Willem J. Heiser

Early prediction of academic performance is important for student support. The authors explored, in a multivariate approach, whether pre‐entry data (e.g., high school study results, preparative activities, expectations, capabilities, motivation, and attitude) could predict university students’ first‐year academic performance. Preregistered applicants for a bachelor's program filled out an intake questionnaire before study entry. Outcome data (first‐year grade point average, course credits, and attrition) were obtained 1 year later. Prediction accuracy was assessed by cross‐validation. Students who performed better in preparatory education, followed a conventional educational path before entering, and expected to spend more time on a program‐related organization performed better during their first year at university. Concrete preuniversity behaviors were more predictive than psychological attributions such as self‐efficacy. Students with a “love of learning” performed better than leisure‐oriented students. The intake questionnaire may be used for identifying up front who may need additional support, but is not suitable for student selection.

A review is provided for the creation of the Psychometric Society in 1935, and the establishment of its journal, Psychometrika, in 1936. This document is part of the 80th anniversary celebration for Psychometrika’s founding, held during the annual meeting of the Psychometric Society in July of 2016 in Asheville, NC.

John Douglas Carroll, widely regarded as a leading psychometrician and mathematical psychologist of the last four decades, and one of the founding fathers of classification as an interdisciplinary methodological field, passed away at the age of 72 on Tuesday, June 7, 2011, at Overlook Hospital in Summit, NJ. He is survived by his wife of 46 years, Sylvia B. Carroll, and two sons, Steven D. Carroll of Saratoga Springs, New York, and Gregory A. Carroll of Columbus, Ohio, as well as by his daughter-in-law, Maria Ryan Carroll, and two grandchildren, Jenny Morgan Ryan and Bradley Ryan Carroll. Gifted people learn rapidly. Born on January 3, 1939, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Doug Carroll finished his undergraduate studies with honors at the University of Florida in August 1958, with comajors in Mathematics and Psychology, at the age of nineteen. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and won an Educational Testing Service Psychometric Fellowship to Princeton University, where he received his M.

In this paper, we propose a cluster-MDS model for two-way one-mode continuous rating dissimilarity data. The model aims at partitioning the objects into classes and simultaneously representing the cluster centers in a low-dimensional space. Under the normal distribution assumption, a latent class model is developed in terms of the set of dissimilarities in a maximum likelihood framework. In each iteration, the probability that a dissimilarity belongs to each of the blocks conforming to a partition of the original dissimilarity matrix, and the rest of parameters, are estimated in a simulated annealing based algorithm. A model selection strategy is used to test the number of latent classes and the dimensionality of the problem. Both simulated and classical dissimilarity data are analyzed to illustrate the model.