It has been proposed that the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) increase its efforts to gather and analyze data on student background, teachers, households, and schools. Adoption of this proposal would result in the inclusion in NAEP of additional background variables and subpopulations, to be defined by states. NAEP specification…

Researchers conducted surveys of public attitudes in two Tennessee school systems in 1984-85 and 1985-86. Although interested in the survey results, one purpose of the researchers was to determine some inexpensive and relatively simple survey procedures. The researchers sought--through several pilot studies--to identify an efficient, parsimonious…

A statistical method has been developed for nested incomplete samples in a longitudinal study in which part of the sample has dropped out in such a way that the data have a nested pattern. A procedure which performed well in a Monte Carlo experiment was extended to a two-factor incomplete design with repeated measures on one factor. Methods…

Sampling distributions for ten tests for comparing population variances in a two group design were generated for several combinations of equal and unequal sample sizes, population means, and group variances when distributional forms differed. The ten procedures included: (1) O'Brien's (OB); (2) O'Brien's with adjusted degrees of freedom; (3)…

With the help of widely available microcomputers, it is possible to demonstrate certain statistical phenomena which students of statistics are usually expected to take on faith. Two demonstrations are described. In the first demonstration, three common types of sampling (simple random, biased, and stratified-random) are used to compare statistics…

How accurately deltas (statistics measuring the difficulty of items) established by pre-test populations reflect deltas obtained from final form populations, and the consequent utility of pre-test deltas for constructing final (operational test) forms to meet developed statistical specifications were studied. Data were examined from five subject…

The third section of this two-volume report examines the utility of the model developed in section I for application in a classroom testing situation. The model was applied in arithmetic classes through a weekly testing program. The teacher specified the generic task being taught, tests were constructed using a table of random numbers to select…

The High School and Beyond (HS&B) Local Labor Market Indicators machine-readable data file (MRDF) provides various measures of the conditions of the local labor market in the geographic areas in which the 1,015 HS&B sample high schools are located. The data are presented in such a way as not to reveal the identities of the participating…

A review of the literature about practices in evaluating art education programs led to the design of the new evaluation model described in this paper. The literature review revealed that a growing number of authors advocate qualitative methods, and that a debate exists regarding the combination of qualitative and quantitative data gathering and…

Three statistical problems related to criterion-referenced testing are investigated: estimation of the likelihood of a false-positive or false-negative decision with a mastery test, estimation of true scores in the Compound Binomial Error Model, and comparison of the examinees to a control. Two methods for estimating the likelihood of…

Five data collection techniques and two sampling methods were examined in terms of costs, rates of return, quality of the data collected, and degree of representativeness in assessing needs and interests of public television viewers in rural areas. Data collection techniques were (1) mail only, (2) mail incentive, (3) telephone only, (4) mail and…

Two sampling designs were compared for the planned 1978 national longitudinal survey of high school seniors with respect to statistical efficiency and cost. The 1972 survey used a stratified two-stage sample of high schools and seniors within schools. In order to minimize interviewer travel costs, an alternate sampling design was proposed,…

A logistic model was used to generate data to serve as a proxy for an immediate retest from item responses to a fourth grade standardized reading comprehension test of 45 items. Assuming that the actual test may be considered a pretest and the proxy data may be considered a retest, the effect of regression was investigated using a percentage of…

A stratified two-stage cluster sample design was chosen for the Texas Assessment Project and is described in this document. The sample was designed so as to achieve a chosen level of precision in item analysis data within each of the 20 geographic regions chosen for analysis. Four sampling frames were developed: 9-year-olds; sixth graders;…

A Monte Carlo simulation was used to ascertain the degree of inflation that can occur in regression estimates when samples contain randomly occurring instances of a pattern among correlations called cooperative suppression. Ten thousand samples of scores on three variables were randomly drawn from a population in which the correlations among the…