illustrated that three water inrushes from Ordovician limestone occurred in mining face 2127, 2125, and 2222 in the study area were all located in the area with a risk score higher than 65. Through grouting, the identified cracks were effectively blocked and waterproof layers beneath the coal seam floors were constructed to reduce the threat of water inrush. By comparing the risk assessment results with three water inrush cases before grouting operation, we found that water inrush areas were consistent with the area of higher risk. (shrink)

We evaluated the relationships of daily sleep duration and inconsistency with soft tennis competitive performance among 15 healthy collegiate soft tennis players. Sleep duration and inconsistency were determined by a 50-day sleep diary, which recorded sleep and wake times of sleep. Soft tennis athletic performance was evaluated by a service and baseline stroke accuracy test and the spider run test. Mean sleep duration was 7.4 ± 1.7 h. No correlation was found between long-term mean sleep duration and athletic performance. But (...) inconsistency in sleep duration was inversely correlated with service score after controlling for soft tennis experience and sex. There was no significant relationship between sleep inconsistency and other athletic performance. This result indicates that reducing the instability of sleep duration in the long-term may have a positive effect on soft tennis players’ service performance. Although participants’ current mean sleep duration was not as sufficient as the recommendation in sleep extension experiments, it revealed the importance for athletes to maintain regular sleep in daily life. (shrink)

Although pioneering studies using statistical methods in geographical data analysis were published in the 1930s, it was only in the 1960s that their increasing use in human geography led to a claim that a ‘quantitative revolution’ had taken place. The widespread use of quantitative methods from then on was associated with changes in both disciplinary philosophy and substantive focus. The first decades of the ‘revolution’ saw quantitative analyses focused on the search for spatial order of a geometric form within an, (...) often implicit, logical positivist framework. In the first of three reviews of the use of quantitative methods in human geography, this progress report uncovers their origin with regard to the underlying philosophy, the focus on spatial order, and the nature of the methods deployed. Subsequent reports will outline the changes in all three that occurred in later decades and will chart the contemporary situation. (shrink)

Understanding and solving the psychological health problems of college students have become a focus of social attention. Complex networks have become important tools to study the factors affecting psychological health, and the Gaussian graphical model is often used to estimate psychological networks. However, previous studies leave some gaps to overcome, including the following aspects. When studying networks of subpopulations, the estimation neglects the intrinsic relationships among subpopulations, leading to a large difference between the estimated network and the real network. Because (...) of the high cost, previous psychological surveys often have a small sample size, and the psychological description is insufficient. Here, the intrinsic connections among multiple tasks are used, and multitask machine learning is applied to develop a multitask Gaussian graphical model. The psychological networks of the population and subpopulations are estimated based on psychological questionnaire data. This study is the first to apply a psychological network to such a large-scale college student psychological analysis, and we obtain some interesting results. The model presented here is a dynamic model based on complex networks which predicts individual behavior and provides insight into the intrinsic links among various symptoms. (shrink)

Mixture item response theory models include a mixture of latent subpopulations such that there are qualitative differences between subgroups but within each subpopulation the measure model based on a continuous latent variable holds. Under this modeling framework, students can be characterized by both their location on a continuous latent variable and by their latent class membership according to Students’ responses. It is important to identify anchor items for constructing a common scale between latent classes beforehand under the mixture IRT framework. (...) Then, all model parameters across latent classes can be estimated on the common scale. In the study, we proposed Q-matrix anchored mixture Rasch model, including a Q-matrix and the traditional mixture Rasch model. The Q-matrix in QAMRM can use class invariant items to place all model parameter estimates from different latent classes on a common scale regardless of the ability distribution. A simulation study was conducted, and it was found that the estimated parameters of the QAMRM recovered fairly well. A real dataset from the Certificate of Proficiency in English was analyzed with the QAMRM, LCDM. It was found the QAMRM outperformed the LCDM in terms of model fit indices. (shrink)