Although hundreds of questionnaires were collected successfully in this study, the ordinal scale was used for the observed variables. [Ding et al. (1995) cited a number of studies agreeing that 100 to 150 subjects is the minimum recommended sample size.]
Maximum likelihood was thus further adopted to estimate the parameters (Joreskog and Sorbom 2001; Diamantopoulos and Siguaw 2000).
Both a path diagram and the SIMPLIS program language were applied as tools to identify the model.
To distinguish the role of each teaching approach (TfT, ShT, and TvT) in the identified surface-achieving learning process (AM-SS), 12 models were established: 4 TfT-AM-SS models, 5 ShT-AM-SS models, and 3 TvT-AM-SS models (Table 4).