The large and growing Hispanic population in the United States is rapidly changing the ethnic composition of the country. In 1982 there were close to 16 million Hispanics in the United States and, according to U.S. census projections, 16 million more Hispanics are expected to join the U.S. population by 2010, raising the total Hispanic population…

This paper acknowledges that research on school dropouts presents problems in the definitions and computation of dropout indices. It considers a variety of methods for computing dropout rates, using dropout rates which are real and which were available at the end of the 1986-1987 school year. Fall enrollment, average daily membership, and total…

Methods for meta-analysis have evolved dramatically since Gene Glass first proposed the term in 1976. Since that time statistical and nonstatistical aspects of methodology for meta-analysis have been developing at a steady pace. This guide is an attempt to provide a practical introduction to rigorous procedures in the meta-analysis of social…

This report examines the poverty status of persons in 1984 and 1985 using the complete panel file of the 1984 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and compares those findings to poverty estimates based on the Current Population Survey (CPS). Although the CPS is used to obtain official estimates of persons in poverty, SIPP captures the…

This study investigated the effect of the integration of media projects into an existing language arts curriculum on the year-end achievement of fifth and sixth grade students at the University of Wyoming laboratory school. During their communication arts block of language arts, reading, and literature, each student completed a minimum of four…

The validity of six instruments designed to assess counselor effectiveness was studied. Four videotaped counselor role conditions were created. Participants, 160 undergraduates at the University of Cincinnati (Ohio), were asked to rate the counselors using each of the six commonly used instruments. Three were drawn from social influence theory:…

Statistics tend to become interesting to non-methodologists when taught in a research context that is relevant to them. Real data sets supplemented by sufficient background information can provide just such a context. Despite this, many textbook authors and instructors of applied statistics rely on artificial data sets to illustrate statistical…

Attributional style as it has been operationalized in the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ) was critically assessed. A sample of 538 senior high school and college students completed the ASQ. The resulting ASQ data were then intercorrelated, factor analyzed, and compared to hypothesized matrices for all items, good outcome items, and bad…

This document describes the revision of the Center for the Study of Evaluation (CSE) Program Evaluation Kit, including planning, development, and/or revisions of specific components. The kit is a set of books, originally developed in 1978, and designed to provide step-by-step procedural guides to help people conduct evaluations of educational…

To assess the relative effectiveness of public and private school environments, researchers must distinguish between the effects of the schools' programs and the students' innate abilities. Student background variables do not appear to account for all the important differences among students attending public and private schools. This document…

Direct and indirect effects in decomposed zero-order correlations among variables in causal models are considered. Under certain circumstances, the components of the decompositions could be interpreted as direct, indirect, and spurious causal effects, plus a component called joint associations. The sum of the direct and indirect effects is the…

Behavioral observation has become increasingly important in research in developmental and clinical psychology, as well as in program evaluation and instructional research. Several statistical approaches to assessing the dependability of behavioral observation were reviewed. The demand for accurate and efficient paradigms for behavioral observation…

An Attitude Toward Blindness Questionnaire (ATBQ) was developed to assess individual progress through a Veterans Administration blind rehabilitation program. The instrument is also meant to measure attitudes toward blindness for blind persons, rehabilitation workers, and a "naive" group without contact with the blind. A method of…

An explicit model identifying 10 relevant components of achievement gain scores has been developed. Based on that model, all students under consideration are stratified according to individual observed pretest score, and achievement gains are measured relative to the average and range of gains among students in the same prescore stratum. The…

Several special cases of the general Rasch model, varying in complexity, were investigated to determine whether they could successfully model realistic multidimensional item response data. Whether the parameters of the model could be readily interpreted was also investigated. The models investigated included: (1) the vector model; (2) the product…