Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) provides international comparative data about students' reading achievement after four years of primary schooling, while also measuring trends over time, monitoring curricular implementation, and identifying promising instructional practices. Conducted on a regular 5-year cycle, PIRLS has…

To support and promote secondary analyses, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) is making the SITES 2006 international database and accompanying User Guide available to researchers, analysts, and public users. The database comprises national contexts and school- and teacher-level data from 23 education…

Virtually all parametric statistical procedures have been shown to be special cases of canonical correlation analysis, which is a useful research methodology particularly when augmented by the calculation of canonical structure, index, and invariance coefficients. A logic for conducting stepwise canonical correlation analysis based upon evaluation…

Seven methods for measuring and comparing value added in higher education are considered; six are index methods (all found unsatisfactory for lack of empirical support) and a seventh is proposed which calculates value added as the difference between the outcomes achieved and those predicted from national (United Kingdom) data. The advantages of a…

Using data describing entry into preschool among children with special needs, this paper introduces the fundamental statistical quantities of event occurrence--hazard and survivor functions. The paper discusses construction of formal statistical models of event occurrence over time, predictors that can be included in hazard models, and importance…

When studying different types of returns to education, educational reforms are commonly used in the economics literature as a source of exogenous variation in education. The Swedish compulsory school reform is one example; the reform extended compulsory education throughout the country, in different municipalities at different points in time. Such…

Direct and indirect effects in decomposed zero-order correlations among variables in causal models are considered. Under certain circumstances, the components of the decompositions could be interpreted as direct, indirect, and spurious causal effects, plus a component called joint associations. The sum of the direct and indirect effects is the…

Part of the Evaluation of Teaching Project (EOTP), this research report uses statistical analysis to examine: 1) whether students who had an opportunity to learn classroom material differ in posttest achievement from those students who did not have sufficient time to learn, 2) whether the relationships between teacher behaviors and student…