Purpose: To develop an evaluation instrument that assessed health literacy competencies, specific to the national health education standards, that would provide less variability in response interpretation and greater speed of scoring than available in existing instruments. Methodology: Content was developed by professional practitioners with…

The need for hands-on computer laboratory experience in undergraduate and graduate statistics education has been firmly established in the past decade. As a result a number of attempts have been undertaken to develop novel approaches for problem-driven statistical thinking, data analysis and result interpretation. In this paper we describe an…

This book discusses two major approaches to social science research: quantitative research, which involves converting observations to numbers and analyzing them statistically; and qualitative research, which looks at participants' opinions, behaviors, and experiences from their own points of view and in a more subjective way. In the book,…

Educators and researchers have suggested that positive relations with their parents would have significant impacts on children's attitudes and behaviours. The present study has two purposes: (a) to examine whether parent-child relations would influence low achievers' liking of school, and (b) to investigate whether low achievers' parent-child…

College attrition rates are of substantial concern to policy makers and economists interested in educational attainment and earnings opportunities. This is not surprising since nationwide, almost one-third of all first-time college students fail to return for their sophomore year. There exists a substantial body of literature seeking to model this…

This research introduced resilience characteristics to study the adjustment of international graduate students at American universities. The purpose of the study was to explore relationships among resilience characteristics and background factors; among resilience characteristics and adjustment problem areas; and among adjustment problem areas and…

A longitudinal study with 6 years of cohort data examined the association between persistence at a private liberal arts university and participation in a study-abroad program. After adjustment for several factors that are known to affect persistence, results of regression analysis showed that students in the study-abroad program persisted longer…

This is a report of a study of the lack of qualified applicants for administrator positions in public schools. Objectives of the study were as follows: to respond to calls for more empirical studies about administrator recruitment and applicant decisions before an employment interview; to experimentally manipulate the way the position of assistant…

In a recent report, Lewis Solmon, Kern Paark, and David Garcia (2001) seek to identify the impact of attending charter schools on student achievement using data from Arizona. Based on a sophisticated statistical analysis, these authors report that charter school attendance increases test score gains of students. This note raises some questions…

Based on the recommendations of previous research, this study discusses and analyzes the usage of technology and instructional materials in a broad level in the United States. The National Education Longitudinal Study: 1988-96 (NELS88) is a longitudinal study of the 1988 eighth graders by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The…

A study was conducted to compare, with simulated unidimensional and two-dimensional sets, the Type I error probabilities and rejection rates obtained with two versions of the LISREL computer program, the earlier version PRELIS/LISREL 7 and the later version PRELIS2/LISREL8, a version that corrects the asymptotic covariance matrix. Unidimensional…

A study examined the effects of scheduling a language arts block at West Vigo Middle School (Indiana) in the 1993-94 school year in an attempt to show that ISTEP (Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress) language arts and reading NCE (Normal Curve Equivalent) scores for eighth graders would increase. ISTEP scores for 1993 (before the…

This working paper contains the overheads used in a seminar designed to introduce some basic concepts of statistics to nonstatisticians. The seminar has been presented on several occasions. The first part of the seminar, and the first set of overheads, deals with the essentials of statistics, including: (1) population, sample, and inference; (2)…

Administrators at two-year college and secondary area vocational centers accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools were surveyed regarding their institutions' actual and ideal involvement in 29 economic development activities. Usable data were collected from 345 administrators, and data from 75 respondents were further…

In 1999, an external review was conducted of the indicators and methodology that the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education (NCHEMS) had developed for "Measuring UP 2000: The State-by-State Report Card for Higher Education." The principal purpose of these tests was to understand better the relationships among the indicators and…