TO STUDY THE EXACT DISTRIBUTIONAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN SMALL, RELATED-SAMPLE PERCENTAGES AND THE ACCURACY OF LARGE-SAMPLE TESTS, SOME SIX HUNDRED SAMPLING DISTRIBUTIONS WERE CONSTRUCTED BY RANDOMIZATION. EXACT PROBABILITY FIGURES IN THE .204-.005 RANGE WERE TABULATED. THE TABLE OF SIGNIFICANCE VALUES EXTENDS TO SAMPLES YIELDING MATRICES VARYING IN…

In 1966, the Research Department of the California Teachers Association sent a questionnaire to a stratified random sample of California teachers. Of 2,400 questionnaires distributed, there were 2,061 (85.9 percent) usable returns. The questionnaire asked about the professional status of the teacher and his professional judgments regarding teacher…

Researchers often use the analysis of variance to test hypotheses about the means, followed by a multiple comparison technique when the F-test is significant. The technique is this study was developed by Newman (1939) and Keuls (1952). A flaw in the rationale underlying this technique was evaluated to determine whether the flaw is sufficiently…

The experience of the American Council on Education's Cooperative Institutional Research Program indicates that large-scale national surveys in the domain of higher education can be performed with scientific integrity within the constraints of costs, logistics, and technical resources. The purposes of this report are to provide complete and…

Four nonparametric alternatives to the parametric Bartlett test are presented for handling the K-sample equality of variance problem. The two sample Siegel-Tukey Test, Mood Coefficient of Alienation Test, and Klotz Test are extended to the multisample situation by the methods of Puri. A fourth alternative involving a Q-statistic procedure…

The purpose of this paper is to prove that one currently recommended method of obtaining the reliability of an instrument defined on a population of aggregate units is invalid. This method randomly splits the aggregate into two halves, correlates the two half unit scores by a Pearson product moment correlation coefficient, and corrects the…

The use of readability principles in the ERIC guidelines for abstracting suggests that abstracts should be more readable than source documents. However, information theory suggests that the compression of information would result in less readable abstracts. Abstracts and their source documents were selected randomly from each of four…

Behavioral scientists often wish to determine if a sample has been taken from a symmetric population. Similarly, classroom teachers are interested in symmetry if they wish to grade on a "curve." Previously, the sign test, the Wilcoxon test and the t-test have been used to test a hypothesis concerning the symmetry of a distribution of…

The particulate sampling system currently in use by the Bay Area Air Pollution Control District, San Francisco, California is described in this presentation for the 12th Conference on Methods in Air Pollution and Industrial Hygiene Studies, University of Southern California, April, 1971. The method represents a practical, inexpensive tool that can…

In many circumstances it is appropriate to use the school as the unit of analysis. The variables measured on students must be aggregated to form a mean for each school. However, the means derived from the students sampled in a school will tend to fluctuate around the true mean for the school in a way determined by the within-school correlations…

The distributional characteristics of the Kaiser-Rice measure of sampling adequacy (MSA) were investigated with sample correlation matrices from multivariate normal populations where the level of correlation (LC) was systematically varied. Two additional variables were manipulated--sample size (SS) and number of variables (NV). Ten matrices were…

Difficulties often encountered in conducting surveys in educational technology are described, and some guidelines are suggested for the design and implementation of a survey instrument. (RAO)

Two potentially useful tests for homogeneity of variance--the jackknife test and the Box test--are described and compared. Recommendations for the use of these techniques and computational examples of each are provided. (Author/JKS)

An empirical sampling distribution of the statistic average trace (E'E) for various orders of A matrices was developed through a Monte Carlo approach. A method is presented which can be used as a guideline in determining whether factor structures obtained from two data sets are congruent. (Author/DEP)