The educational literature, the popular press, and educated laypeople have all echoed a conclusion from the book "Academically Adrift" by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa (which has now become received wisdom), namely, that 45% of college students showed no significant gains in critical thinking skills. Similar results were reported by…

We present a case study of the process through which a methodology was developed and applied to a quasi-experimental research study that employed propensity score matching. Methodological decisions are discussed and summarized, including an explanation of the approaches selected for each step in the study as well as rationales for these…

This study investigates technical efficiency and productivity for Swedish higher education institutions (HEIs). One identified problem in previous research concerns adjusting efficiency scores for input quality. This problem is avoided using grades from upper-secondary schools. A second problem concerns heterogeneity with respect to subjects and…

Researchers are frequently confronted with unanswered questions or items on their questionnaires and tests, due to factors such as item difficulty, lack of testing time, or participant distraction. This paper first presents results from a poll confirming previous claims (Rietveld & van Hout, 2006; Schafer & Graham, 2002) that data…

This article investigates the quality of social scientific listening research that reports numerical data to substantiate claims appearing in the "International Journal of Listening" between 1987 and 2011. Of the 225 published articles, 100 included one or more studies reporting numerical data. We frame our results in terms of eight…

This paper challenges Hanushek and Woessmann's (2008) contention that the quality and not the quantity of schooling determines a nation's rate of economic growth. I first show that their statistical analysis is flawed. I then show that when a nation's average test scores and average schooling attainment are included in a national income model,…

Education research rarely lends itself to large scale experimental research and true randomization, leaving the researcher to quasi-experimental designs. The problem with quasi-experimental research is that underlying factors may impact group selection and lead to potentially biased results. One way to minimize the impact of non-randomization is…

The normalized mean is developed and discussed as a descriptive measure of central location. The advantages of the normalized mean over the arithmetic mean, median, and trimmed mean are discussed. (Author)

Classical methods for detecting outliers deal with continuous variables. These methods are not readily applicable to categorical data, such as incorrect/correct scores (0/1) and ordered rating scale scores (e.g., 0,..., 4) typical of multi-item tests and questionnaires. This study proposes two definitions of outlier scores suited for categorical…

This paper compares five growth measures using the High School and Beyond database. The measures are: (1) simple gain (posttest minus pretest); (2) difference between group means; (3) percentage of students who scored higher on the posttest than the pretest; (4) percentage of items missed on the pretest which are subsequently answered correctly on…

In almost all applications of measurement there is some sort of response by a human subject. Almost always, the response scale is ordinal, but almost always it is treated as if it were an interval measure. Methods for treating data ordinally are currently being developed in three areas: ordinal analysis for questionnaire responses, ordinal…

A limitation of the principal components method is its scale dependence. This note shows that the method is scale invariant if the normalization is modified in an obvious way. Then the effect of a change in units is as transparent as in linear regression, and principal components can be used without apology. Most researchers who use multivariate…

In 1990, Milwaukee (Wisconsin) became the site of the first publicly funded school-choice program providing low-income parents with vouchers that could be used to send their children to secular, private schools. An evaluation of Milwaukee's school-choice experiment was conducted by a team of researchers, headed by John Witte at the University of…

In August 1996 Jay P. Greene, Paul E. Peterson, and Jiangtao Du, with Leesa Boeger and Curtis L. Frazier, issued a report called "The Effectiveness of School Choice in Milwaukee." The report, referred to as GPDBF, presented data that indicated that low-income minority students in their third and fourth years of participation in the…

The norm-referenced evaluation model (RMC Model A) for Title I project evaluation, consists of procedures whereby the expected posttest standing of a treatment group under the null condition is generated from their pretest standing. It is assumed that the treatment group is not selected on the basis of their pretest scores and can be considered…