The academic progress of minority and nonminority community college transfer students toward baccalaureate degree completion was studied using term-by-term longitudinal files. The study sample consisted of 1,179 students entering community college in fall 1985 as first-time students and transferring to the university by 1991, and 990 students…

This study was undertaken to develop guidelines for making interpretive inferences from scores on the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC), a norm-referenced test of English-language listening comprehension (LC) and reading (R) skills, about level of ability to use English in face-to-face conversation, indexed by performance in…

Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores, student-reported high school grades, and scores for four other Admissions Testing Program tests were correlated with freshman grade point average for 299,794 students at 198 colleges from the enrolling classes of 1978, 1981, and 1985. The purpose of the study was to determine whether observed changes in…

This paper describes a methodology used in an on-going retention study at New York University (NYU) to identify a series of easily measured factors affecting student departure decisions. Three logistic regression models for predicting student retention were developed, each containing data available at three distinct times during the first…

This study examined gender differences in laterality, socialization, and educational achievement in fourth graders and determined which characteristics predicted mathematical and language achievement. The participants were four fourth grade classes comprised of 32 boys and 45 girls at an elementary school in a small rural town. Measures used were…

Two studies examined the relationship between preschool and elementary school children's ability to delay gratification and their school behaviors, after controlling for differences in socioeconomic status (SES). Children's gratification control was measured through an age-appropriate dilemma that forced each child to exhibit gratification control…

Several common sources of error in assessment that depends on the use of judges are identified, and ways to reduce the impact of rating errors are examined. Numerous threats to the validity of scores based on ratings exist. These threats include: (1) the halo effect; (2) stereotyping; (3) perception differences; (4) leniency/stringency error; and…

The Dallas School Accountability Program is described, and a step-by-step method for determining how well a school performs relative to other schools is presented. The Dallas program is a two-part program. Beginning with criterion-based improvement plans, goal levels are set by determining the discrepancy between the actual and desired levels of…

Praxis III is an assessment procedure that provides information for making instructional and licensing decisions about beginning teachers. The Praxis III Assessor's job is to interview the beginning teacher, observe the teacher in the classroom, score the teacher's performance on 19 criteria, and summarize the evidence for each score. The Assessor…

Findings of a study that examined the impact of parent involvement on student performance in Catholic and public schools are presented in this paper. Methodology involved regression analysis of the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88) database, which contains information on 1,035 schools (802 public and 233 private schools) and…

Several regression methods were examined within the framework of weighted structural regression (WSR), comparing their regression weight stability and score estimation accuracy in the presence of outlier contamination. The methods compared are: (1) ordinary least squares; (2) WSR ridge regression; (3) minimum risk regression; (4) minimum risk 2;…

This paper discusses the determination of college faculty salary inequity and identifies the areas in which human judgment must be used in order to conduct a statistical analysis of salary equity. In addition, it provides some informed guidelines for making those judgments. The paper provides a framework for selecting salary equity models, based…

A study investigated the magnitude of the relationship between measures of teacher immediacy and teacher enthusiasm and their relative contributions to student evaluations of instruction (SEI) and students' course grades. It was argued that immediacy and enthusiasm are descriptors of the two dimensions of effective college teaching espoused by…

A recent study of salary equity at an undergraduate institution using traditional regression-based methodology is presented. In a traditional salary equity study a linear model is empirically fitted for predicting salaries (the dependent variable) from a set of independent (predictor) variables using the most up-to-date data possible for some base…

Sixty-three fifth-grade children completed daily activity diaries indicating how they spent their non-school time for 15 days. From these diaries, estimates of the minutes per day that were spent in various activities were derived. The estimate of book-reading time from the activity diary correlated with new measures of individual differences in…