Most enrollment management systems today use historical data to build rough forecasts of what percentage of students will likely accept an offer of enrollment based on historical acceptance rates. While this aggregate forecast method has its uses, we propose that building an enrollment model based on predicting an individual's likelihood of…

This post is one in a series highlighting MDRC's methodological work. Contributors discuss the refinement and practical use of research methods being employed across the organization. Across policy domains, practitioners and researchers are benefiting from a trend of greater access to both more detailed and frequent data and the increased…

This article outlines shortcomings of currently used university admissions tests and discusses ways in which they could potentially be improved, summarizing two projects designed to enhance college and university admissions. The projects were inspired by the augmented theory of successful intelligence, according to which successful intelligence…

Conventional pundits, pollsters, and forecasters are focused on whether the economy will improve sufficiently in 2012 for President Barack Obama to gain reelection. The Keys to the White House, a prediction system that the author developed in collaboration with Vladimir Keilis-Borok, founder of the International Institute of Earthquake Prediction…

The stock market has a high profit and high risk features, on the stock market analysis and prediction research has been paid attention to by people. Stock price trend is a complex nonlinear function, so the price has certain predictability. This article mainly with improved BP neural network (BPNN) to set up the stock market prediction model, and…

The Keys to the White House is a historically-based system for predicting the result of the popular vote in American presidential elections. The Keys system tracks the big picture of how well the party holding the White House has governed and does not shift with events of the campaign. This model gives specificity to the idea that it is…

Predicting the future is now in the hands of K12 administrators. While for years districts have collected thousands of pieces of student data, educators have been using them only for data-driven decision-making or formative assessments, which give a "rear-view" perspective only. Now, using predictive analysis--the pulling together of data over…

We develop a model of induced innovation that applies to medical research. Our model yields three empirical predictions. First, initial death rates and subsequent research effort should be positively correlated. Second, research effort should be associated with more rapid mortality declines. Third, as a byproduct of targeting the most common…

This "Practitioner's Guide to Growth Models," commissioned by the Technical Issues in Large-Scale Assessment (TILSA) and Accountability Systems & Reporting (ASR), collaboratives of the "Council of Chief State School Officers," describes different ways to calculate student academic growth and to make judgments about the…

This article introduces the concept of a prediction interval in a gambling context.

This article reconsiders the issue of clinical versus statistical prediction. The term clinical is widely used to denote 1 pole of 2 independent axes: the observer whose data are being aggregated (clinician/expert vs. lay) and the method of aggregating those data (impressionistic vs. statistical). Fifty years of research suggests that when…

A team of health researchers of the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy at the University of Manitoba was asked to forecast the number of acute care hospital beds that will be required to meet the needs of residents of the province of Manitoba by the year 2020. Methodological considerations for this request included identification of factors…

In their meta-analysis of clinical versus statistical prediction models, Aegisdottir et al. (this issue) extended previous findings of statistical-method superiority across such variables as clinicians' experience and familiarity with data. In this reaction, the authors are particularly interested in violence prediction, which yields the greatest…

A method designed to facilitate prediction of mechanism and products by developing critical thinking skills and reducing memorization is presented. The mechanistic disc method requiring students to utilize their understanding of charge stabilization, structural organic chemistry, and the fundamental mechanisms of aliphatic substitution and…

A model for analyzing policy impacts is presented that will assist state-level policy makers in education. The model comprises four stages: (1) monitoring, which includes the identification of relevant trends and issues and the development of a data base; (2) forecasting, which uses quantitative and qualitative techniques developed in futures…