There is little doubt that teacher quality is a key determinant of student achievement, but finding ways to identify and reward the best teachers has proven illusive. This research brief considers the stability of value-added measures of teacher effectiveness over time and the resulting implications for the design and implementation of…

Nursing student attrition in community colleges negatively affects students, faculty, colleges, and the nursing profession. The purpose of this quantitative correlational retrospective research study was to examine the possible relationships between each of the independent variables of academic preparedness (as measured by NET mathematics and…

Leadership is critically important because it affects the health of the organization. Research has found that leadership is one of the most significant contributors to organizational performance. Expanding and replicating previous research, and focusing on the specific telecommunications sector, this study used multiple correlation and regression…

Purpose: The purpose of this research is twofold. The first purpose is to utilize a new methodology (Bayesian networks) for aggregating various quality indicators to measure the overall quality of care in nursing homes. The second is to provide new insight into the relationships that exist among various measures of quality and how such measures…

This research brief presents selected findings from work examining the stability of value-added model estimates of teacher effectiveness and their implication for tenure policies. Findings show year-to-year correlations in teacher effects are modest, but pre-tenure estimates of teacher job performance do predict estimated post-tenure performance…

The redundancy statistic (Rd) is discussed in relation to canonical correlation analysis. The index is a measure of the variance of one set of variables predicted from the linear combination of the other set of variables. A small data set (N=6) from the work of D. Clark (1975) was analyzed using SPSS-X. Two sets of two variables each were…

Real data are used to illustrate the comparison of two estimators for the square of a population correlation coefficient and the true validity of a sample prediction equation. Interpretive approaches to, and problems in, multiple correlation/prediction estimation are discussed. (Author/BW)

States and the federal government have invested in early care and education programs with an explicit goal of improving school readiness for low-income children. These investments, aimed at strengthening the quality of care and supporting families' access to high-quality settings, are based in part on a confluence of research findings showing a…

Calculated Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) factor deviation quotients (DQ) for Verbal Comprehension, Perceptual Organization, and Freedom From Distractibility. DQs were then compared to the Adaptive Behavior Scale. Results indicated Community Self-Sufficiency and the Comparison Score were significant. Verbal scores were…

In textbooks, foreign (second) language reading proficiency is often evaluated through comprehension questions. In case, authentic texts are used as reading material, such questions should be prepared by teachers. However, preparing appropriate questions may be a very demanding task for teachers. This paper introduces a method for automatically…

Based on the test theory model for ordinal measurements proposed by Schulman and Haden, the present paper considers correlations between tests, attenuation, regressions involving true and observed scores, and predictions of test reliability. Comparisons are made to interval test theory. (Author/JKS)

As a means of studying the present public catalogs and possible catalog format alternatives at the Iowa State University library, a 6-week queuing study was conducted. Objectives of the study were (1) to determine the correlation between other library statistics (e.g., door counts and circulation records) and use of the public catalogs; (2) to…

Over the past nine years 462 sophomore college students in 23 classes in General Psychology were administered at least one test of intelligence. Coefficients of correlation were computed between these scores and the scores on author-made objective subject matter tests ("Tests") and the performance on "Non-tests" (experiments, reviews,…

A large scale study of local norms that are directly related to the interests of military education counselors is described. In a cooperative effort, the U.S. Armed Forces Institute and the Test Department of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. normed the Adult Basic Learning Examination (ABLE) and validated its utility in predicting success on the…

Changes, like single scores, are demonstrated to be valid and reliable and potentially predictable by independent variables. Change and growth measures determined from individual examinees' test scores indicated excellent predictive value. (Author/PN)