Appendix A, "Data Analysis When Students Change from Smaller to Larger Schools between the Pre-test and Post-test of the First Year," discusses a methodological problem involved in planning the approximate number of questionnaires to be administered in program. Appendix B, "Estimates of Sample Sizes and Data Collection Costs," includes five…

The National Household Education Survey (NHES) is a telephone interview survey that has been conducted in the spring of 1991, 1993, 1995, 1996, and 1999. The 1999 NHES was a compilation of survey items from previous years that included three interviews, resulting in three data files. The first is the Parent Interview, in which data were collected…

The extent to which students with disabilities are represented in national data collection programs was investigated by reviewing nine such programs that are receiving attention in current educational reform initiatives. Results suggest that 40-50% of students with disabilities are excluded from these prominent data collection programs. (SLD)

A framework for understanding methodological practices from the perspectives of internal validity, external validity, statistical control validity, and construct validity is presented. One hundred doctoral dissertations completed between 1980 and 1988 at a single urban public university were analyzed for various methodological practices and types…

The sampling of teachers for nationwide surveys offers a challenging endeavor in obtaining a representative and adequate sample to truly represent opinions of the teachers. Ten national surveys of public school teachers conducted between 1980 and 1985 are presented with respect to their sampling design and procedures. Concepts and theoretical…

This paper examines considerations for designing a postschool follow-up system in secondary special education, focusing on survey research techniques and special applications of survey methodologies, including data collection techniques, questionnaire construction, sample design and contact, response rates, and tracking procedures. Design and…

As part of a study of school effectiveness, a procedure was developed to select schools for study based on extreme high or extreme low degrees of successfulness in reading. Data for all 775 public elementary schools in Maryland that were active in 1995 were used. Five triads of schools were selected, each triad consisting of two schools that were…

Sample undercoverage issues in the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88) are addressed. The main focus is the exclusion of certain categories of student in the base year, 1988, and in in-school follow-up rounds. A subsidiary focus is the question of how adequately transfer students were captured within the sampling procedures of…

Under the Drug-Free Schools and Campuses Act, institutions of higher education are required to review the effectiveness of their alcohol and drug prevention programs biannually. This guide offers a method for gathering and interpreting student survey data on alcohol-related problems based on the methodology of the College Alcohol Survey developed…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) currently tests seventeen-year-old students enrolled in public and private secondary schools, but it does not test "out-of-school" seventeen-year-olds who have either graduated or dropped out. Estimating that one of five seventeen-year-olds is out of school, the interpretability of…

This paper examines how various equating methods are affected by: (1) sampling error; (2) sample characteristics; and (3) characteristics of anchor test items. It reviews empirical studies that investigated the invariance of equating transformations, and it discusses empirical and simulation studies that focus on how the properties of anchor tests…

Statistical significance is misused in educational and psychological research when it is applied as a method to establish the reliability of research results. Other techniques have been developed which can be correctly utilized to establish the generalizability of findings. Methods that do provide such estimates are known as invariance or…

An efficiency study was conducted of the base year design used for the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 (NLS). Finding the optimal design involved a search for the numbers of sample schools and students that would maximize the variance at a given cost. Twenty-one variables describing students' plans, attitudes,…

The nine-volume Survey Kit is designed to help readers prepare and conduct surveys and become better users of survey results. All the books in the series contain instructional objectives, exercises and answers, examples of surveys in use, illustrations of survey questions, guidelines for action, checklists of "dos and don'ts," and…

Appraisal of a school's relative effectiveness is complicated by: (1) the need to control for input differences; (2) measurement error in input measures; and (3) small sample size within schools. This study compares the performance of two successive cohorts in 19 schools in a small midwestern city on the five Iowa Tests of Basic Skills using both…