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Optimization In Non-Parametric Survival Analysis And Climate Change Modeling, Iuliana Teodorescu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many of the open problems of current interest in probability and statistics involve complicated data

sets that do not satisfy the strong assumptions of being independent and identically distributed. Often,

the samples are known only empirically, and making assumptions about underlying parametric

distributions is not warranted by the insufficient information available. Under such circumstances,

the usual Fisher or parametric Bayes approaches cannot be used to model the data or make predictions.

However, this situation is quite often encountered in some of the main challenges facing statistical,

data-driven studies of climate change, clinical studies, or financial markets, to name a few. …

Advancing Assessment Of Quantitative And Scientific Reasoning, Donna L. Sundre, Amy D. Thelk

Numeracy

Advancing Assessment of Quantitative and Scientific Reasoning is a four-year NSF Project (DUE-0618599) in part designed to evaluate the generalizability of quantitative (QR) and scientific reasoning (SR) assessment instruments created at James Madison University to four other four-year institutions with very distinct missions and student demographics. This article describes the methods, results, and findings we obtained in our studies. More specifically, we describe how to conduct content-alignment exercises in which faculty members map each item from a prospective test to the student learning objectives taught at the institution. Our results indicated that 92-100% of the QR and SR items were …

Quantitative Literacy Assessments: An Introduction To Testing Tests, Dorothy Wallace, Kim Rheinlander, Steven Woloshin, Lisa Schwartz

Numeracy

This paper describes how professional evaluators construct assessment instruments that work properly to measure the right thing. Constructing an assessment tool begins with getting feedback from relevant experts on the content of questions. The tool is developed and refined through comparison with existing instruments, focus groups and cognitive interviews. The final instrument is formally tested for content validity, usability, reliability and construct validity through a variety of statistical measures. This process of construction is illustrated by two examples relevant to quantitative literacy: the Medical Data Interpretation Test and the Math Attitudes Survey.