This report characterizes forms of dialogic support that a sixth-grade teacher generated during whole-class and small-group conversations to help students develop a practice of statistical modeling. During four weeks of instruction, students constructed and revised models to account for variability and uncertainty across a variety of random…

In secure web application development, the role of web services will not continue if it is not trustworthy. Retaining customers with applications is one of the major challenges if the services are not reliable and trustworthy. This article proposes a trust evaluation and decision model where the authors have defined indirect attribute, trust,…

Smaller universities may produce research which is on a par with larger, elite establishments. This is confirmed by a recently developed mathematical model, supported by data from British and French higher education research-evaluation exercises. The detailed nature of the UK system, in particular, allows quantification of the notion of critical…

A statistical analysis procedure is developed, based on the notion that many educational programs are dynamic interventions in natural growth processes, and is called value-added analysis. The theory of value-added analysis, and several applications are presented. (Author/JKS)

The authors demonstrate how exponential smoothing can play a role in the identification of the intervention component of an interrupted time-series design model that is analogous to the role that the sample autocorrelation and partial autocorrelation functions serve in the identification of the noise portion of such a model. (Author/BW)

The intent of this paper is to generalize the min and max clustering procedures in such a way that the assumption of a symmetric similarity measure is unnecessary. (Author)

The general class of continuous growth models are described and examples representative of growth models suggested for various types of academic and/or physical growth are given. The fan spread hypothesis is discussed in relationship to natural growth models, as well as differential linear growth. (PN)

A method is presented for analyzing data collected in a multiple group time-series design. This consists of testing linear hypotheses about the experimental and control group-means. Both a multivariate and a univariate procedure are described. (Author/GK)

Various methods have been suggested for the analysis of data collected in research settings where random assignment of subjects to groups has not occurred. For the purposes of this paper the set of allowable nonrandomized designs is made up of those research designs where data are collected for one or more groups of subjects at two or more time…

The State Planning System (SPS) is a flexible, policy-oriented management tool intended to help analyze possible impacts of various policy decisions. The SPS is able to address a wide range of issues because it depends on the user to provide the relationships and data to be used in the analysis. Such issues might include enrollment shifts among…

This final report of a National Institute of Education project explores Bayesian statistical analysis as a paradigm for educational impact studies, particularly studies on the education of the disadvantaged. The position of the report is that much of what is wrong with educational research can be attributed to the use of an inappropriate model for…

The problem of comparing proportions when some data are missing is investigated, and determination is made of what statistical techniques are appropriate under each of several probability models describing the observations likely to be missing. Monte Carlo methods were used to investigate the properties of standard estimators under each of the…

This discussion of how the multilevel character of data should influence analyses of the determinants of educational achievement is grounded in the context of planning explanatory analyses for the longitudinal Second International Mathematics Study (SIMS). The intention is to describe how a multilevel perspective in the specification of…

Although there is a healthy trend toward employment of multivariate statistical methods in the analysis of data from experiments in psychology and education which involve multiple dependent variables, there remains a need to demonstrate the wide variety of data analytic techniques available for post hoc analysis of statistically significant…

Available from: the North-Holland Publishing Company, P.O. Box 211, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. (JG)