Inference, or decision making, is seen in curriculum documents as the final step in a statistical investigation. For a formal statistical enquiry this may be associated with sophisticated tests involving probability distributions. For young students without the mathematical background to perform such tests, it is still possible to draw informal…

Two national probability samples are used to uncover whether children benefit from having school teacher parents. The inquiry is motivated by frequent commentaries by teachers that substandard student performance is associated with unhelpful parenting practices. If teachers believe that parents are crucial for determining child outcomes, then we…

This article focuses on the impact of ethnic background on employment and earnings among people with a vocational education in Norway. I differentiate between three different groups: majority, first-generation non-Westerners and second-generation non-Westerners. Panel data from several public register databases of the entire population of…

Based on Norwegian register data, we set up a multivariate mixed proportional hazard model (MMPH) to analyze nurses' pattern of work, sickness absence, nonemployment, and social insurance dependency from 1992 to 2000, and how that pattern was affected by workplace characteristics. The model is estimated by means of the nonparametric…

In this paper, I use a nationally representative sample of American high school seniors in 1992 to examine change and stability in the employment patterns of youth as they make the transition from high school to college. Students with weak attachments to the labor force in high school tend to remain unemployed during the first year of college.…

The authors propose a strategy for studying the effects of time-varying instructional treatments on repeatedly observed student achievement. This approach responds to three challenges: (a) The yearly reallocation of students to classrooms and teachers creates a complex structure of dependence among responses; (b) a child's learning outcome under a…

This paper describes a study, now in progress, of new methods for representing the sampling variability of Mantel-Haenszel differential item functioning (DIF) results, based on the system for categorizing the severity of DIF that is now in place at the Educational Testing Service. The methods, which involve a Bayesian elaboration of procedures…

Based on a synthesis of the literature and observations of young children over 2 years, a framework for assessing probabilistic thinking was formulated, refined, and validated. For each of four major constructs incorporated into this framework--sample space, probability of an event, probability comparisons, and conditional probability--four…

A test of statistical significance is a procedure for determining how likely a result is assuming a null hypothesis to be true with randomization and a sample of size n (the given size in the study). Randomization, which refers to random sampling and random assignment, is important because it ensures the independence of observations, but it does…

Induced probabilities have been largely ignored by educational researchers. Simply stated, if a new or random variable is defined in terms of a first random variable, then induced probability is the probability or density of the new random variable that can be found by summation or integration over the appropriate domains of the original random…

Previous work on the effects of dimensionality on parameter estimation was extended from dichotomous models to the polytomous graded response (GR) model. A multidimensional GR model was developed to generate data in one-, two-, and three-dimensions, with two- and three-dimensional conditions varying in their interdimensional associations. Test…

The goal of books in this series is to present work that is on the growing tip of research in cognitive development. The theme of this volume is children's logical and mathematical cognition, a field in which Piaget's influence has been extensive. In the first of the six chapters, Acredolo presents a new theory of the cognitive bases for…

The logit methodology provides a unique way of examining input-output relationships for social systems where the principal output of the analysis is a probability of some action or state. (Author)

Concerns about students' difficulties in statistical reasoning led to a study which explored year 11 (14 to 16 year-olds) students' ideas in this area. The study focussed on sampling variability, probability, descriptive statistics and graphical representations. This paper presents and discusses the ways in which students made sense of sampling…

Weighting and variance estimation are two statistical issues involved in survey data analysis for large-scale assessment programs such as the Higher Education Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Literacy Assessment. Because survey data are always acquired by probability sampling, to draw unbiased or almost unbiased inferences for the…