Differential item performance (DIP) is discussed as a concept that does not necessarily imply item bias or unfairness to subgroups of examinees. With curriculum-based achievement tests, DIP is presented as a valid reflection of group differences in requisite skills and instruction. Using data from a national testing of the ACT Assessment, this…

Argues that although it is often thought and said that what we most need in education is wisdom and broad understanding of the issues that confront us, what we really need are deeply structured theories in education that drastically reduce, if not eliminate, the need for wisdom. (Author/JM)

Functional Job Analysis, a technology of work analysis making it possible to achieve statistical reliability in the definition of basic units of information, clarifies training needs, exposes worker growth as a fundamental purpose of the organization, and is used to design jobs and organize career ladders. (AJ)

We compare three control charts for monitoring data from student evaluations of teaching (SET) with the goal of improving student satisfaction with teaching performance. The two charts that we propose are a modified "p" chart and a z-score chart. We show that these charts overcome some of the shortcomings of the more traditional charts…

Authors who write introductory business statistics texts do not agree on when to use a t distribution and when to use a Z distribution in both the construction of confidence intervals and the use of hypothesis testing. In a survey of textbooks written in the last 15 years, we found the decision rules to be contradictory and, at times, the…

Education is the means by which society provides for the transmission or advancement of its culture and it is formally done at schools that are the arena of human interaction aimed at producing learning. But some people in that interaction aimed at producing learning cannot achieve as much as the others due to some social or individual factors…

The goal of this investigation was to derive a common battery of tests for both whites and negroes, and utilizing, if possible, uniform selection standards. (Author)

The proportions of a sample of Australian postsecondary students who continued with full-time study, the nature of that study, the institution at which it occurred, and the students' success were investigated in this research study. Those criterion variables were then related to the students' sex and father's occupation by means of two- and…

This report on faculty salaries in Washington public higher education is divided into two parts: a status report and a commentary dealing with the questions emanating from an analysis of faculty salaries and fringe benefits. The status report provides background information on faculty salary recommendations made by the Council for Postsecondary…

Substantial differences exist between the incomes of white and black Americans. These differences in income are a major aspect of inequality between blacks and whites. Improvements and declines in black income relative to white income have roughly paralleled expansions and contractions in the business cycle. Income differences are related to a…

Researchers often claim validity for student ratings after finding a positive ratings/achievement correlation. This allegedly shows that ratings identify teachers who promote learning. But if students are not randomly assigned to classes, or if the correlation is not computed across classmeans, the correlation may result instead from a student…

This study investigated whether the use of the impasse procedures established by New York's Taylor Law affected the level of teacher salaries in New York public school districts between 1968 and 1972. Data for the study were gathered from all 693 New York public school districts (except New York City) that were involved in collective bargaining…

This documentation has been prepared to guide the analyst who intends to analyze the data collected for the Safe School Study. Along with the Volume 2 Methodology report, its objective is to serve as a reference guide to the distributed data files. Together, these two volumes describe the data, the techniques utilized in their collection, and the…