Preparing early childhood education (ECE) and early childhood special education (ECSE) professionals to work with young children with and without disabilities entails the acquisition of content, its application, and opportunities for reflection. This article describes a component of an ECSE assessment course focusing on the logistics and process…

When conducting an exploratory factor analysis, the decision regarding the number of factors to retain following factor extraction is one that the researcher should consider very carefully, as the decision can have a dramatic effect on results. Although there are numerous strategies that can and should be utilized when making this decision,…

Normal theory maximum likelihood (ML) is by far the most popular estimation and testing method used in structural equation modeling (SEM), and it is the default in most SEM programs. Even though this approach assumes multivariate normality of the data, its use can be justified on the grounds that it is fairly robust to the violations of the…

Benford's law of the "first digits" states that in spite of intuitively expected equal frequency of 1/9 of the decimal digits r = 1, ... , 9 appearance on the first place of any number, various empirical studies show another pattern of these frequencies distribution, which is log[subscript 10](1 + 1/r). The article considers this law and other…

The monitoring and support of university freshmen is considered very important at many educational institutions. In this paper we describe the results of the educational data mining case study aimed at predicting the Electrical Engineering (EE) students drop out after the first semester of their studies or even before they enter the study program…

Effective strategic planning for community colleges contains four key elements: (1) It must be mission driven; (2) It must be integrated with capability and resources; (3) It must define measurable standards for determining outcomes; and (4) It must be transparent in its intent and strategic goals to all levels of the organization. Using a…

Salehi and Scheidt have derived several Wold-Cramer concordance theorems for q-variate stationary processes over discrete groups. This paper characterizes the concordance of the Wold decomposition with respect to families arising in the interpolation problem and the Cramer decomposition for non-full-rank q-variate stationary processes over certain…

Kaiser's measure of sampling adequacy is applied to a special Spearman matrix and a special q cluster generalization. The result supports the contention that the measure should be no less than five tenths for data to be appropriate for factor analysis. A table is presented. (Author/JKS)

The effects of nonnormally distributed perceived distance between pairs of objects on the accuracy of recovered configurations of traditional multidimensional scaling were studied via simulation methods. Multidimensional scaling is shown to be robust with respect to violations of the assumption of normality. (Author/JKS)

Studies concerning the relation of sample size to the number of variables in factor analysis are reviewed. It is noted that constraints imposed on the dimensionality of the variables by having fewer observations than variables are not mentioned in the literature. Suggestions for resolution of the problem are made. (Author/JKS)

Matching by Procrustes methods involves the transformation of one matrix to match with another. A special least squares criterion, the congruence coefficient, has advantages as a criterion for some factor analytic interpretations. A Procrustes method maximizing the congruence coefficient is given. (Author/JKS)

Presents an algorithm for the production of a graphical diagram from a matrix formula in such a way that its components are logically and hierarchically arranged. The algorithm, which relies on the matrix equations of J. McArdle and R. McDonald (1984), calculates the individual path components of expected covariance between variables and…

P. Zellini has shown how to decompose an arbitrary symmetric matrix of a given order in terms of a fixed basis of eigenvectors of persymmetric matrices. In this paper, a simplified tensor basis is given that can be obtained without persymmetry. (SLD)

A theorem is proved stating that the set of all "minimax links," defined as links minimizing, over paths, the maximum length of links in any path connecting a pair of objects comprising nodes in an undirected weighted graph, comprises the union of all minimum spanning trees of that graph. (Author/SLD)

This paper describes the conjunctive counterpart of the hierarchical classes model of P. De Boeck and S. Rosenberg. The new model represents the row-column association as a conjunctive function of a set of hypothetical binary variables. The substantive significance of the conjunctive model is illustrated. (Author/SLD)