This manuscript addresses the question of who makes the better university professor.--Is it the person with experience in the field as a K-12 administrator or the one directly out of college with only in-depth knowledge of educational administration theory? The study was performed at a southern university using graduate educational leadership and…

What people mean by randomness should be taken into account when teaching statistical inference. This experiment explored subjective beliefs about randomness and probability through two successive tasks. Subjects were asked to categorize 16 familiar items: 8 real items from everyday life experiences, and 8 stochastic items involving a repeatable…

Recent research into students' reasoning about variation refers specifically to notions of distribution that emerge. This paper reports on research where written responses, from tertiary introductory statistics students, were coded according to the level of consideration of variation. A hierarchy of reasoning about distribution is proposed, based…

The purposes of this study were to examine the variables related to the special education students' stereotyped behavior in Taiwan, to understand types and functions of these students' stereotyped behavior, and to investigate the impact of such stereotypy on teaching in special educational classrooms. Questionnaires were sent to 308 classroom…

Since publication use of the WHOQOL-Bref has rapidly risen. However, as yet no population norms have been published as a reference point against which researchers can interpret their findings. This study provides preliminary population norms for this purpose. Randomly sampled community residents from two studies were pooled and used to examine the…

Do children learn more in full-day kindergartens than half-day programs? If full-day kindergarten increases learning, are kindergartners in some schools particularly advantaged by their full-day experience? We address these questions with a nationally representative sample of over 8,000 kindergartners and 500 U.S. public schools that participated…

The use of tests of statistical significance was explored, first by reviewing some criticisms of contemporary practice in the use of statistical tests as reflected in a series of articles in the "American Psychologist" and in the appointment of a "Task Force on Statistical Inference" by the American Psychological Association…

This handbook is intended to help government, university, private sector, and other users become better acquainted with the concepts and data underlying the Department of Agriculture's statistical series. The introduction reviews what various pieces of federal legislation say about the computation of agricultural production costs by the U.S.…

Presents teaching activities that are intended to be used to teach statistics to students in a high school mathematics program. Includes a worksheet of eight discussion questions on statistics, four activities on sampling bias, two experiments on sampling techniques, and a game known as "capture-recapture." (TW)

Possible relationships between five test examiner characteristics (gender, race, tenure, experience as a test administrator, and experience as a test developer or scorer) and six student achievement scores (reading, writing, language usage, mathematics, science, and social studies) were studied at the school level in a statewide assessment. The…

In this study we test the performance of some nonexperimental estimators of impacts applied to an educational intervention--reduction in class size--where achievement test scores were the outcome. We compare the nonexperimental estimates of the impacts to "true impact" estimates provided by a random-assignment design used to assess the…

Describes the model for decision making used in inferential statistics and real-world applications that parallel the statistical model. Discusses two activities that ask students to write about a personal decision-making experience and create a mock trial in which the class makes the decision of guilt or innocence. (MDH)

The purpose of this study was to compare students enrolled in an alternative school with students in a traditional school on the bases of academic achievement and attitudes toward school subjects. The subjects were 33 sixth-grade students who attended an open education school modeled after the British infant school. The control group consisted of…

Applied simple difference and regression methods for determining discrepancies between Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and achievement to second- and fifth-grade IQ, reading and math achievement scores. Simple difference discrepancies covaried with IQ and produced disproportionate ethnic representation for both grades in reading and for second graders…

Of all the areas within public elementary and secondary education that are experiencing rapid change, none is experiencing more turmoil than school finance. This publication contains papers commissioned by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to address the twin concerns of what additional school-finance information NCES should…