Measures of variability are successfully used in predictive modeling in research areas outside of education. This study examined how standard deviations can be used to address research questions not easily addressed using traditional measures such as group means based on index variables. Student survey data were obtained from the Organisation for…

Educational institutions and governing practices are increasingly augmented with digital database technologies that function as new kinds of policy instruments. This article surveys and maps the landscape of digital policy instrumentation in education and provides two detailed case studies of new digital data systems. The Learning Curve is a…

This study examined whether there is evidence in Hong Kong and Taiwan students' early attitudes to civic participation that suggests they will adopt radical forms of civic participation and whether civic participatory potential of students from these two Chinese societies differed in early adolescence. To achieve these purposes, we used a Rasch…

This work asks one simple question: "how reliable is the method used by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) to estimate projected rates of VET program completion?" In other words, how well do early projections align with actual completion rates some years later? Completion rates are simple to calculate with a…

The objective of this study was to validate a scale for assessment of academic projects. As a complement, we examined its predictive ability by comparing the scores of advised/corrected projects based on the model and the final scores awarded to the work by an examining panel (approximately 10 months after the project design). Results of…

An index of the quality of life for children in Ireland's four provinces containing thirty-two counties is generated from three domains of information in the (1841) census of Ireland. The average of three regression-weighted indexes derived from educational, demographic and housing data is labelled the Quality of Life for Irish Children-1841…

Paul Newton (2010), with his characteristic concern about theory, has set out two different ways of thinking about the basis upon which equivalences of one sort or another are established between test score scales. His reason for doing this is a desire to establish "the defensibility of linkages lower on the continuum than concordance."…

This article presents the author's rejoinder to thinking about linking from issue 8(1). Particularly within the more embracing linking frameworks, e.g., Holland & Dorans (2006) and Holland (2007), there appears to be a major disjunction between (1) classification discourse: the supposed basis for classification, that is, the underlying theory…

"Linking" is a term given to a general class of procedures by which one represents scores X on one test or measure in terms of scores Y on another test or measure. A recent taxonomy by Holland and Dorans (2006; Holland, 2007) organizes the various types of links into three broad categories: prediction, scale aligning, and equating. In…

Newton's article (2010) makes three main contributions to the literature. First, it is transatlantic, bringing together literatures that have been dealing with similar problems, using sometimes different methods and certainly with distinctive educational, cultural perspectives. He points out that neither of these literatures has all of the…

The article "Thinking About Linking" by Newton (2010) presents a novel philosophical perspective on the way that educational assessments should be linked. Newton starts by describing the linking framework as it was characterized in various publications and identifies a cross-cultural dimension in the definitions and uses of test…

This study examines whether MidYIS and YELLIS cognitive ability tests (CATs) are appropriate methods for the identification of giftedness in Design and Technology. A key rationale for the study was whether CATs and able to identify those students with the aptitudes considered of importance to identifying giftedness in Design and Technology and…

General strain theory (GST) was tested as an explanation of violent and status offense delinquency of South Korean girls and boys. One research objective was to determine whether Korean girls and boys differed in their experience of each type of strain and in the levels of conditioning effects that might moderate the connections of strain to…

Predictors of novice learning in simulation environments were investigated in the domain of statistics. The first objective was to clarify the relation between intellectual ability and working method (e.g., orientation and systematical orderliness), and to determine the effects on learning of working method, independently of intellectual ability.…

Two models of library circulation, the Markov model and the mixed Poisson Model, are applied to circulation statistics from the University of Saskatchewan. Goodness-of-fit tests indicate that neither model fits the data; in both cases, the set of noncirculating items is larger than that predicted by the model. (Author/LRW)