One of a series of research reports examining objective principles successfully used in other fields which can lend integrity and legitimacy to evaluation, this report presents an overview of operations research (OR) as a potential source of evaluation methodology. The nature of the methods common to this discipline are summarized and the…

The purpose of this study was to find out what difficulties Nicaraguan children encounter in doing addition and subtraction exercises. The results were used in the design of radio lessons in mathematics for elementary school. The performance on addition exercises is analyzed with a view toward identifying the distinct skills that are required by…

THE STUDY IS CONCERNED WITH THE LINGUISTIC PROBLEM INVOLVED IN TEXT COMPRESSION--EXTRACTING, INDEXING, AND THE AUTOMATIC CREATION OF SPECIAL-PURPOSE CITATION DICTIONARIES. IN SPITE OF EARLY SUCCESS IN USING LARGE-SCALE COMPUTERS TO AUTOMATE CERTAIN HUMAN TASKS, THESE PROBLEMS REMAIN AMONG THE MOST DIFFICULT TO SOLVE. ESSENTIALLY, THE PROBLEM IS TO…

The construction of algorithms to present grammatical rules is advocated on the basis of clarity and ease of memorization. Algorithmic procedure is demonstrated for the introduction of subordinate clauses by conjunctions in German, and the formation of plural nouns in English. (AF)

An algorithm for generating a structural syntactic surrogate of English text is defined in this paper. The "performance" of the surrogate is judged empirically according to adherence to the following criteria: (1) The surrogate is an organized representation of natural language text; (2) The algorithm which produces the surrogate is…

In this paper a reliable method is found for approximating the value of the Bivariate Normal Correlation Coefficient, rho, given values of the joint probability and the normal deviates, h and k, or the related areas. This technique finds useful application in the computation of the tetrachoric correlation coefficient, r, when the underlying…

A test for divisibility by any prime number is discussed and its proof is given. (MP)

A current method of teaching long division using repeated subtraction is analyzed as being an example of a sound mathematical method that falls into disrepute when it results in unnecessary, length calculations. (MP)

Comparisons are made between the errors obtained when approximating the integral with the midpoint rule, the trapezoidal rule, and Simpson's rule. (MP)

This study examined the effectiveness using an automatic algorithm to rank the results of Boolean searches of an inverted file design document retrieval system. Relevant documents were ranked significantly higher than nonrelevant documents on output lists. (Author/KP)

Two difficulties that students have in computing with fractions are idenfitied. Then a procedure is described, stressing the identity element, that resolves these difficulties and increases students' understanding and retention. (MNS)

Presents a model and experimental results of a new one-phase technique for compression text files that is a modification of the Ziv and Lempel compression scheme. The description includes the use of a subword dictionary that is periodically reorganized based on information theory and structural linguistics principles. (29 references) (Author/CLB)

An algorithm or decision chart is presented which provides basic decision steps to help management decide what data should be collected to derive valid and correct objectives, and to determine what levels of objectives will be selected relative to products, outputs, or outcomes of an organization. (MBR)

A description of a Mokken test program to test the robustness of nonparametric Stochastic scales is presented. For each sample and the whole population, different scale statistics (both on scale and on item level) are computed recursively. A statistic T is presented for testing the robustness of the scales in the samples. (Author)

Describes a computerized information retrieval system that uses three agglomerative hierarchic clustering algorithms--single link, complete link, and group average link--and explains their implementations. It is noted that these implementations have been used to cluster a collection of 12,000 documents. (LRW)