Studies sex bias portrayed in 25 picture books published during 5 decades between 1940 and 1980, particularly the use frequency and characterization of males and females. Frequency of depiction has become more evenly distributed, but girls are shown to be as passive dependent as found 50 years ago. (JB)

Analysis of a two-way sample of means is considered when corresponding population means are believed a priori to satisfy a partial order restriction. Simulation and the Gibbs sampler are used to summarize posterior distributions, and the posterior distribution is used to predict GPAs of first-year students at University of Iowa. (SLD)

A study of the relationship between first-year results for 115 Dutch medical students and achievement during medical school was studied using an item-response theory model for the longitudinal measure of change with stochastic parameters (developed by Albers et al., 1989) indicates that a low rate of growth in the first year persists. (SLD)

Describes the College of Lake County's (Illinois) development of an enrollment projection process that satisfies the need for information for institutional planning and budget forecasting. The process includes statistically driven projections and adjustments to the projections that reflect unique conditions within the disciplines and requires much…

In recent years, semiotics has become an innovative theoretical framework in mathematics education. The purpose of this article is to show that semiotics can be used to explain learning as a process of experimenting with and communicating about one's own representations (in particular "diagrams") of mathematical problems. As a paradigmatic…

This exploratory study, a one group pretest-posttest design, investigated the development of elementary preservice teachers' understandings of distribution as expressed in the measures and representations used to compare data distributions. During a semester-long mathematics methods course, participants worked in small groups on two statistical…

This research examines the effect of increased testing time by comparing the four performance indices of randomly equivalent examinee subpopulations on sections of similar content and difficulty administered at different times on three SAT administrations. A variety of analyses were used in this study and found no evidence that the current SAT…

While most existing online learning environments cater for needs identified during the 1990s, a new generation of digital students has emerged in the developed world. Digital students are young adults who have grown up with digital technologies integrated as an everyday feature of their lives. Digital students use technology differently, fluidly…

This paper is a draft of Chapter 8 of a planned book, "Preschool and Jobs: Human Development as Economic Development, and Vice Versa". This book analyzes early childhood programs' effects on regional economic development. Four early childhood programs are considered: (1) universally accessible preschool for four-year-olds of similar…

The purpose of this study was to align verbal descriptions of test takers' language performance with distributions of the numerical scores they received on the three sections (Listening Comprehension, Structure and Written Expression, and Reading Comprehension and Vocabulary) of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). The descriptors of…

Comparative results are presented for procedures recently appearing in literature related to standard setting on the National Assessment of Educational Progress--the paper selection method and the contrasting group method. For this comparison, a probabilistic model with normal distribution of performance and a six-point scale were assumed. The…

The empirical performance of the technique proposed by P. O. Johnson and J. Neyman (1936) (the JN technique) and the modification of R. F. Potthoff (1964) was studied in simulated data settings. The robustness of the two JN techniques was investigated with respect to their ability to control Type I and Type III errors. Factors manipulated in the…

Factor analysis is the traditional method for studying the dimensionality of test data. However, under common conditions, the factor analysis of tetrachoric correlations does not recover the underlying structure of dichotomous data. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the factor analyses of tetrachoric correlations is unlikely to…

This report is based on data gathered in a 1982 survey of college and university libraries conducted as part of the Higher Education General Information Survey (HEGIS). The survey had a 91% response rate from a universe of 3,326 colleges and universities. The 1982 data categories cover the following time frames: staff and library hours as of fall…

Extended caution indices (ECI) specify the degree of confidence that can be placed in an individual's test score by analyzing patterns of item response. Among the most promising of such indices are the standardized ECIs. Contrary to the literature, several instances were found, in a previous study, of nonnormal distributions of ECIs with samples…