This article presents the author's address at the 2007 "Journal of Applied Quantitative Methods" ("JAQM") prize awarding festivity. The festivity was included in the opening of the 4th International Conference on Applied Statistics, November 22, 2008, Bucharest, Romania. In the address, the author reflects on three theses that…

As teachers and leaders are well aware, schools and districts across the country have invested enormous amounts of money and energy in creating data management systems so that teachers can access information about their students' performance. With these systems in place, the focus now needs to move to the structures and allocation of time that…

Extreme-value statistics is often used to estimate so-called return values (actually related to quantiles) for environmental quantities like wind speed or wave height. A basic method for estimation is the method of block maxima which consists in partitioning observations in blocks, where maxima from each block could be considered independent.…

A standard interpretation of the coefficient of correlation may be obtained from the ratio of two variances. If it is assumed that two variables, X and Y, are bivariate normal and scaled to have zero means and unit variances, it can be shown that the correlation between X and Y is the ratio of two conditional means. Galton's statistical studies of…

Data reexamination is a critical component for any study. The complexity of the study, the time available for data base development and analysis, and the relationship of the study to educational policy-making can all increase the criticality of such reexamination. Analysis of the error levels in the National Institute of Education's Instructional…

Reviews the factor analytic studies done on the 1981 Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R) standardization sample and various patient samples. Concludes that a three-factor solution appears to provide a source of hypotheses about an individual's or a select sample's unique abilities and weaknesses worthy of further exploration.…

This article evaluates power and Type I error probabilities for a modified Fisher exact test for homogeneity of response probabilities in 2 x 2 tables. The continuity-corrected Fisher statistic is more powerful than the uncorrected Fisher exact test, while it is less often nonconservatively biased than the Pearson chi-square. (Author/RD)

To assess association between rows of proximity matrices, H. de Vries (1993) introduces weighted average and row-wise average variants for Pearson's product-moment correlation, Spearman's rank correlation, and Kendall's rank correlation. For all three, the absolute value of the first variant is greater than or equal to the second. (SLD)

Expands census data practice of "age heaping," rounding off individual's age to nearest digit ending in zero or five. Presents statistical data supporting "death heaping" in state vital statistics. Illustrates possibility for death date to be assigned as birth date when there may be no adequate record of the date of birth for…

Purpose: Statistical studies conducted in various languages on both infants and adults have revealed an intersyllabic preference for initiating words with a labial consonant-vowel-coronal consonant sequence. Speech motor constraints have been proposed to explain this so-called "labial-coronal effect." This study was designed to test for a possible…

Part-time engagement is a significant feature of senior secondary study for large numbers of students, in a context which includes high level policy pressures to achieve better outcomes for many more and a wider proportion of the schooling population, and significant policy and practice shifts at school, system and accreditation authority levels.…

Classic parametric statistical significance tests, such as analysis of variance and least squares regression, are widely used by researchers in many disciplines, including psychology. For classic parametric tests to produce accurate results, the assumptions underlying them (e.g., normality and homoscedasticity) must be satisfied. These assumptions…