The reliability and difficulty level of faculty interviewing of applicants to the Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine are assessed. An index is proposed for classifying interviewers, along with a point system for assuring fairness in assigning interviewers. Tabular data are included. (MSE)

Reviews studies of adolescent pregnancy since 1982 and relates them to a study of teen pregnancy in Duval County (Florida). Discusses incidence, causes and health, social and economic consequences. (FMW)

A theoretical model is presented, suggesting stakeholder involvement in establishing the process of decision making in school-conducted needs assessment. Stakeholder involvement affects the validity of the selected needs, with validity defined as teacher agreement with needs selection. Data from a survey of 151 teachers support the model. (SLD)

This article is the second contribution to a research methods series dedicated to getting good results from survey research. In this series, "good results" is a stenographic term used to define surveys that yield accurate and meaningful information that decision makers can use with confidence when conducting program evaluation and policy…

Most of the recent literature on the achievement effects of school size has examined school and district performance. These studies have demonstrated substantial benefits of smaller school and district size in impoverished settings. To date, however, no work has adequately examined the relationship of size and socioeconomic status (SES) with…

Objective: Evidence-based practice is becoming increasingly important in social work and community practice. The authors reviewed existing research to assess the level of evidence available to guide community practice. Method: The authors conducted a review of the literature on community practice intervention research from 1985 to 2002 using…

Although the 1990s represented an expansive period for business schools in the United States the past few years have seen a significant drop in demand for this once popular degree program. As many schools of business struggle to retain their market share in this increasingly competitive environment, one powerful, but sometimes overlooked, strategy…

The quality of fit between the data and the measurement model is fundamental to any discussion of results. Fit has been the subject of inquiry since as early as the 1920s. Most early explorations concentrated on assessing global fit or subset fits on fixed length, traditional paper and pencil tests given as a single unit. The detection of aberrant…

This study presents a means of identifying economically efficient school districts in Illinois and provides an analysis of select school variables: school population; salary expenditure; level of teacher preparedness; number of years of teaching experience; and select ratios incorporating pupils, administrators, teachers, test scores, and percent…

DIMTEST is a statistical test procedure for assessing essential unidimensionality of binary test item responses. The test statistic T used for testing the null hypothesis of essential unidimensionality is a nonparametric statistic. That is, there is no particular parametric distribution assumed for the underlying ability distribution or for the…

The National Longitudinal Surveys (NLS), sponsored by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, are a set of surveys each of which has gathered information at multiple points in time on the labor market experiences of five groups of men and women since the mid-1960s. Each group of at least 5,000 persons was selected to be…

Using two statistical analysis techniques (the Program Evaluation and Review Technique and the Critical Path Method), this study analyzed procedures for compiling the required yearly report of the Metropolitan Separate School Board (Catholic) of Toronto, Canada. The computer-assisted analysis organized the process of completing the report more…

This paper illustrates the transformation of a raw data matrix into a matrix of associations, and then into a factor matrix. Factor analysis attempts to distill the most important relationships among a set of variables, thereby permitting some theoretical simplification. In this heuristic data, a correlation matrix was derived to display…

The study compares three methods for establishing cut-off scores that effect a compromise between absolute cut-offs based on item difficulty and relative cut-offs based on expected passing rates. Each method coordinates these two types of information differently. The Beuk method obtains judges' estimates of an absolute cut-off and an expected…