Describing the variation in test scores between and within school districts is critical for: (1) for policy-related and descriptive work that investigates the sorting of students among districts and the differential effectiveness of those districts; and (2) for methodological work planning future experiments or interventions. Intraclass…

Correlational analyses are one of the most popular quantitative methods, yet also one of the mostly frequently misused methods in social and behavioral research, especially when analyzing ordinal data from Likert or other rating scales. Although several correlational analysis options have been developed for ordinal data, there seems to be a lack…

A procedure is presented to transform an n-dimensional scatter diagram into a two-dimensional scatter diagram while preserving proximity relationships between points. This procedure can help in the presentation and interpretation of multivariate results. (Author/SLD)

A strategy for the pairwise assessment which may be used to evaluate the nature of both "prerequisite" and "transference" relations existing among a set of traits is presented. Both confirmatory and exploratory strategies are presented. An example of how the strategy would be used is presented in the exploratory context.…

Decomposable models, which allow for the interdependence of structure among observable variables, are described. Each model is fully characterized by a set of conditional interdependence restrictions and can be visualized with an undirected as well as a special type of directed graph. (Author/JKS)

A WORKING MODEL CAPABLE OF RANKING INDIVIDUALS IN A RANDOM SAMPLE FROM A MULTIVARIATE POPULATION BY SOME CRITERION OF INTEREST WAS DEVELOPED. THE MULTIPLE CORRELATION COEFFICIENT OF RANKS WITH MEASURED VARIATES AS A STATISTIC IN TESTING WHETHER RANKS ARE ASSOCIATED WITH MEASUREMENTS WAS EMPLOYED AND DUBBED "QUASI-RANK MULTIPLE CORRELATION…

This study involved an investigation of the use of Pearson r, tetrachoric r, phi, phi/phi maximum, and Kendall Tau-B coefficients as measures of association for the incomplete principal components analysis of simulated Likert scale attitudinal data, based on a known factor pattern and possessing different types of severe departures from normality.…

A continuing project titled "Measuring Career Readiness in Elementary Education" had as its fourth-year goal constructing learning activities to coordinate with six subtest areas of the Career Education Readiness Test (CERT). The secondary goal was to continue the refinement of the CERT through the analysis of data gathered during the…

The merits of the multilevel model for educational research and its uses for school effectiveness research are considered. The main goal of the paper is to establish what intelligent applications of multilevel models can do, helping researchers decide what they must do to make a rational choice between models. Multilevel models are random line…