This paper reviews the new directions in institutional research on undergraduate racial/ethnic and socioeconomic diversity at the University of California, Berkeley. The use of SERU/UCUES and other web-based census surveys has made possible more detailed and extensive analysis of student diversity. Included is research on an expanded number of…

Discusses the inappropriate racial categorizations of minorities that have routinely infected evaluations and social research. By adhering to principles of democracy and including minorities as participants in dialogue, evaluators can avoid such damaging effects in their work. (Author/SLD)

The stability of bias estimates from J. Schueneman's chi-square method, the transformed Delta method, Rasch's one-parameter residual analysis, and the Mantel-Haenszel procedure, were compared across small and large samples for a data set of 30,000 cases. Bias values for 30 samples were estimated for each method, and means and variances of item…

"Outlier studies" identify items for which extreme differences in performance by contrasting groups occur; these extreme items are the "outliers" referred to. Review of the studies conducted on tests receiving major use in higher education reveals that though one cannot make a priori classifications of outliers with confidence,…