Unavoidable sample size issues beset psychological research that involves scarce populations or costly laboratory procedures. When incorporating longitudinal designs these samples are further reduced by traditional modeling techniques, which perform listwise deletion for any instance of missing data. Moreover, these techniques are limited in their…

Because of concerns about test security, different test forms are typically used across different testing occasions. As a result, equating is necessary in order to get scores from the different test forms that can be used interchangeably. In order to assure the quality of equating, multiple equating methods are often examined. Various equity…

This NCEE Technical Methods Paper compares the estimated impacts of an educational intervention using experimental and regression discontinuity (RD) study designs. The analysis used data from two large-scale randomized controlled trials--the Education Technology Evaluation and the Teach for America Study--to provide evidence on the performance of…

Propensity score estimation plays a fundamental role in propensity score matching for reducing group selection bias in observational data. To increase the accuracy of propensity score estimation, the author developed a bootstrap propensity score. The commonly used propensity score matching methods: nearest neighbor matching, caliper matching, and…

The School Composition and the Black-White Achievement Gap study was undertaken by the National Center for Education Statistics to present both descriptive and associative information on the relationships among the percentage of students in a school who were Black (referred to as "Black student density" or "density"), the…

The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) assessed the English literacy skills of a nationally representative sample of 18,500 U.S. adults (age 16 and older) residing in private households. NAAL is the first national assessment of adult literacy since the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS). The NAAL and NALS produced direct…

Lord's bias function and the weighted likelihood estimation method are effective in reducing the bias of the maximum likelihood estimate of an examinee's ability under the assumption that the true item parameters are known. This paper presents simulation studies to determine the effectiveness of these two methods in reducing the bias when the item…

This information brief examines four factors contributing to Florida's overall high graduation rates in public four-year institutions: (1) Graduation rates for the largest race/ethnic groups were higher than for the nation as a whole; (2) The gaps between racial/ethnic groups were smaller than in the nation as a whole; (3) Florida's largest…

This report examines the development of tuition rates and tuition policy in Washington State's public higher education system and provides comparisons to rates and policies in other states. It also explores philosophies regarding the determination of tuition rates, along with the range of potential policy options. The draft report is divided into…

This paper addresses two audiences--those who design education trend studies that simultaneously have longitudinal and intercohort implications, and the secondary analysts who use such trend data. Four study series conducted for the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) provide material for the paper: the…

The data and computational procedures used by the IDEA system at Kansas State University (during the 1976-77 academic year) to interpret ratings of teacher performance are described in this technical report. The computations for each of the seven parts (evaluation, course description, students' self ratings, methods, additional questions,…

The data and computational procedures used by the IDEA System during the 1977-78 academic year at Kansas State University to interpret ratings of teacher performance are described in this technical report. The computations for each of the seven parts (evaluation, course description, students' self-ratings, methods, additional questions, diagnostic…

The data and computational procedures used by the IDEA System to generate IDEA Reports from information collected on the Standard Form of the IDEA Survey Form are described in this technical report. The computations for each of the seven parts of the IDEA Report are explained. The data base used for this 1978-79 Kansas State University study…

Explained and illustrated is the formula funding system used for colleges and universities in Texas. This system is considerably more complicated than the formulas used in other states. Data for institutions in the state system for fiscal 1978 are presented; actual appropriations are used rather than requests, and formula-produced amounts are…

This report describes a project originally intended to identify demographic patterns among adults with low literacy skills in each Canadian province. The project was carried out between March 2000 and June 2001 under the auspices of Movement for Canadian Literacy (MCL). The project was based on the assumption that demographic information about…