The objective of this study is to examine the social profile of students who are enrolled in Basic General Education in Ecuador. Both a descriptive and multidimensional statistical analysis was carried out based on the data provided by the National Survey of Employment, Unemployment and Underemployment in 2015. The descriptive analysis shows the…

This paper explores students' conceptions of good teaching in three different disciplines. Moreover, the aim is to explore the relation between these conceptions and students' approaches to learning by combining qualitative and quantitative methods. A total of 695 students from the Faculties of Behavioural Sciences, Law and Veterinary Medicine…

A strategy for reordering the hierarchical tree structure is presented. While the order of terminal nodes of Johnson's procedure is arbitrary, this procedure will rearrange every triad of nodes under a common least upper node so that the middle node is nonarbitrarily closest to the anchored node. (Author/CTM)

Introduces a new approach for partitioning test items into dimensionally distinct item clusters. The core of this approach is a new item-pair conditional-covariance-based proximity measure that can be used with hierarchical cluster analysis. The procedure can correctly classify, on average, over 90% of the items for correlations as high as 0.9.…

Measuring object similarity using the method of free clustering is gaining in popularity. Instructions are usually simple and since no structure is imposed on the subject's selection, response bias is reduced. More importantly, measures of object similarity derived from the judges' clustering can be adequately analyzed by the methods of…

Examines the structure of medical informatics and the relationship between biomedicine and information science and information technology. Uses co-occurrence analysis of subject headings assigned to items indexed for MEDLINE as well as multidimensional scaling to show seven to eight broad multidisciplinary subject clusters. (Contains 28…

Predictive discriminant analysis involves a technique used in multivariate classification, i.e., in predicting membership in well-defined groups for units on which multiple measures are available. The validation (assessment) of group membership predictions pertains to two problems: estimating true proportions of correct classifications (i.e., hit…

Points of view analysis, as a way to deal with individual differences in multidimensional scaling, was largely supplanted by the weighted Euclidean model. It is argued that the approach deserves new attention, especially as a technique to analyze group differences. A streamlined and integrated process is proposed. (SLD)

Discusses the intellectual structure of the sciences and describes a study that was conducted to test the usefulness of author cocitation analysis for empirically deriving groupings of intellectual leaders in the field of sociology. Results are contrasted with traditional subjective methods of codification of a field. (35 references) (LRW)

A class of closely related hierarchical grouping methods are discussed and a procedure which implements them in an integrated fashion is presented. These methods avoid some theoretical anomalies inherent in clustering and provide a framework for viewing partitioning and nonpartitioning grouping. Significant relationships between these methods and…

Argues that co-citation methods combine citing behavior of authors by assuming they share common view of scientific literature which affects assessments of dimensionality and clustering of articles. Co-citation matrices, effects of shared point-of-view assumption, and co-citation compared with bibliographic coupling and centroid scaling are…

Author cocitation analysis was used to investigate changes in intellectual structure of macroeconomics over two consecutive time periods, 1972-1977 and 1978-1983. Profile analysis, nonmetric multidimensional scaling, and clustering techniques were used to create two-dimensional maps displaying changing relationships among 41 authors as perceived…

Three approaches to the graphic representation of similarity and dissimilarity matrices are compared and contrasted. Specifically, Kruskal's multidimensional scaling, Johnson's hierarchical clustering, and Waern's graphing techniques are employed to depict, in two dimensions, data representing the structure of a set of botanical concepts. Each of…

A method of two-stage clustering of literature based on citation frequency is applied to 5,065 articles from 57 journals in environmental and civil engineering. Results of related methods of citation analysis (hierarchical graph, clustering of journals, multidimensional scaling) applied to same set of articles are compared. Ten references are…