Examines four working steps from an empirical model where an expert abstractor discovers what a paper is about and drafts a topic sentence; a simulation system is developed using this model. Discusses knowledge processing activities of professional summarizing. Results indicate that a small simulation model of professional summarizing is feasible.…

Discussion of the changing economic environment and the resulting restructuring of society focuses on changes in education needs. Highlights include evaluative simulations, interactive distance learning in the home and in the workplace using interactive media, and a list of World Wide Web information sources for distance education. (LRW)

Crossroads to the World is an interdisciplinary, teacher-developed, technology-based project involving constructive learning that can be adapted to almost any social-studies curriculum. Beginning with literary models (like Whitman's "Song of the Open Road"), students use simulation software to generate ideas for their own simulated world…

Robustness of the school-level item response theoretic (IRT) model to violations of distributional assumptions was studied in a computer simulation. In situations where school-level precision might be acceptable for real school comparisons, expected a posteriori estimates of school ability were robust over a range of violations and conditions.…

A maximum likelihood approach to correlational outlier identification is introduced and compared to the Mahalanobis D squared and Comrey D statistics through Monte Carlo simulation. Identification performance depends on the nature of correlational outliers and the measure used, but the maximum likelihood approach is the most robust performance…

Asymptotic distributions of the estimators of communalities are derived for the maximum likelihood method in factor analysis. It is shown that equating the asymptotic standard error of the communality estimate to the unique variance estimate is not correct for the unstandardized case. Monte Carlo simulations illustrate the study. (SLD)

Effects of violating the independence assumption when combining correlation coefficients in a meta-analysis were studied. This Monte-Carlo simulation varied sample size, predictor number, population intercorrelation among predictors, and population correlation between predictors and criterion. Combining statistics from nonindependent data in a…

Describes virtual realities as environments in which visual, aural, or other stimuli generate in the mind of the user a sense of navigable, frameless, three-dimensional space, and predicts that the availability of computer technology to create real-time, three-dimensional graphics will bring radical changes in the educational use of visualization…

The algorithm developed by B. A. Schneider (1980) for analysis of paired comparisons of psychological intervals is replaced by one proposed by R. M. Johnson. Monte Carlo simulations of pairwise dissimilarities and pairwise conjoint effects show that Johnson's algorithm can provide good metric recovery. (SLD)

Describes the "Virtual Cities" project, a virtual reality satellite teleconference with students age 12 to 17 from Canada, Italy, and the United States held during the International Council for Educational Media 1992 conference. A visual database overlaid with instructional gaming strategies provided students with the opportunity to…

The present simulation study confirms that the corrected epsilon approximate test of B. Lecoutre yields a less biased estimation of population epsilon and reduces Type I error rates when compared to the epsilon approximate test of H. Huynh and L. S. Feldt. (SLD)

New methods for comparing the medians corresponding to independent treatment groups are suggested. Procedures are based on the estimator of F. Harrell and C. Davis in conjunction with a modification and extension of the bootstrap calibration technique suggested by W. Loh. Data from two groups provide an illustration. (SLD)

A statistical method, W. F. Stout's statistical test of essential unidimensionality (1990), for exploring the lack of unidimensionality in test data was studied using Monte Carlo simulations. The statistical procedure is a hypothesis test of whether the essential dimensionality is one or exceeds one, regardless of the traditional dimensionality.…

A Monte Carlo study, which simulated 10,000 examinees' responses to four tests, investigated the effect of item stratification on parameter estimation in multiple matrix sampling of achievement data. Practical multiple matrix sampling is based on item stratification by item discrimination and a sampling plan with moderate number of subtests. (SLD)

A method is presented that eliminates some interpretational limitations arising from assumptions implicit in the use of arbitrary rules of thumb to interpret exploratory factor analytic results. The bootstrap method is presented as a way of approximating sampling distributions of estimated factor loadings. Simulated datasets illustrate the…