The effect sizes of studies included in a meta-analysis do often not share a common true effect size due to differences in for instance the design of the studies. Estimates of this so-called between-study variance are usually imprecise. Hence, reporting a confidence interval together with a point estimate of the amount of between-study variance…

Two journals reflecting the interests and concerns of music educators are "Music Educators Journal (MEJ)" and "Philosophy of Music Education Review (PMER)". The purpose of this study was to explore the interests of P--12 music teachers and university faculty as represented by the topics of articles in "MEJ" and…

This article reviews all (quasi)experimental studies appearing in the first 19 volumes (1997-2015) of "Language Teaching Research" (LTR). Specifically, it provides an overview of how statistical analyses were conducted in these studies and of how the analyses were reported. The overall conclusion is that there has been a tight adherence…

The use of propensity scores in psychological and educational research has been steadily increasing in the last 2 to 3 years. However, there are some common misconceptions about the use of different estimation techniques and conditioning choices in the context of propensity score analysis. In addition, reporting practices for propensity score…

Examination of the literature on statistics indicates that the rejection of the hypothesis of chance dates from the turn of the century. Early statements about statistical significance were given in terms of the "probable error." These earlier conventions were adopted and restated by Fisher in his "Statistical Methods for Research…

Several norms for how people should assess a question's usefulness have been proposed, notably Bayesian diagnosticity, information gain (mutual information), Kullback-Liebler distance, probability gain (error minimization), and impact (absolute change). Several probabilistic models of previous experiments on categorization, covariation assessment,…

It is easy to observe that meta-analysis is quickly establishing itself as useful tool of the social sciences. Perusal of representative journals confirms that meta-analysis has been applied in various ways to diverse literatures. It is imperative, therefore, that reviewers, publishers, consumers, and critics of these reviews be best informed…

While research has shown that both black and white children can clearly discriminate (usually through the use of dolls or puppets) with respect to ethnic identification by the age of 3-4 years, findings regarding ethnic preference are more complex. Researcher W.C. Banks has implied that research designs that compare ethnic preferences across…

A recent recommendation by Holt (EJ 200 576) that coefficients resulting from estimating log-linear and similar models should not be interpreted is argued to be based on lack of clarity about the substantive and theoretical importance of the choice between dummy and effect coding for categorical variables. (Author/GDC)

Examines research on the observed values of retrieval effectiveness obtained in searches of files of nearest neighbor document clusters. Results show interdocument similarities used to generate nearest-neighbor clusters are significantly different from randomly generated clusters. (Contains 14 references.) (EAM)

The PRODIGY/EBL system [Minton88] was one of the first works to directly attack the problem of strategy utility. The problem of finding effective strategies was reduced to the problem of finding effective rules. However, this paper illustrates limitations of the approach. There are two basic difficulties. The first arises from the fact that the…

This article shows how the methods of survival analysis (also known as event history analysis) lend themselves to the study of the timing of educational events. Using examples from teacher attrition and student dropout research, survival methods are introduced for building statistical models of the risk of event occurrence over time. (Author/SLD)

In machine learning there is considerable interest in techniques which improve planning ability. Initial investigations have identified a wide variety of techniques to address this issue. Progress has been hampered by the utility problem, a basic tradeoff between the benefit of learned knowledge and the cost to locate and apply relevant knowledge.…

Three versions of a probabilistic model adapted from the theory of information retrieval--a binary version, a version using the full value of the data, and a version using principal components--were tested and applied to data available from application forms to predict graduate school performance of library school students. (EM)

This paper reviews the issues involved in using statistical data on multiple choice examination results as evidence of cheating among college student test-takers. Recent studies have demonstrated the large extent of academic dishonesty among American college students. Seeking to curb this trend, college faculty have been turning to statistical…