Measuring the incidence of public spending in education requires an intergenerational framework distinguishing between what current and future generations--that is, parents and children--give and receive. In standard distributional incidence analysis, households are assumed to receive a benefit equal to what is spent on their children enrolled in…

Seventy-nine studies in geoscience conceptions appeared in peer-reviewed publications in English from 1982 through July 2009. Summaries of the 79 studies suggest certain recurring themes across subject areas: issues with terms, scale (temporal and spatial), role of prior experience, and incorrect application of everyday knowledge to geoscience…

As a starting point for their analysis of equity, the authors begin their work here with an examination of the relationship between student performance, as measured by the California Academic Performance Index (API), and student needs, as measured by the percentage of students from low-income families (i.e., the percent of students eligible for…

This paper initiates an investigation of the college students' MI (multiple intelligences) distribution in English class. The participants are a group of Chinese sophomores from different majors: city planning, tourism, software engineering, financial administration and arts of English. With a view to make the investigation more specified in…

The focus of research in technology education has evolved throughout its history as the field changed from industrial arts to technology education (Spencer & Rogers, 2006). With the move to technology education, the field has begun to broaden its focus to better understand the teaching, learning, curriculum, and policy implications of preparing…

This study investigated the benefits of creating item "testlets" or "parcels" in the context of structural equation modeling confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Testlets are defined as groups of items related to a single content area that is developed as a unit. The strategy is illustrated using data from the administration of…

This analysis of Zipf's law uses an index for the sequence of observed values of the variables in a Zipf-type relationship. Three important properties relating rank, count, and frequency are identified, shapes of Zipf-type curves are described, and parameters of the Mandelbrot-Zipf law are discussed. (Author/LRW)

Discusses flaws in the Apple IIe Applesoft random number generator, RND, and reports results of frequency and serial correlation tests of the generator. Suggestions of seeds that yield sequences of numbers which pass fundamental screening tests for randomness are presented. (Author/LRW)

The focus of this simulation study was to investigate the effects of item difficulty drift on the stability of test taker ability estimates and pass/fail status under the Rasch model. Real, non-normal distributions of test taker abilities and item difficulties were used to represent true parameters. Test taker responses for 18 conditions of item…

Developed by B. Efron (1979) and his colleagues (P. Diaconis and B. Efron, 1983), bootstrap methods have the goal of creating an empirical sampling distribution that can be used to test statistical hypotheses, estimate standard errors, and create confidence intervals. Bootstrapping methods offer a unique and effective method for testing the…

Conducted simulations to explore methods for comparing bivariate distributions corresponding to two independent groups, all of which are based on Tukey's "depth," a generalization of the notion of ranks to multivariate data. Discusses steps needed to control Type I error. (SLD)

Relationships among the noncentrality parameter for the "F" distribution, mean square between and within groups, and effect size are examined. (Author)

Similarity between pairs of scores with a common mean and variance can be expressed in terms of the absolute differences between them. The distribution of such absolute differences between pairs of normally distributed scores with a common mean and variance is discussed, with procedures for calculating moments and areas within this distribution.…

Demonstrates visualization techniques using the tuple frequency method that helps organize data generated in computational studies of literary style. Two-dimensional representations of the style of the authors of "The Federalist Papers" are explained that were used to determine the authorship of unattributed papers. (Contains 13…

The accuracy of Kendall's chi square approximation (M. Kendall, 1962) to circular triad distributions was assessed by comparing estimated indices to enumerated values across upper and lower tails of cumulative proportions of circular triad distributions. In general, the approximation was found to be quite good, and its use is discussed. (SLD)