Drug use and delinquency share many common antecedents: early antisocial behavior, difficulties in school, impaired family relationships, delinquent or drug-using peers, and rebelliousness. But these common factors could underlie a cluster of problem behaviors or lead to distinctly different behavioral manifestations. Using data from 1,363 West…

The context of teaching has changed dramatically in the wake of two national waves of educational reform. This dissertation examined the relationship between elementary principals' use of transformational leadership strategies as determined by teacher reports and the presence of social-organizational factors within the schools. The five…

This study guide presents lessons on hand calculating various statistics: Central Tendency and Dispersion; Tips on Data Presentation; Two-Tailed and One-Tailed Tests of Significance; Error Types; Standard Scores; Non-Parametric Tests such as Chi-square, Spearman Rho, Sign Test, Wilcoxon Matched Pairs, Mann-Whitney U, Kruskal-Wallis, and Rank Sums;…

Psychosocial correlates of exposure to violence are explored to gain insight into how adolescents are affected in areas of school-based adjustment, and also whether specific groups of youth are affected more than others. Data were gathered as part of a study on academic adjustment across two groups of adolescents: one from a Northeastern…

It is argued that, given the importance and the increased use of multivariate techniques such as factor analysis and canonical correlation, students need to be made aware of multivariate methods and the appropriate ways in which they can be applied. As a general linear model that subsumes all other parametric measures, canonical correlation…

At Tallahassee Community College (TCC), a full-time equivalent (FTE) based ratio was used as the basis for comparing the college's staff allocations with those of other community colleges in the state. The development of a statewide personnel database by the Florida State Board of Community Colleges provided the means for investigating this ratio.…

The use of stepwise regression has been criticized for both interpretive misunderstandings and statistical aberrations. A major statistical problem with stepwise regression and other procedures that involve multiple significance tests is the inflation of the Type I error rate. General approaches to control the family-wise error rate such as the…

A crucial, but often forgotten, role of educational assessment is to enhance students' learning. This author advocates that an assessment program designed for student learning differs from assessment for accountability in purpose, test format, measurement type, number, and spread of tests, use of test results, and amount of interval between…

A study examined the relationship between self-perceived leadership ability and aspiration levels among 262 randomly selected consumer and home economic students in grades 7 through 12. The Dimensions of Self Concept (DOSC) questionnaire and a demographic survey instrument were administered to the students to gather data on their gender, age, and…

A model of research design anxiety reactions, that was adapted from the work of P. B. Cemen (1987) on mathematics anxiety reactions, was tested. The sample consisted of six classes of 152 master's degree students in a graduate educational research design course. Most were full-time teachers pursuing the master's degree part-time. Students were…

DIMTEST is a statistical test procedure for assessing essential unidimensionality of binary test item responses. The test statistic T used for testing the null hypothesis of essential unidimensionality is a nonparametric statistic. That is, there is no particular parametric distribution assumed for the underlying ability distribution or for the…

Studies comparing neuromotor and mental functioning of normal and disabled populations have shown that lower cognitive functioning is significantly related to lower motor functioning for retarded or disabled children but not for normal children. In an effort to further examine the relationship between these two functions, a study was conducted of…

Undergraduate students who were given specific instructions to form mental images while reading a text passage containing spatial information scored significantly higher than the control group on a drawing posttest. Significant correlations also resulted between the test scores and both reading time and use of imagery. The use of imagery…

This paper illustrates the transformation of a raw data matrix into a matrix of associations, and then into a factor matrix. Factor analysis attempts to distill the most important relationships among a set of variables, thereby permitting some theoretical simplification. In this heuristic data, a correlation matrix was derived to display…

Semantic noun classes in Emai, an Edoid language of Nigeria, are examined with respect to a process of Reference Point Marking (RPM) in order to explore the relationship between discourse and lexical semantics. Across pre- and post-verbal positions subcategorized by verbs like "rere" ("to be far"), these classes are shown to…