The Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) is conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) on behalf of the United States Department of Education in order to collect extensive data on American public and private elementary and secondary schools. SASS provides data on the characteristics and qualifications of teachers and…

Sudden cardiac death among athletes continues to take the lives of college students across the nation. Leadership at all levels of higher education has great concern over this phenomenon. However, the processes and procedures related to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) remain poorly understood. Corrado (1998) suggests that sudden cardiac death of…

Superintendents and school boards should get the most accurate information they can when making policy decisions--and that means data, not anecdotes and impressions. This article discusses factors to consider in conducting a survey. A good survey starts with the basics: Ask the right questions of a good sampling of the defined population; take…

The focus of this First Look report is on base-year contextual data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09). This First Look is intended as a companion to the report, "High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09): A First Look at Fall 2009 Ninth-Graders (NCES 2011327)" (ED521115), which focuses on the mathematics…

The work-sampling approach derives a composite overall picture of how an individual allocates time by taking a sufficiently large number of spot observations of activity at random intervals. (For availability, see EA 507 433.) (Author)

Experimental research involves comparing two or more conditions. One of those conditions in single subject research is often the baseline. Adequate description of the baseline conditions is necessary for evaluating the effects of independent variables, drawing generalizations from studies, and providing information for subsequent replication…

Methodological and political issues arise during the designing, conducting, and reporting of campus-climate studies for LGBT students. These issues interact; making a decision about a methodological issue (e.g., sample size) has an impact on a political issue (e.g., how well the findings will be received). Ten key questions that must be addressed…

The National Household Education Surveys Program (NHES) is a random digit dialing (RDD) survey program developed by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. The surveys are designed to help NCES collect data directly from households about important education topics.…

Discusses the application of statistical sampling to the compiling of reference-desk statistics, and describes a technique that uses the Pearson correlation procedure of SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) to determine appropriate sampling periods for keeping reference desk statistics at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. (FM)

This article demonstrates the use of mixed-effects logistic regression (MLR) for conducting sequential analyses of binary observational data. MLR is a special case of the mixed-effects logit modeling framework, which may be applied to multicategorical observational data. The MLR approach is motivated in part by G. A. Dagne, G. W. Howe, C. H.…

This is the first of two reports that summarize the findings from an impact evaluation of a violence prevention intervention for middle schools. This report discusses findings after 1 year of implementation. A forthcoming report will discuss the findings after 2 years and 3 years of implementation. In 2004, the U.S. Department of Education (ED)…

This technical report and user's guide is designed to provide researchers with an overview of the design and implementation of the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), as well as with information on how to access the PISA 2009 data. This information is meant to supplement that presented in Organization for Economic Cooperation…

"This study involving 1,452 liberal Arts College science graduates has shown that a personalized approach can elicit an excellent response to a mailed questionnaire. (Author)

This article presents a fairly quick, easy way to decide what size sample is needed for a survey, given a desired level of confidence and degree of accuracy. The method proposed will work on any multiple response instrument. A technical mathematical explanation is also included. (GK)