This article uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979-1998 to understand the differences between those who exited the welfare system voluntarily (leavers) and those who stayed (non-leavers), 1990-1996. The purpose of this research was to examine the differences between the groups in their personal and family characteristics,…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of gender and grade level on students' logical thinking abilities. A total of 174 sixth, seventh, and eighth-grade students participated in the study. Test of Logical Thinking (TOLT) was administered to determine students' reasoning abilities. A two-way multivariate analysis of variance…

With growing numbers of drug-involved offenders, substance abuse treatment has become a critical part of corrections. A multistage therapeutic community implemented in the Delaware correctional system has as its centerpiece a residential treatment program during work release--the transition between prison and community. An evaluation of this…

Under the No Child Left Behind Act, states have been required to set minimum proficiency standards that virtually all students must meet by 2014. Sanctions of increasing severity are to be applied to schools that fail to meet interim targets, known as Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). The authors examine the effect of this legislation using…

In this article, the author investigates the relationship between undergraduate student loan debt and degree attainment. Using data from the Beginning Postsecondary Student (BPS) surveys in 1995-1996 and 2000-2001, she examines whether the relationship between debt and degree attainment is different for students with different parental income…

Background: The purpose of this study was to identify the prevalence and the main risk factors of poor posture in school children in the Czech Republic. Methods: The cross-sectional study examined representative sample of children aged 7, 11, and 15 years in the year 2003. From the overall number of 3600 children, 3520 (97.7%) attended and were…

Background: The development of youth psychopathology may be associated with direct and continuous contact with a different culture (acculturation) and to distress related to this process (cultural stress). We examine cultural experiences of Puerto Rican families in relation to youth psychiatric symptoms in two different contexts: one in which…

By using a competing risks model, survival analysis methods can be extended to predict which of several mutually exclusive outcomes students will choose based on predictor variables, thereby ascertaining if the profile of risk differs across groups. The paper begins with a brief introduction to logistic regression and some of the basic concepts of…

Research on factors related to student academic achievement typically involves the use of some type of total cognitive score as the final outcome measure. However, in using a total score, it is assumed that variables related to student learning have the same effect on student learning across academic skill levels. Using a subsample from the first…

Researchers should investigate statistical models that can help counselors decide how to treat individual clients. This research investigated the questions, "Given an effect size (ES) from a counseling outcome study, what is the probability that a client would have a negative response to the treatment, and what is the probability that the client…

The PRODIGY/EBL system [Minton88] was one of the first works to directly attack the problem of strategy utility. The problem of finding effective strategies was reduced to the problem of finding effective rules. However, this paper illustrates limitations of the approach. There are two basic difficulties. The first arises from the fact that the…

Power refers to the probability that a statistical test will yield statistically significant results. In spite of the close relationship between power and statistical significance, there is a consistent overemphasis in the literature on statistical significance. This paper discusses statistical significance and its limitations and also includes a…

This study examines the effects on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) achievement levels of using item response theory (IRT) models that have nominal missing-response parameters. It compares cutpoints based on item parameters that were fitted using two different models. The first set of cutpoints were based on parameters for…

Related research suggests that children may show some simple understanding of event covariations by the early elementary school years. The present experiments use a rule analysis methodology to investigate covariation judgments of children in this age range. In Experiment 1, children in second, third and fourth grade judged covariations on 12…

This review guide, prepared as an aid to teachers of Course III, starts with a pre-test review of Course II topics found again in Course III. The five units of Course III, as outlined in the New York State Syllabus, are then separated into nine smaller units. These include: real numbers; complex numbers; functions; logarithms; trigonometry;…