Several issues relating to agreement estimates for different types of data from performance evaluations are considered. New indices of agreement are presented for ordinal level items and for summative scores produced by nominal or ordinal level items. Two sets of empirical data illustrate the performance of the two formulas derived to estimate…

A study was conducted to characterize those features which could be recognized across students' academic journals. Subjects, 110 students in an introductory linguistics course, kept a journal during the course. The study was mainly interested in the relationships among categorical ratings of linguistic features in students' journals, and the…

This study reports on an examination of the experiences and expectations of the older university student who is returning to school to either complete a degree or begin a new career--one who in all likelihood did not have any computer experience before attending university classes. Specifically, the study was designed to: (1) compare attitudes…

This annotated bibliography was developed upon noting a deficiency of information in the literature regarding the training of raters for establishing agreement. The ERIC descriptor, "Interrater Reliability", was used to locate journal articles. Some of the 33 resulting articles focus on mathematical concepts and present formulas for computing…

A growing controversy surrounds the strict interpretation of statistical significance tests in social research. Statistical significance tests fail in particular to provide estimates for the stability of research results. Methods that do provide such estimates are known as invariance or cross-validation procedures. Invariance analysis is largely…

This study examined the effect of three aspects of the testing context--physical privacy, anonymity, and offers of help from a tester--on children's expectations. Performance of 96 11-year-old boys and girls on a pictorial recall memory task in a simulated test was evaluated. The subjects were divided into eight different groups varying on the…

This paper reports the results of an investigation into the relationship between librarians' status (i.e., librarians having faculty status or librarians lacking such status) and the organizational structure of the college library. The analysis was conducted within the conceptual framework of two organizational models: the bureaucratic and the…

An item discriminability study of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills Language Skills tests identified test items that are robust discriminators, psychometrically capable of separating low scorers from higher scorers in the language tests battery. The analysis was conducted by calculating a point-biserial correlation for each item on the four language…

The purpose of this paper is to further the cause of clarifying construct interpretations of tests, by proposing that non-metric multidimensional scaling may be more useful than factor analysis or other latent structure models for investigating the internal structure of tests. It also suggests that typical problems associated with scaling…

While teachers are well aware of the effect of nutrition on children's health, they are less aware of the relationship of diet to the learning process. An indirect relationship between nutrition and learning exists because food is required to supply energy for learning. Research has shown that a highly nutritional breakfast results in improved…

The Bialer Scale and the Nowicki-Strickland Scale were administered twice, 4 weeks apart, to 526 students in the third through sixth grade from four public schools in a rural, predominately white, midwestern community. The association of verbal ability and the reliabilities of the locus of control scales were assessed in view of evidence that the…

The relationship between American College Testing Program (ACT) and California Test of Mental Maturity (CTMM) scores were explored. Four hundred and thirty-four undergraduate subjects of both sexes were selected from a midwestern university. Pearson product moment correlation (r) and Kendall rank correlation coefficient (tau) were used to measure…

Meta-analysis has become an important supplement to traditional methods of research reviewing, although many problems must be addressed by the reviewer who carries out a meta-analysis. These problems include identifying and obtaining appropriate studies, extracting estimates of effect size from the studies, coding or classifying studies, analyzing…

A class of multidimensional latent trait models is described. The properties of the model parameters, and initial results on the accuracy of a maximum likelihood procedure for estimating the model parameters are discussed. The model presented is a special case of the general model described by Rasch (1961), with close similarities to the models…

This study attempted to secure information about some personal and social characteristics of the undergraduate psychology majors at Marquette University. (Author/RK)