Improving School Achievement and Inter‐group Relations for Children Placed at Risk: the Roots and Wings program

Roots and Wings is a comprehensive elementary‐school program designed to ensure that all children achieve world class standards in reading, writing and language arts, mathematics, science, history and geography; and can apply their knowledge to solve real‐world problems. Critical to these goals is increasing the achievement of students placed at‐risk as a consequence of poverty, disabilities, language problems, or other factors. Roots and Wings extensively employs cooperative learning to promote student motivation, socialization, appreciation of diversity, and academic achievement. Although cooperative learning offers a variety of potential benefits, it can be challenging to use for teachers and students more accustomed to traditional methods. This paper presents research in inner‐city elementary schools using the Roots and Wings design and identifies several factors that facilitate the change process and quality of cooperative classroom activities.     

A Reinforced Randomized Block Design with Correlated Errors

In the analysis of variance the errors are assumed to be independent which may not always be true. In this article, a restricted randomized block design under compound autocorrelated structure is considered. A method of analysis for such a randomized block design has been developed. It provides confidence ellipsoid and confidence interval of a set of estimable functions and an estimable function of treatment parameters, respectively. Analogous to Scheffe's method, the multiple comparison technique of judging all possible treatment contrasts has been derived. In the process, a method of estimation of unknown parameters has been also developed. An example (simulated data) illustrates this approach.     

MOMENTS OF A LINEARLY TRUNCATED BIVARIATE NORMAL DISTRIBUTION1

The moments are obtained for a bivariate normal distribution which is linearly truncated with respect to both variables; the variables may be correlated. From these moments the parameters of the distribution can be estimated.     

TECHNIQUES OF COVARIANCE STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS1

The paper delineates the scope and important features of covariance structural analysis in which some pattern can be postulated a priori for the covariance matrix. The coverage given also includes a brief review of the published work in this area with illustration of statistical tests based, on principles of maximum likelihood and union-intersection. Few results on the computational ease under the assumption of particular covariance structures are reported. A few unsolved problems in the area of structural analysis are briefly mentioned.     

Multivariate relationships between modernity value orientations and family planning indicators

Using canonical correlation techniques in the analysis of data collected from interviews with 1,737 married women of three Indian states, this paper evaluated three modernity value orientations—subjective efficacy, openness to change, and propensity to plan—as predictors of a set of four family planning indicators. The analysis revealed that, in Haryana, both subjective efficacy and openness to change were related to family planning knowledge and attitudes as well as to favorability toward small family size. Propensity to plan was related to adoption. In rural Tamil Nadu, subjective efficacy and openness to change were related essentially to family planning attitudes, whereas in urban Tamil Nadu they were strongly related to adoption. In the latter area, the best linear association between the modernity variables (predictor set) and the family planning variables (criterion set) resulted when the criterion set was so weighted that it involved a large amount of adoption and a moderate amount of contraceptive knowledge and attitudes. Thus, in urban Tamil Nadu, the four family planning variables seemed to cohere, reflecting cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioral consistency. Except in Meghalaya, it appears that married women with higher subjective efficacy, openness to change, and planning tendency may be more likely than others to translate their family planning knowledge and favorability toward small family size into action, under suitable conditions. Some of the implications of the findings are discussed.The author is affiliated with the Council for Social Development, 53 Lodi Estate, New Delhi, 110003, India.     

ESTIMATION OF MISCLASSIFICATION PROBABILITIES IN THE LINEAR PROGRAMMING APPROACHES TO THE TWO-GROUP DISCRIMINANT PROBLEM

Expressions for misclassification probabilities are derived under a contaminated multivariate normal model for the linear-programming approaches to the two-group discriminant problem.