Educational stakeholders have long known that students might not be fully engaged when taking an achievement test and that such disengagement could undermine the inferences drawn from observed scores. Thanks to the growing prevalence of computer-based tests and the new forms of metadata they produce, researchers have developed and validated…

This supplement contains documentation on the explicit and implicit stratification variables included in the TIMSS 2011 data files. The explicit strata are smaller sampling frames, created from the national sampling frames, from which national samples of schools were drawn. The implicit strata are nested within the explicit strata, and were used…

Describes the Web Characterization Project that characterizes the use of metadata in Web documents by extracting a valid sample. Discusses Web resource discovery and description; sampling methods; metadata and embedded document description; HTML; Dublin Core metadata elements; and home pages versus internal Web pages. (Author/LRW)