The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), as amended by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 inaugurated important changes in assessment and accountability for English Learner (EL) students. Specifically, Title III of the law required states to develop or adopt English-language proficiency (ELP) standards aligned with language demands of…

In this literature review, we examined 30 years of play-literacy inquiry through a quantitative lens in order to identify, assemble and summarize studies of sufficient methodological strength to form a corpus of research that encourages meta-analytic thinking. First, a multi-phase search of the literature was conducting yielding 192 studies that…

The article is aimed at a partial problem of science process skills development--the evaluation of educational outcomes. In comparison to evaluation of obtained knowledge, the skills development is not so easy to be objectively evaluated. The article provides a proposal of an evaluation tool and describes the first results of its research…

When conducting an exploratory factor analysis, the decision regarding the number of factors to retain following factor extraction is one that the researcher should consider very carefully, as the decision can have a dramatic effect on results. Although there are numerous strategies that can and should be utilized when making this decision,…

In Varimax rotation, permutations and reflections can give rise to the phenomenon that certain pairs of columns are consistently skipped in the iterative process, causing Varimax to terminate at a nonstationary point. This skipping phenomenon is demonstrated, and how to prevent it is described. (SLD)

Several methodological issues in the multidimensional scaling of coarse dissimilarities were studied, examining whether it was better to scale dissimilarity data directly or to scale a new matrix derived from the original by row comparisons. Findings support an alternative row-comparison measure based on the Jacard coefficient. (SLD)

The originally proposed multivariate meta-analysis approach for correlation matrices--analyze Pearson correlations, with each study's observed correlations replacing their population counterparts in its conditional-covariance matrix--performs poorly. Two refinements are considered: Analyze Fisher Z-transformed correlations, and substitute better…

The research reported in this article lends support to using matrix sampling procedures with paired comparisons in survey research. When a large number of items are to be assessed, matrix sampling proves to be a reliable and effective way to obtain survey data. (Author/CT)

A comparison of measures of association for 2x2 data was carried out by computer analysis. For each of 1,539 tables, 14 measures of association were calculated and evaluated. A measure based on the odds-ratio (Chambers, 1982) was most accurate in capturing the rho underlying a majority of the tables. (Author/BW)

This article examines the utility of multi-matrix sampling as a technique in health education research that permits collection of large quantities of data without lengthy questionnaires or excessive time demands on respondents. Advantages and limitations of multi-matrix sampling are delineated through a hypothetical example. (Authors/CJ)

An alternative to the PROMAX exploratory method is presented for constructing a target matrix in Procrustean rotation in factor analysis. A technique is proposed based on vector majorization. The approach is illustrated with several standard numerical examples. (SLD)

Data reduction techniques seek to combine variables that account for patterns of variation in observed dependent variables in such a way that a simpler model is available for analysis. Factor analysis is a data reduction technique that attempts to model or explain a set of variables in terms of their associations. To understand why this technique…

Both the Rule Space Method (RSM) and the Neural Network Model (NNM) are techniques of statistical pattern recognition and classification approaches developed for applications from different fields. RSM was developed in the domain of educational statistics. It started from the use of an incidence matrix Q that characterizes the underlying cognitive…

The common marketing research practice of standardizing the columns of a persons-by-variables data matrix prior to clustering the entities corresponding to the rows was evaluated with 10 large-scale data sets. Results indicate that the column standardization practice may be problematic for some kinds of data that marketing researchers used for…

This commentary praises the clustering technique of data gathering from clients described by Carney (1992). It also cautions that analyzing qualitative data by quantitative means must be done with care, so that a matrix analysis and resulting interpretation of data gathered through the clustering technique, as Carney suggests, is valid and…