This study examined the attitudes and behaviors associated with leadership qualities in 73 freshman athletes at the University of Maryland, College Park. The Sport Leadership Behavior Inventory (SLBI), the Noncognitive Questionnaire (NCQ), and the New Student Census were administered to the athletes. The SLBI was chosen to provide a definition of…

An instrument was developed to identify schools that might be more prone to the occurrence of violence. The first draft of the instrument was developed by a research analyst, the project evaluator, the school resource officer at a junior high school, and school officials. This draft went through several pilot administrations, revisions, and factor…

This paper comments on the impact of computers on statistical analysis and presents a concise, nontechnical overview of five statistical methods now being applied in educational research. Appropriate uses of these techniques are pointed out, along with dangers concerning misapplications. (PP)

Analysis of data from 797 high school seniors planning to delay further education reveal that socioeconomic factors significantly influence the types of school activities pursued and that these activities influence educational plans. Pragmatic attitudes, inaccurate assessment of educational levels necessary for desired professions, and new…

Using their own 1978 national survey sample, the authors describe the social and demographic characteristics, psychological needs, and television viewing behaviors of persons who exhibit each of 14 patterns of leisure activities. The patterns were isolated through factor analysis and clustering techniques. (Author/RM)

The usefulness of faculty ratings of departments and department heads as a measure of departmental quality is examined. It is found that the performance of the department head plays a very important role in faculty perceptions of the departments, and vice versa. (Author/MLW)

A research program is suggested that integrates admissions procedures and methods of statistical analysis to study the first stage of the admissions selection process: the rating of applicants. A systematic procedure is described that provides an index of applicant "quality" in the light of institutional goals. (Author/MLW)

California Assessment Program's application of matrix sampling and item response curve theory to the scaling and reporting of state assessment data is described. It is designed to express educational outcomes in an efficient and interpretable form that is both immediately informative and suited to analysis over extended periods of time.…

Factor analysis is of limited value in investigating the influence of students' implicit theories about teachers' behaviors on student evaluations of teachers. (MH)

A method of measuring students' preferred characteristics of instructors includes the use of factorial designs, monotonic analysis of variance, and cluster analysis. In this case, preferred characteristics included work load, grading, classroom style and format, and teacher style. (Author/GDC)

Stephens et al. (EJ 055 112) committed a serious methodological error in holding chronological age constant in their IQ measures and allowing it to vary in their Piagetian developmental measures. This error is unrelated to differences in factor rotation methods used by these authors and was not answered in their reply. (CTM)

Evidence is presented for the existence of two types of factors when semantic differential data are factor analyzed by treating each concept-scale combination as a variable: (1) factors defined by scales within given concepts; and (2) factors defined by scales across concepts. (Author/MH)

The development of the Estimate of Self-Competence Scale is described. The instrument was designed to measure generalized expectancy of task success. Reliability and validity data are provided. (Author/JKS)

The development of a measure to assess students' perceptions of the extent to which higher education learning environment characteristics enhance personal learning is reported. Factor analyses of the Student Assessment of Teaching and Learning are reported for 2,190 students. Implications for using student rating information in teacher evaluation…

Utilizing the Test of English Proficiency, developed by Seoul National University (TEPS), examined comparability between the paper-based language test and the computer-based language test based on content and construct validation employing content analyses based on corpus linguistic techniques in addition to such statistical analyses as…