Background/Context: Principles of evidential reasoning have often been discussed in the context of educational and psychological measurement with respect to construct validity and validity arguments. More recently, Mislevy proposed the metaphor of assessment as an evidentiary argument about students' learning and abilities given their…

GREATER UNDERSTANDING OF INFERENTIAL STATISTICAL METHODS AND EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN WOULD ENABLE LANGUAGE TEACHERS TO INTERPRET OBJECTIVELY AVAILABLE RESEARCH REPORTS AND HOPEFULLY WOULD ENCOURAGE MORE EXPERIMENTATION. TO UNDERSTAND THE EXPERIMENTAL PROCESS, EDUCATORS MUST REALIZE THAT ANY EXPERIMENT IS AS SUCCESSFUL AS THE EXPERIMENTER IS IN…

When gathering and presenting educational statistics, five principles should be considered. (1) The data must be accurate, valid, and complete. Limitations, weaknesses, margins of error, and levels of confidence should be clearly stated. (2) The data must include comparable information, sought in comparable ways, in comparable forms, from…

This supplement to "Postsecondary Student Terminology," a National Center for Education Statistics handbook, examines postsecondary education policy issues relevant to information needs about students, procedures used in identifying information items needed to statistically evaluate the issues, and an illustrative database for postsecondary…

Intended for use by educators and the public, this report interprets the findings of two research studies on competency-based vocational education (CBVE) in Kentucky secondary schools: "The Development of an Instrument to Measure Student Attitudes toward Competency-Based Individualized Instructional Modules," by John C. Thomas, and…