In an invitational address to the Victorian Institute of Educational Research, the author discussed Bayesian theory and its relationship to the design and construction of tailored or adaptive tests. Bayesian thinking involves recognizing the role of prior probabilities and using these probabilities in combination with new data to arrive at future…

Student's empirical sampling approach is used to assess the magnitude of the sampling errors of statistics describing a recursive causal model. The data were gathered with four complex sample designs commonly used in educational surveys. Jackknife and half-sample error estimates are applied to the data. (Author/CTM)