| Abstract: | Investigated the effects of the semantic similarity of items on student ratings of instructors by asking 28 graduate students to rate several hypothetical instructor profiles that were constructed by systematically manipulating information about the instructors' classroom behaviors. Factor analyses of the student ratings were performed before and after all behavioral information in the instructor profiles had been statistically removed. Results revealed no substantive change in the underlying factor structure. In both analyses the factors represented clusters of semantically equivalent items. Thus, Ss appeared to be imposing an implicit semantic organization on their ratings, apart from any covariance among the instructors' actual classroom behavior. (30 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
