Background: Youth programs often rely on self-reported data without clear evidence as to the accuracy of these reports. Although the validity of self-reporting has been confirmed among some high school and college age students, one area that is absent from extant literature is a serious investigation among younger children. Moreover, there is…

This book is a guide to categorizing, measuring, testing, and assessing aspects of language, and is intended for language teachers, speech therapists and other language-related practitioners, and researchers, in conjunction with other resources on research methods and statistics. The first part is a discussion of basic terminology and the varied…

Describes two QuickBASIC programs that provide students direct experience with interpreting correlation scatter-plots. Maintains that the programs can be used in classroom exercises to highlight factors that influence the size of a Pearson correlation coefficient. (CFR)

Describes a QuickBASIC program for demonstrating the differences between main effects and interactions in factorial designs. The program can be used in conjunction with a traditional lecture to improve student understanding and develop skills in recognizing main effects and interactions from graphic displays. (CFR)

Instructional leadership studies are plentiful but have many shortcomings, including lack of definition of key variables, problems of causality, overrepresentation of exemplary schools, and lack of validity and reliability in research design and implementation. Definitions of "leadership" and "instruction" are needed. There is…

Higher education relies on student ratings to evaluate faculty teaching, partly because the alternatives (expert peer appraisals or objective performance criteria) are costly or unavailable. Because student ratings are crucial not only to improving instruction, but also in making or breaking faculty careers, it is important to assure that they…

In statistical terms, transfer rates require two components: a numerator that represents community college students who transfer and a denominator that approximates the pool of potential transfer students. The California Task Force adopted a set of criteria to judge the appropriateness of prospective pairs of numerators and denominators. Its form…

This book provides basic skills and knowledge about assessment so that teachers can expand their ability to deal with appraisal problems in their own settings. The first section deals with the basic principles of assessment. The second section concerns creating and applying assessment tools. The third section reviews issues in understanding and…

A survey of respondents and nonrespondents to the Vocational Education Data System's follow-up survey of Massachusetts community college graduates was designed to measure response bias. The survey investigated employment patterns, wages, and degree of job relatedness. Results suggest original data was biased, if at all, toward underestimation, not…