Statistics - May Require Opinion

Home-Schooled Pupils are Making Colleges Sit Up and Take Notice

LEAD STORY-DATELINE: HYPERLINK "http://www.wsj.com" The Wall Street
Journal , February 11, 2000.

Education in the home rather than in public schools is becoming more
popular in this country. More children are withdrawing from public
schools in favor of learning their lessons at home. One of the possible
reasons for this movement is the increasing violence in public schools.
After the disaster in Littleton, Colorado, the number of registered
home-schooled children rose 10%.

Not only are more children staying at home, they seem to be doing very
well academically. College-admissions tests indicate that for reading,
English and science, home-schooled scores are better than public-school
scores. For the ACT, home-schoolers scored 23.4, 24.4 and 21.9 compared
to national averages of 20.5, 21.4 and 21.0. Only in math did
home-schooled children do worse than the national average (20.4 compared
to 20.7). The SAT had similar results with children studying at home
scoring 1083 compared to the national average of 1016.

Interestingly, children schooled at home do not come from the highest
income levels. The average income for the homes of these children is
$40,000 to $50,000 as opposed to the national median income of $50,000
to $60,000. Their parents, however, do have more education than the
national average. Home-schooled children also do not fit the racial
stereotype, as 8% are nonwhite.

Based on this article and your knowledge of college-admissions tests,
what variables would you include in a multiple regression model to
predict ACT scores? Be certain to include dummy variables (categorical
variables).

After deciding on the variables to include in the model, explain how
stepwise regression, R2adjusted and Cp could be used to improve upon the
model.