In light of the emergence of statistical analysis techniques based on data mining in education sciences, and the potential they offer to detect non-trivial information in large databases, this paper presents a procedure used to detect factors linked to academic achievement in large-scale assessments. The study is based on a non-experimental,…

Assessing a high school's effectiveness is not straightforward. Comparing a school's standardized test scores to those of other schools is one approach to measuring effectiveness, but a major objection to this method is that students' test scores tend to be related to students' "socioeconomic" status--family household income, for…

Discusses the problem of determining an adequate sample size for an information retrieval experiment comparing two systems on separate samples of requests. The application of statistical methods to information retrieval experiments is discussed, the Mann-Whitney U Test is used for determining minimum sample sizes, and variables and distributions…

Presents a new measure of retrieval evaluation called corrected precision, which refines the traditional measures of recall and precision by taking into account differences among users in their selectivity when judging document relevance. The formula for calculating corrected precision is explained, and results from an empirical study of relevance…