During the transition period between the use of exclusively old SAT® scores and the use of exclusively new SAT scores, college admission offices will be receiving both types of scores from students. Making an admission decision based on new SAT scores can be challenging at first because institutions have methods, procedures, and models based on…

A procedure enabling 19 adolescents/adults with profound mental retardation to express food and drink preferences was evaluated. Results indicated that active choice making occurred, and caregiver opinion was not predictive of participant preferences. Choices made using the procedure were similar to choices made when less structured opportunities…

The National Center for Education Statistics supported this conference as a first step in a dialogue among forecasters to benefit all in the field. Fifty forecasters representing 20 different federal agencies attended the day-long session. Objectives of the conference include: (1) to bring forecasters together for a forum to share information on…

A methodological framework is presented for representing tradeoffs among alternative combinations of training and aiding for personnel in complex situations. In general, more highly trained people need less aid, and those with less training need more aid. Balancing training and aiding to accomplish the objectives of the system in a cost effective…

Local public officials may be confronted with the use of economic multipliers when asked to react to project proposals, to environmental impact statements, or to other studies containing economic impact analyses. Employment, income, and output multipliers are tools for estimating private sector economic impacts of a new development within a local…

The incremental contribution of an interview to the student admission process was studied for 331 applicants accepted as undergraduates at a private university. Interviews provide information about applicants and correlate to grade point average (GPA). Interviewer judgments do not contribute incremental variance to prediction of admissions…

Adherence to the arbitrary 0.05 level of significance as a benchmark for decisions about publishing research largely accounts for the popularity of one-tailed hypothesis tests. Effect size estimates, accompanied by confidence intervals or exact two-tailed probabilities, are generally more compatible with the growing meta-analytic view of social…

Reflecting on a career spent in assessment in personnel selection and managment, the author lists 12 things (items) that he wishes he knew about assessment. The first four items are underdeveloped ideas set aside because of the field's preoccupation with equal employment opportunity. A second set (items five through eight) comes from intellectual…

Making decisions about residential or day program placement for adults with developmental disabilities requires examination of multidimensional measures of behavior and thus the use of multivariate statistical techniques along with expert opinion. This study used adaptive and maladaptive cluster scores on the Inventory for Client and Agency…

Thirteen papers are presented that discuss issues in public personnel decision making, specifically in the area of personnel selection. After an introduction by James P. Springer, the following papers are presented: (1) "History of Employment Testing" (Matthew Hale); (2) "Job Families: A Review and Discussion of Their Implications for Personnel…

The problem of enabling a teaching machine to adapt to the individual characteristics of students in presenting course material has been considered--general outlines of computer algorithms and decision criteria have been formulated. It is assumed that there exists both an ordered set of concepts which comprise the material to be learned and, for…