This report describes a use study designed to facilitate the selection of books that will be needed and used by identifying heavily used subjects and publishers in an academic library's collection of nursing books. Discussions include the study background and significance, study limitations, and basic assumptions. In addition, the procedures for…

The reliability of item bias estimates was studied for four methods: (1) the transformed delta method; (2) Shepard's modified delta method; (3) Rasch's one-parameter residual analysis; and (4) the Mantel-Haenszel procedure. Bias statistics were computed for each sample using all methods. Data were from administration of multiple-choice items from…

Background information needed to understand the literature on the impact of price on college attendance (i.e. price-response literature) is provided. After briefly introducing price theory and its use in demand studies in higher education, the major expository articles are reviewed, and major analytical methods used by researchers are examined.…

The discovery of disproportionate minority enrollments in special education classes has been a subject of considerable concern to federal, state, and local education officials alike for the past decade. Because the existence of disproportions is frequently thought to result from discriminatory placement practices on the part of local school…

This study was designed to illustrate the use of the Rasch model procedure to equate the Dade County Compensatory Education Skills Test (DCCEST) to the State Student Assessment Test (SSAT) for both mathematics skills and communications skills. The SSAT was a test developed by the Florida State Department of Education to measure students' level of…

Causes of the significant decrease in productivity growth and dramatic increase in unemployment in the United States since the mid-1960's are examined in order to test the underlying assumption of current economic policies that increasing capital savings and investments will create fuller and more productive employment. Data on trends in…

Disparities in rates of mobility among groups in the population have long been of interest as indicators of potential differences in access to economic and social opportunities. Racial differentials in mobility within the United States are seen as evidence of the lack of assimilation of blacks into the American mainstream. This paper tests for a…

A procedure for developing a nomogram that depicts expectancy of success on a criterion from performance on two predictors is presented. Data from 574 medical students attending Michigan State University College of Human Medicine's classes of 1979 through 1984 were used to develop a model for predicting the expectancy of success on Part I of the…

The development of a computer-based decision support system for outcomes assessment at Southeast Missouri State University is described. A menu-driven, user-based retrieval and analysis and reporting system, the Statistical Analysis System (SAS) was designed. The decision support system incorporates two major components, research group…

This handbook is intended to help government, university, private sector, and other users become better acquainted with the concepts and data underlying the Department of Agriculture's statistical series. The introduction reviews what various pieces of federal legislation say about the computation of agricultural production costs by the U.S.…

Several years ago, a coalition of Chicago civic groups met to determine the scope of the urban dropout problem and develop strategies for dealing with it. The resulting research program rejected both attrition and survey analysis approaches in favor of direct examination of all student records for three graduating classes (1982, 1983, and 1984)…

The development of the telephone dial access service is described, including initial services, procedures, library service, promotion and publicity, evaluation, and experimental programs, as well as arrangements with other states, institutions, and agencies and a study of the feasibility of a national dial access library. The major portion of the…

This report investigates seven document representations--configurations of controlled and free-text vocabulary--which can be used to search the INSPEC (Computer and Control Abstracts) and PsychInfo (Psychological Abstracts) databases. The performance of each representation is analyzed, as is overlap among the representations, i.e., the extent to…

The goal of this study is to broaden the scope of a conceptual model for child behavior by analyzing constructs relevant to cognition, conation, and affect. Two samples were drawn from school populations. For the first sample, 28 teachers from 8 rural, suburban, and urban schools rated 193 kindergarten children. Each teacher rated up to eight…

The purpose of this pilot study was to determine the contributions of computerized health risk appraisal when used as a supplement to the traditional methods of health instruction. Subjects were a convenience sample of 26 students enrolled in a university level, personal health course. Using a one group pretest posttest design, these subjects were…