To assist in the redesign of accountability systems, the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) and the Center for Research on Evaluation, Student Standards, and Testing (CRESST) sought to assemble knowledge from new research on emerging accountability systems. A book, "Redesigning Accountability Systems for Education," edited by Susan…

This report profiles 19 public two-year colleges in the state of New Jersey. Each profile includes the number of students, faculty and trustees, and the ratio of full-time to part-time faculty at each college. Student characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, full-time or part-time status, financial assistance received, graduation and transfer…

This statewide fact book contains general statistical information about public community, technical, and state colleges in Texas. The book is divided into 11 sections: (1) annual enrollment; (2) fall enrollment; (3) first-time-in-college enrollment; (4) remediation; (5) first-time-in-college-cohort tracking analysis; (6) transfer and retention;…

This quantitative study compared two groups of community college students who were studying elementary statistics. The control group consisted of 38 students in two classes during the fall of 1998, and the treatment group contained 40 students in two classes during the spring of 1999. The treatment group participated in ten data collection and…

Educational research, unfortunately, often focuses on finding statistical differences between overall means or averages. Media reports of research routinely present those differences and little else. This paper discusses the importance of considering the spread of the data in addition to the center and how this is relevant to research focused on…

With the increased use of computerized adaptive testing, which allows for continuous testing, new concerns about test security have evolved, one being the assurance that items in an item pool are safeguarded from theft. In this paper, the risk of score inflation and procedures to detect test takers using item preknowledge are explored. When test…

Studies at British Columbia universities show that although transfer students perform well at universities, they tend to achieve somewhat lower grades in university courses than direct entry students. The B.C. Council on Admissions and Transfer (BCCAT) wanted to develop a better understanding of this disparity in grades and asked the Office of…

Five university faculty members identified six broad topic areas in research and statistics that they considered important for Master's level graduate students. The six areas were: (1) types of research; (2) research process; (3) hypothesis testing; (4) data gathering; (5) descriptive statistics; and (6) inferential statistics. These broad areas…

The University of California San Diego (UCSD) Libraries User Survey was designed to have its results in machine-readable form. Library management, anticipating the need for detailed statistics for future decision making, required that the survey results be manipulatable by library managers. Responses to the 1996 use survey were solicited from…

Course placement systems in the first year of college include both an assessment component (to estimate students' probability of success in standard courses) and an instructional component (in which underprepared students are taught the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in the standard courses). The effectiveness of a placement system…

This report describes the current employment status of students who graduated from the Dutchess County (New York) Board of Cooperative Educational Services Technical Center in June, 1996. It is designed to provide summary data concerning the class as a whole, as well as information on how students from individual programs fared. The placement…

Enrollment in a foreign language course increasingly is becoming an essential part of college students' programs of study. As a result, there has been an influx of students with diverse backgrounds, interests, and aspirations enrolling in foreign language courses in order to fulfill degree requirements. Unfortunately, many students underachieve in…

This document contains statistics and input-output measures for Colorado school libraries and media centers. High schools, middle/junior high schools, and elementary schools are each subdivided into sections by population. Each section includes the school identification (address, RLSS code), respondent identification, hours of the library media…

This research investigated notions raised in the literature about teachers' lack of statistical background and knowledge. It focused on four assumptions: elementary school teachers have a rich source of ideas about statistics from their everyday teaching experiences; they have a greater understanding of statistics than they are often given credit…

This volume documents the data collection of the 1990-91 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). People wishing to determine whether their research needs can be served by SASS data will find a description of the survey's contents and objectives in the Overview. This volume contains the following chapters: (1) "Overview"; (2) "Changes in…