Can genetic screening be used to personalize education for students? Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) screen an individual's DNA for specific variations in their genome, and how said variations relate to specific traits. The variations can then be assigned a corresponding weight and summed to produce polygenic scores (PGS) for given traits.…

This study examined the relative contributions of Latino/a children's (N = 102) school readiness and early literacy skills during kindergarten in predicting first grade reading achievement. By using discriminant function analyses, the current study identified a set of areas to assess that could be used to effectively screen children during…

Community college students are often placed in developmental math courses based on the results of a single placement test. However, concerns about accurate placement have recently led states and colleges across the country to consider using other measures to inform placement decisions. While the relationships between college outcomes and such…

Multiple linear regression and ANOVA models are widely used in applications since they provide effective statistical tools for assessing the relationship between a continuous dependent variable and several predictors. However these models rely heavily on linearity and normality assumptions and they do not accommodate categorical dependent…

In a sample of 195 first graders selected for poor reading performance, the authors explored four cognitive predictors of later reading comprehension and reading disability (RD) status. In fall of first grade, the authors measured the children's phonological processing, rapid automatized naming (RAN), oral language comprehension, and nonverbal…

A significant body of research exists on the development of early literacy skills and their relationship to the development of literacy as a whole. Phonological awareness, orthographic processing, rapid automatized naming, phonological memory, and receptive vocabulary have all been shown to be predictive of early reading outcome measures. What is…

Emotional and behavioural difficulties (EBD) are common in children, and forecasting their prevalence in schools is of interest to both academic researchers and local authorities. Percentage of pupils eligible for free school meals is one measure often used for this purpose. The article presents the first independent validation of a simple…

Administered questionnaires to abusive (N=21) and nonabusive (N=21) employees to identify potential for institutional child abuse. Results corroborated earlier findings of institutional child abuse and demonstrated an attempt at developing an assessment tool needed to screen staff who are working with the developmentally disabled and children in…

The present study attempts to discover ways to improve the usefulness of the Bender Gestalt Test as a screening instrument for school beginners, especially for individual pupils. (Author)

The publication reports on a statistical analysis of educational level as it affects the prediction of enlisted performance in Army training courses. Samples of the men at each of four educational levels were formed: non-high school graduation, high school graduation, some college, and college graduation. Using the Gulliksen-Wilks analysis of…

Presented and applied to a sample of 239 vocational rehabilitation clients is a discrete multivariate classification procedure for predicting vocational rehabilitation outcomes using several background characteristic combinations. Several cost-of-misclassification functions are proposed. (Author/KW)

Selection and classification testing throughout the nation has been subject to widespread criticism and legal attack. Tests used by the military service, however, have been largely immune from the criticism. A major reason is that from their inception, military tests have been carefully validated as predictors of successful performance. The…

Correlations between the two screening tests and between the screening and criterion measures were inconsistent with prediction rates based on classificational screening test scores. On the basis of correlational validity coefficients, relationships between measures in this study would have been overestimated. (Author/SBH)

The Minnesota Child Development Inventory (MCDI) was used to describe the developmental status of 59 children before the start of kindergarten. A number of variables from the MCDI were highly correlated with this continuum of difficulty in mastering reading, with parental report of the child's general development and knowledge of letters and…

The study, comparing 27 pairs of mildly mentally retarded students and normal achievers (ages 6-8), found that mentally retarded subjects evidenced lower performance on experimental oddity problems but were able to generalize to very different oddity arrays. High levels of sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive accuracy, and negative…