Many school-based research efforts require active parental consent for student participation. Maximizing rates of consent form return and agreement is an important issue, because sample representativeness may be compromised when these rates are low. This article compares two methods for obtaining active parental consent: return of consent forms in…

The present study was designed to identify the impact of drinking problems, impulsivity, and a history of childhood physical abuse on both male-to-female (MFIPV) and female-to-male intimate partner violence (FMIPV). The data were collected in 1995 from a representative national sample of couples living in the contiguous 48 states. Using a…

We compared partial-interval recording (PIR) and momentary time sampling (MTS) estimates against continuous measures of the actual durations of stereotypic behavior in young children with autism or pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified. Twenty-two videotaped samples of stereotypy were scored using a low-tech duration recording…

This study analyzes whether appropriate service delivery, defined as risk level appropriate treatment and supervision services, reduces recidivism. Utilizing a dataset collected for the purpose of evaluating Intensive Supervision Programs, this project analyzes whether high risk offenders are supervised at higher rates than low risk offenders.…

This article describes how the teacher work sample methodology of the Renaissance Partnership for Improving Teacher Quality was implemented within the teacher education program at a small liberal arts college. Resulting program improvements are described, as well as on-going challenges. The adapted teacher work sample prompt and scoring rubric are…

This article reports on a further exploration into the reliability and validity of the shortened form of the Career Development Inventory-Australia (Creed & Patton, 2004), a career maturity measure being developed to meet the need for a shorter and more up-to-date measure to provide data on this career development construct. Data gathered from…

When a simple random sample of size n is employed to establish a classification rule for prediction of a polytomous variable by an independent variable, the best achievable rate of misclassification is higher than the corresponding best achievable rate if the conditional probability distribution is known for the predicted variable given the…

Background: The Thinking Styles Inventory--developed by Sternberg and Wagner based on Sternberg's (1988, 1997) earlier theory of mental self-government--was selected for the research in order to assess thinking styles of student teachers. Another reason is that the theoretical constructs, as well as the inventory generated from the theory, have…

Monitoring the Future is a long-term program of research being conducted at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research under a series of investigator-initiated research grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Now in its 34th year, the study is comprised of several ongoing series of annual surveys of nationally…

This technical report documents the procedures used to collect and summarize data from the 2005 High School Transcript Study (HSTS 2005). The transcript studies serve as a barometer for changes in high school graduates' course-taking patterns; these patterns provide information about the rigor of high school curricula followed across the nation.…

Large scale surveys usually employ a complex sampling design and as a consequence, no standard methods for estimation of the standard errors associated with the estimates of population means are available. Resampling methods, such as jackknife or bootstrap, are often used, with reference to their properties of robustness and reduction of bias. A…

As a result of a recent College Board Admissions Testing Program Achievement Test scaling study, L. L. Cook and others recommended that the practice of sampling only high school juniors taking the achievement tests in June might be expanded to include sophomores and that a two-stage scaling procedure be evaluated. The two-stage procedure would…

This paper shares the findings of an inquiry that evaluated 50 survey articles published in a refereed journal, "Educational Administration Quarterly," by examining the 53 sample designs reported in the articles. The paper presents a typology of the sample designs identified, discusses the problems of sample selection and estimation…

Norm-referenced tests yield information regarding a student's performance in comparison to a norm or average of performance by similar students. Norms are statistics that describe the test performance of a well-defined population. The process of constructing norms, called norming, is explored briefly in this paper. Some of the most widely reported…

Bayesian methods for estimating dose response curves in quantal bioassay are studied. A linearized multi-stage model is assumed for the shape of the curves. A Gibbs sampling approach with data augmentation is employed to compute the Bayes estimates. In addition, estimation of the "relative additional risk" and the "risk specific…