A common approach to needs analysis involves the development of a self-report questionnaire administered to members of the intended audience. Such an approach poses a problem however: Concern for data reliability demands polling as many respondents as possible, while concern for cost-effectiveness dictates minimizing the size of the sample. The…

Researchers persist in using stepwise regression in spite of problems with this approach. As noted by B. Thompson (1995), three problems accompany the use of stepwise applications. The first is that computer packages may use incorrect degrees of freedom in their computations, resulting in a greater likelihood of obtaining a spurious statistical…

A tailored testing model employing the beta distribution, whose mean equals the difficulty of an item and whose variance is approximately equal to the sampling variance of the item difficulty, and employing conditional item difficulties, is proposed. The model provides a procedure by which a minimum number of items of a test, consisting of a set…

A linear regression model was used to select items from a pool of 700 arithmetic word problems to be used in a computer-assisted mathematics curriculum for elementary school students. The experimental procedure first involved a stepwise linear regression analysis of a student's performance over a set of 25 problems. The probability correct for…