Responses to OMB

Memorandum United States Department of Education

Institute of Education Sciences

National Center for Education Statistics

DATE: August 16, 2010

TO: Brian Harris-Kojetin and Shelly Martinez, OMB

FROM: Lisa Hudson, NCES

THROUGH: Kashka Kubzdela, NCES

RE: Response to 08-13-10 OMB Passback for ATES 2010 Pilot Test

All revisions have been made in tracked changes in the attached “Volume 1” and “ATES Extended Topical Survey” documents. (Note that the table of contents for the “Volume 1” document will not be accurate until tracked changes are accepted.)

Q1. A9 – Please include $0 as a control condition for the incentives experiment and provide the minimum detectable effects for differences in response rates between the conditions (using 80% power and alpha=.05).

Response: Change made. See p. 6, 17, and 18 in the “Volume 1” document.

Q2. Please ensure that all promises of “confidentiality” are removed and that the same NCES pledge is used consistently in all places.

Response: Change made. Confidentiality text was changed for the telephone follow-up (see “Volume 1” p. 7) and survey instrument item IN3 (see “ATES Extended Topical Survey”).

Q3. Pease clarify how the adult respondent will be selected from within households.

Response: Change made. See p. 12 in the “Volume 1” document.

Q4. One of our key reviewers would like to see the following items added. Please consider how and where these might be incorporated or how we might best be able to obtain this kind of information. Has any testing been conducted on items similar to these in your work so far?

Do you have a license or certification that is required by a federal, state, or local government agency to do your job? Y/N/in process

Would someone who does not have a license or certificate be legally allowed to do your job? Y/N

Is everyone who does your job eventually required to have a license or certification by a federal, state, or local government agency? Y/N

Response: The data collected in the ATES Pilot Test will be used to make recommendations for a core set of 3-5 items that can be used by NCES and other federal statistical agencies to enumerate professional certifications and education certificates in the United States. In this pilot data collection, we are only including items that have been developed and tested for this limited purpose. We have not tested items similar to these in our work thus far. In the future, our goal is to expand the scope of this work to collect more detailed information on certifications, as the reviewer suggests. We will therefore keep the reviewer’s questions in mind for the next stage of our credentials work, where they will be very applicable.