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USING DEMOGRAPHIC SUBGROUP AND DUMMY VARIABLE EQUATIONS TO PREDICT COLLEGE FRESHMAN GRADE AVERAGE
Author(s) -
SAWYER RICHARD
Publication year - 1986
Publication title -
journal of educational measurement
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.917
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1745-3984
pISSN - 0022-0655
DOI - 10.1111/j.1745-3984.1986.tb00239.x
Subject(s) - ethnic group , statistics , mathematics , subgroup analysis , variable (mathematics) , variables , demography , psychology , confidence interval , sociology , mathematical analysis , anthropology
The purpose of this study was to determine whether adjustments for the differential prediction observed among sex, racial/ethnic, or age subgroups in one freshman class at a college could be used to improve prediction accuracy for these subgroups in future freshman classes. For older students, dummy variable and separate subgroup prediction equations were found, on cross‐validation, to be more accurate than the total group equations. For sex subgroups, dummy variable and separate subgroup equations were only moderately effective in improving prediction accuracy. For racial/ethnic subgroups, they were more often than not less accurate, on cross‐validation, than total group equations. Among all three kinds of demographic subgroupings, shifts over time in colleges' mean grade averages were found to be a more important source of prediction bias than differential prediction.