The paper reviews the literature on problems associated with the assessment and placement of language minority students in special education and the utilization of a prereferral system and describes the development of the "Prereferral Screening Instrument" (PSI). The review of the literature looks at: the disproportionate representation…

Adherence to the arbitrary 0.05 level of significance as a benchmark for decisions about publishing research largely accounts for the popularity of one-tailed hypothesis tests. Effect size estimates, accompanied by confidence intervals or exact two-tailed probabilities, are generally more compatible with the growing meta-analytic view of social…

Alternative mathematical models for scoring and decision making with criterion referenced tests are described, especially as they concern appropriate test length and methods of establishing statistically valid cutting scores. Several of these approaches are reviewed and compared on formal-analytic and empirical grounds: (1) Block's approach to…