In the 1988-89 school year, the Austin (Texas) Independent School District's Office of Research and Evaluation undertook a new dropout research project. Part of this initiative, termed Project GRAD, attempted to develop a statistical equation by which one could predict which students were likely to drop out. If reliable predictive information…

A study used data gathered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to address three issues: (1) What do the school and teacher reports reveal about current patterns of instruction? (2) How well do these results agree with earlier findings based solely on student reports? and (3) what relationships exist between student outcomes…

A study investigated the relationship of trait emotion to Communication Apprehension (CA). It was hypothesized that (1) persons with high CA scores will have lower trait pleasure, arousal, dominance, and arousal seeking tendencies; and (2) a regression equation could be produced in which communication apprehension scores may be explained in terms…

The use of stagewise regression was investigated in a university study of salary equity for full-time staff-exempt personnel. The commonly used method of regression substitution was modified in three ways: (1) shifting the emphasis away from estimating inequity and toward describing the impact of men's and women's population differences on…

The general ability factor (G), as enunciated by Charles Spearman in the model of cognitive functioning, has been the foundation of psychometric theory and test making practices for 80 years. Through these decades, some psychologists disagreed with this theory, especially Godfrey Thompson and E. L. Thorndike. Nevertheless, various aptitude tests…

High rates of attrition among students in Undergraduate Navigator Training (UNT) is a major concern for Air Training Command. The main objective of this research was to evaluate the Basic Navigator Battery (BNB), a multi-test experimental selection instrument, for its potential to increase the validity of the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test…

Traditionally, the errors-in-variables problem is concerned with the point estimation of the slope of the true scores regression line when the regressor is measured with error, and when no specification error is present. In this paper, the errors-in-variables problem is extended to include specification error. Least squares procedures provide a…

The Computerized Adaptive Screening Test (CAST) was developed to provide an estimate at recruiting stations of prospects' Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) scores. The CAST was designed to replace the paper-and-pencil Enlistment Screening Test (EST). The initial validation study of CAST indicated that CAST predicts AFQT at least as accurately…

Direct and indirect effects in decomposed zero-order correlations among variables in causal models are considered. Under certain circumstances, the components of the decompositions could be interpreted as direct, indirect, and spurious causal effects, plus a component called joint associations. The sum of the direct and indirect effects is the…

This study investigates the degree of relationship between scientific and technical subject headings and their corresponding class notations in the Dewey Decimal (DDC) and Library of Congress Classification (LCC) systems. The degree of association between a subject heading and its corresponding class of notation or notations is measured by…

Modern software practices call for the active involvement of business people in the software process. Therefore, programming has become an indispensable part of the information systems component of the core curriculum at business schools. In this paper, we present a model-based approach to teaching introduction to programming to general business…

Aside from the theoretical issues involving the validity of inferences from surveys, the basic problem of producinq unbiased estimates of regression parameters and estimates of the associated standard errors has been a particularly difficult issue in dealing with results from stratified multistage sample designs such as the one used in the…

The relationship between the black student percentage and white students' hostility toward blacks in desegregated schools was investigated through secondary analysis of data from a nationwide survey of desegregated elementary schools. Previous studies have indicated that whites are more hostile toward blacks in settings where the black percentage…

The problem of model estimation when the data are collinear was examined. Though the ridge regression (RR) outperforms ordinary least squares (OLS) regression in the presence of acute multicollinearity, it is not a problem free technique for reducing the variance of the estimates. It is a stochastic procedure when it should be nonstochastic and it…

For many reasons, students do not always perform on tests in ways that are congruent with their true abilities or achievement levels. Problems of this sort may be especially common on Title I evaluations where the tests administered are too difficult for a large percentage of the students. Such considerations raise the questions of whether…