From 1982-1997, 35 states adopted legislation, referred to as homeschool rights, that explicitly granted families the right to educate their children at home. Using data from the National Household Education Survey, this article examines the impact that this legislation has had on the decision to homeschool a child versus the alternatives of…

Recently, Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) completed a study to connect the scale of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCA) Testing Program used for Minnesota's mathematics and reading assessments with NWEA's RIT (Rasch Unit) scale. Information from the state assessments was used in a study to establish performance-level scores on…

The Minnesota Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP) provides subsidies to help low-income families pay for child care while parents are working, looking for work, or attending school. The program can help make quality child care affordable and is intended both to support employment for low-income families and to support the development and…

The Maryland Higher Education Commission (MHEC) submits this report in response to the 2014 Joint Chairmen's Report, which requested an update to the 2013 MHEC report that examined impacts of financial need on student success. The charge included in the 2014 Joint Chairmen's Report was the following: "As part of the Access, Affordability, and…

Background/Context: Relying largely on high school measures of home language use, the literature examining immigrant incorporation in schools provides contradictory evidence of home language effects on educational outcomes. More recent research has demonstrated that home language use is dynamic and thus it is important to examine the implications…

The increase in the squared multiple correlation coefficient ([delta]R[superscript 2]) associated with a variable in a regression equation is a commonly used measure of importance in regression analysis. Algina, Keselman, and Penfield found that intervals based on asymptotic principles were typically very inaccurate, even though the sample size…

This paper revisits the effect of lexical ambiguity in word recognition, which has been controversial as previous research reported advantage, disadvantage, and null effects. We discuss factors that were not consistently treated in previous research (e.g., the level of lexical ambiguity investigated, parts of speech of the experimental stimuli,…

In contrast to dichotomous item response theory (IRT) models, most well-known polytomous IRT models do not imply stochastic ordering of the latent trait by the total test score (SOL). This has been thought to make the ordering of respondents on the latent trait using the total test score questionable and throws doubt on the justifiability of using…

On the basis of the statistical concept of waiting time and on computer simulations of the "probabilities of nonoccurrence" (p. 457) for random sequences, Hahn and Warren (2009) proposed that given people's experience of a finite data stream from the environment, the gambler's fallacy is not as gross an error as it might seem. We deal with two…

Disjunction fallacies have been extensively studied in probability judgment. They should also occur in episodic memory, if remembering a cue's episodic state depends on how its state is described on a memory test (e.g., being described as a target vs. as a distractor). If memory is description-dependent, cues will be remembered as occupying…

A dual-source model of probabilistic conditional inference is proposed. According to the model, inferences are based on 2 sources of evidence: logical form and prior knowledge. Logical form is a decontextualized source of evidence, whereas prior knowledge is activated by the contents of the conditional rule. In Experiments 1 to 3, manipulations of…

Technological advances touch multiple aspects of an individual's life. One such example is the use of information technology to provide online books. Online books have been introduced in education in the form of electronic textbooks (e-texts). The research question examined here is among those students who have purchased or used an e-text, what…

The efficacy of inoculation theory has been confirmed by decades of empirical research, yet optimizing its effectiveness remains a vibrant line of investigation. The present research turns to psychological reactance theory for a means of enhancing the core mechanisms of inoculation--threat and refutational preemption. Findings from a multisite…

This study uses the Survey of Income and Program Participation to infer the legal status of Mexican and Central American immigrant youth and to investigate its relationship with educational attainment. We assess differences by legal status in high school graduation and college enrollment, decompose differences in college enrollment into the…

This study leveraged the complementary nature of confirmatory factor (CFA), item response theory (IRT), and latent class (LCA) analyses to strengthen the rigor and sophistication of evaluation of two new measures of the Air Force Academy's "leader of character" definition--the Character Mosaic Virtues (CMV) and the Leadership Mosaic…