Analyzes the financial impact of Pennsylvania's Act 125, which distributed $132.5 million in additional state aid among the state's public school districts. (JG)

Universal design of assessment has been an important step forward in making tests more accessible to students with disabilities. An issue affecting the universal design approach is the need to review individual items, potentially hundreds of them. Ideally, there would be a statistical procedure available that would first identify items that are…

This study sought to determine whether GRE subscores (or GMAT) could predict graduation rates in related areas (math-oriented majors for GRE quantitative, etc.) in a sample of over 9,000 graduate students at a major public research university. Because few low quantitative scores were present in math-oriented majors, an attempt was made to…

The aim of this paper is to inform readers about the development of national qualifications systems and to provide guidance for countries aiming to set up or reform their systems. The paper is written in the context of vocational qualifications--that is, qualifications that are designed to prepare people for work or to assess their performance in…

This report has two objectives: first, to explore how the demographic and educational characteristics of low-performing students compare to other students within the United States; second, to analyze if the United States differs from the other PISA countries in terms of the characteristics of its low-performing students. The Program for…

As part of a research project on students' understanding of variability in statistics, 272 students, (84 middle school and 188 secondary school, grades 6-12) were surveyed on a series of tasks involving repeated sampling. Students' reasoning on the tasks predominantly fell into three types: additive, proportional, or distributional, depending on…

Studies on satisfaction and performance have always attracted the interest of academicians. Continuing debate over whether performance precedes satisfaction or vice versa permeates the study of student satisfaction in American higher education. The purpose of this paper is to ascertain the relationship between satisfaction and performance and to…

The purpose of this study was to use quality improvement tools to determine any assignable causes that were linked to the workorder system within Housing and to make recommendations to control the causes, therefore improving the quality of the workorder system. This study measured the effectiveness of the Department of Housing's workorder system…

The purpose of this study was to use quality improvement tools to determine if the current process of supplying hot water to a high-rise residence hall for women at a southeastern Doctoral I granting institution was in control. After a series of focus groups among the residents in the hall, it was determined that they were mostly concerned about…

A statistical analysis was performed to test the hypothesis that, if profit-maximizing firms have limited information about the general productivity of new workers, they may choose to use easily observable characteristics such as years of education to discriminate statistically among workers. Information about employer learning was obtained by…

The relationship between employer learning and statistical discrimination was explored through a statistical analysis that included a test for statistical discrimination or "rational" stereotyping in environments where agents learn over time. The test is used to study the working hypothesis that, because firms have only limited…

This monograph provides a description of the curricular area "Area-Escola" (A-E), in the context of an innovative curriculum development process, presenting the history, aims, and guidelines of this curricular area and analyzing some of the results of qualitative and quantitative studies on its impact. A-E is seen as an emerging school…

Researchers noted that introducing technology within a course specific framework, such as a methods class, often results in preservice teachers increasing their computer competency and confidence in using technology and can greatly influence the adoption of technology as part of instructional experiences. To determine if these constructs were…

This paper argues that a typical use of regression models to target student recruitment efforts is theoretically unsound and may therefore be operationally inefficient. It presents results from a study using a predictive model to identify the prospective students on whom recruitment efforts have the greatest impact. The model uses four kinds of…

This paper presents a model for analyzing and drawing inferences from pre- and post-assessment data that are not as clean as might be desired. The model was applied to comparison of freshman and senior scores on the Academic Profile and Short Form at Cardinal Stritch University (Wisconsin). As of 1997-98, 891 pre-tests had been administered to new…