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…

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an important international study of 15-year-olds' academic achievement. Although PISA has traditionally been used to draw comparisons across countries, there is growing interest in the production of regional (i.e. city,state, or provincial level) results. In this paper we present the…

This paper investigates four methods of linear equating under the common item nonequivalent groups design. Three of the methods are well known: Tucker, Angoff-Levine, and Congeneric-Levine. A fourth method is presented as a variant of the Congeneric-Levine method. Using simulation data generated from the three-parameter logistic IRT model we…

The longitudinal study of the 2005-06 preschool in Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) found short-term gains during the preschool year, but limited impact by kindergarten and no average impact by the end of 3rd grade on achievement, retention rates, special education placements, or attendance. Small sample sizes limit conclusions that can be…

This study concerns the "highly qualified teacher" provisions of the "Elementary and Secondary Education Act" ("ESEA," 2002), as reauthorized, and other policies at the federal, state and local levels, which have aimed to elevate the content knowledge of teachers. This examination of "Praxis II" score trends…

The purposes of this study were to introduce the iterative purification procedure and to compare this with the two-step purification procedure, to compare false positive error rates and the power of five observed score approaches and to identify factors affecting power and false positive rates in each method. This study used 2,400 data sets that…

In an effort to identify instructional methods that might improve mathematics learning at the grade 4 level when used in a variety of educational settings under typical conditions, the REL Mid-Atlantic research team looked for promising, replicable practices that were being used broadly by teachers in U.S. schools, for which research showed…