A study examined communication skills of college students to determine the relationship between individuals' skill valuings and their acceptance within peer groups of intact social systems. Data were gathered from 102 residents of two fraternities and 106 residents of two sororities. Subjects completed the Communication Functions Questionnaire and…

The Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) measures the English language proficiency of foreign students who apply for higher education in the United States. It is administered according to a strict schedule through the International and Special Center (I&SC) testing program or at ad hoc intervals by institutional users as part of the…

A study was conducted at the International University of Japan to see if second language (L2) working capacity correlates with L2 reading ability in advanced English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learners. The study consisted of a set of memory tests (Simple Digit, Simple Word, and Complex Span Test) and a set of measures of reading skills given to…

The Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales (VABS) and the Scales of Independent Behavior (SIB) were administered to the mothers of 40 preschoolers (23 females and 17 males) in a day care situation. The children ranged in age from 47 to 74 months. Mothers were interviewed to determine if any changes had taken place in the behavior of the children…

From the fall of 1981 through June 1984, more than 850 disabled examinees took special administration of the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE). Grade point averages were obtained on 278 disabled students; 236 had enough complete data to be included in the study. Disabled students earned lower mean GRE scores than their nonhandicapped counterparts…

The Stanford-Binet: Fourth Edition and Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children were administered in counterbalanced order followed by the Cognitive Domain of the Battelle Developmental Inventory to a sample of 30 nonhandicapped, preschool children (13 males and 17 females). Correlations (corrected for restriction in range) among the three…

The great concern in recent decades over the trends of declining student achievement scores and increased cost of schooling has prompted speculation about how these trends might relate to one another. Much like popular opinion, research findings from studies of this relationship have often been contradictory. This study presents results from a…

A study of differential brain hemisphere involvement in second language acquisition is reported. The study examined the idea that the right hemisphere is progressively more involved the later the second language is acquired. Various techniques for monitoring hemispheric functioning are described, especially the Evoked Potential (EP) technique. In…

Although perfectly scalable items rarely occur in practice, Guttman's concept of a scale has proved to be valuable to the development of measurement theory. If the score distribution is uniform and there is an equal number of items at each difficulty level, both the elements and the eigenvalues of the Pearson correlation matrix of dichotomous…

This paper discusses the use of latent class structure as a modelling framework for tests in which much of the data conforms to a relatively small number of systematic patterns. Application of this framework to the analysis of tests has been limited because available parameter estimation algorithms can only handle a relatively small number of…

This study attempts to integrate and extend previous research by multivariate investigation to determine multidimensional relationships among both the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R) subscales and the demographic variables for the 1981 WAIS-R standardization sample. Canonical correlation with orthogonal rotation of composite…

This study is an attempt at a cohesive characterization of the concept of essay reliability. As such, it takes as a basic premise that previous and current practices in reporting reliability estimates for essay tests have certain shortcomings. The study provides an analysis of these shortcomings--partly to encourage a fuller understanding of the…

Hypothetical data sets are used to demonstrate how canonical correlation methods subsume other commonly utilized parametric methods. Analysis of variance, analysis of covariance, multiple analysis of variance, and multiple analysis of covariance are heavily used by educational researchers. It is concluded that researchers would do well to consider…

A visual display is introduced that enables one to compare the predictive validities of all possible non-negatively weighted sums of two predictors. This two-predictor validity curve assesses the level of predictability of a criterion from composites of two predictors. Derivations are presented for the general case. For illustrative purposes, the…

This study examined the effect of type of correlation matrix on the robustness of LISREL maximum likelihood and unweighted least squares structural parameter estimates for models with categorical manifest variables. Two types of correlation matrices were analyzed; one containing Pearson product-moment correlations and one containing tetrachoric,…