Alpha Omega Publications Your Partner in Christian Education Serving Christian schools with awardwinning Christian curriculum since 1977. Welcome to Alpha Omega. Alpha Omega LIFEPACSAlpha Omega publishes a few different lines of curriculum as well as their Switched On Schoolhouse and Monarch computer based programs. Alpha Omegas LIFEPAC curriculum was their core program from the beginning, with Switched On Schoolhouse and Monarch developed from that platform. The educational approach is traditional in many ways although the format is unusual. Alpha Omega LIFEPAC materials are unlike typical school textbooks in a number of ways. Children are placed at the appropriate starting point in each subject area in the program, and they work sequentially through a number of full color workbooks, called LIFEPACS, as they master the material in each one. LIFEPACs are called a mastery program since students are not supposed to move on to the next LIFEPAC until they have mastered the previous one. The LIFEPAC workbooks each contain instruction, information, questions with blanks, and tests. Everything except answer keys is included within the LIFEPACs. Although Alpha Omega LIFEPACS are similar in format to School of Tomorrow PACEs, Alpha Omega includes a variety of questions to encourage deeper thinking rather than simple recall of factual information. Children take tests as they complete each section of a workbook before proceeding to the next. Tests check on student mastery of current subject matter and also review previously mastered material. A second test is included within each LIFEPAC to be used as needed. Alpha Omega offers full curriculum for grades 1 1. Bible and electives. Non denominational Christianity is integrated throughout the material, not just in their Bible courses. Courses are available in complete sets for each subject for each grade level. For most courses, each boxed set includes ten LIFEPACS and a complete teachers guide which includes all answer keys, tests, and teacher helps for the subject for that year in a perfect bound volume. Grade 1 teachers guides are in two volumes because of their size. Subject areas are Bible, Math, Language Arts English, Science, and History and Geography for the elementary grades. Discover homeschool curriculum savings, discounts, product reviews, and helpful tips to choose the best homeschooling resources for your family and budget. Alpha Omega provides homeschoolers with fantastic options for individualized homeschool curriculum through SOS, Lifepac, Horizons, Monarch Weaver. History and Geography combine within one LIFEPAC strand. While you can buy complete grade level packages, you can also purchase subjects separately, selecting different grade levels if need be. Only a few of the LIFEPAC courses require the use of a supplementary book to complete the course. Describes how to calculate Cronbachs alpha coefficient for reliability in Excel by using a technique similar to that for KR20 as well as by using ANOVA. Sleipnir Das Ende. School of Tomorrow also known as ACE is a popular homeschool curriculum. Find out why by reading reviews posted by homeschooling parents who use SoT with their. Alpha Omega offers elective courses for many subjects such as art, foreign language, government, literature, health, speech, business, and worldview. Unlike School of Tomorrow, Alpha Omega emphasizes that their material should not be used by a child working totally independently but that parents need to be involved, supplementing with activities and other interaction from the teachers manuals to ensure an effective program. Even though the LIFEPACS enable children to work independently, parental involvement is essential for providing the complete learning experience intended by the publisher. Unfortunately, there is a tendency among home educators to ignore the teachers manuals and allow children to use the material completely on their own. Because this happens so frequently, I recommend that LIFEPACS be used with older learners junior and senior high who are independent, self motivated, and who do not need much hands on experience to learn well. However, if parents plan to use the material as designed by the publisher, then it can work with learners who need more parental interaction. The LIFEPAC approach can be a real boon to parents with many children especially when there are large gaps between oldest and youngest or to parents who feel inadequate to help their children in particular subjects. Alpha Curriculum' title='Alpha Curriculum' />Alpha Omega offers a Parent Starter Kit which includes some basics for beginning homeschoolers, a scope and sequence for the curriculum, a sample LIFEPAC plus step by step instructions on how to use the LIFEPACS which covers organization, administration, and record keeping. Free placement tests are available online for math and language arts. Inexpensive print placement tests for math and language arts as well as for Bible, history and geography, and science are available individually or as a set. Tests are not timed and they are parent administered. Step by step instructions show how to administer the tests, grade them, analyze the results, and determine which Alpha Omega LIFEPACS to order. The placement tests might also be useful as a general diagnostic testing tool for others not using LIFEPACS. As of the summer of 2. The content itself for some subject areas has been updated, but some LIFEPACs retain copyrights from the 1. Most significantly, the math courses have been heavily revised and updated for better alignment with the more rigorous coverage offered by other publishers. Cronbachs Alpha Real Statistics Using Excel. One problem with the split half method is that the reliability estimate obtained using any random split of the items is likely to differ from that obtained using another. One solution to this problem is to compute the Spearman Brown corrected split half reliability coefficient for every one of the possible split halves and then find the mean of those coefficients. This is the motivation for Cronbachs alpha. Cronbachs alpha is superior to Kuder and Richardson Formula 2. In particular, it can be used for testing with partial credit and for questionnaires using a Likert scale. Definition 1 Given variable x. Cronbachs alpha is defined to be. Property 1 Let xj tj ej where each ej is independent of tj and all the ej are independent of each other. Also let x. 0  and t. Then the reliability of x. Cronbachs alpha. Here we view the xj as the measured values, the tj as the true values and the ej as the measurement error values. Click here for a proof of Property 1. Observation Cronbachs alpha provides a useful lower bound on reliability as seen in Property 1. Cronbachs alpha will generally increase when the correlations between the items increase. For this reason the coefficient measures the internal consistency of the test. Alphaphonics-cover-500x333.jpg' alt='Alpha Curriculum' title='Alpha Curriculum' />Its maximum value is 1, and usually its minimum is 0, although it can be negative see below. A commonly accepted rule of thumb is that an alpha of 0. Very high reliability 0. These are only guidelines and the actual value of Cronbachs alpha will depend on many things. E. g. as the number of items increases, Cronbachs alpha tends to increase too even without any increase in internal consistency. The goal in designing a reliable instrument is for scores on similar items to be related internally consistent, but for each to contribute some unique information as well. ALP3rdGradeBibleInside_7.jpg' alt='Alpha Curriculum' title='Alpha Curriculum' />Observation There are an number reasons why Cronbachs alpha could be low or even negative even for a perfectly valid test. Two such reasons are reverse coding and multiple factors. Reverse coding Suppose you use a Likert scale of 1 to 7 with 1 meaning strongly disagree and 7 meaning strongly agree. Suppose two of your questions are Q1 I like pizza and Q2. I dislike pizza. These questions ask the same thing, but with reverse wording. In order to apply Cronbachs alpha properly you need to reverse the scoring of any negatively phrased question, Q2. Alpha Curriculum South Africa' title='Alpha Curriculum South Africa' />Thus if a response to Q2. Multiple factors Cronbachs alpha is useful where all the questions are testing more or less the same thing, called a factor. If there are multiple factors then you need to determine which questions are testing which factors. If say there are 3 factors e. You then calculate Cronbachs alpha for each of the three tests. The process of determining these hidden factors and splitting the test by factor is called Factor Analysis see Factor Analysis. Example 1 Calculate Cronbachs alpha for the data in Example 1 of Kuder and Richardson Formula 2. Figure 1 below. Figure 1 Cronbachs Alpha for Example 1. The worksheet in Figure 1 is very similar to the worksheet in Figure 1 of Kuder and Richardson Formula 2. Super Bounce Out Crack Windows. Row 1. 7 contains the variance for each of the questions. E. g. the variance for question 1 cell B1. VARPB4 B1. 5. Other key formulas used to calculate Cronbachs alpha in Figure 1 are described in Figure 2. Figure 2 Key formulas for the worksheet in Figure 1. We see from cell B2. Cronbachs alpha. KR2. Example 1 of Kuder and Richardson Formula 2. Observation If the variances of the xj vary widely, the xj can be standardized to obtain a standard deviation of 1 prior to calculating Cronbachs alpha. Observation To determine how each question on a test impacts the reliability, Cronbachs alpha can be calculated after deleting the ith variable, for each i k. Thus for a test with k questions, each with score xj, Cronbachs alpha is calculated for for all i where. If the reliability coefficient increases after an item is deleted, you can assume that the item is not highly correlated with the other items. Conversely, if the reliability coefficient decreases, you can assume that the item is highly correlated with the other items. Example 2 Calculate Cronbachs alpha for the survey in Example 1, where any one question is removed. The necessary calculations are displayed in Figure 3. Figure 3 Cronbachs Alpha for Example 2. Download Free Solucionario Termodinamica Cengel 7 Edicion Pdf Espanol Software there. Each of the columns B through L represents the test with one question removed. Column B corresponds to question 1, column C corresponds to question 2, etc. Figure 4 displays the formulas corresponding to question 1 i. B the formulas for the other questions are similar. Some of the references are to cells shown in Figure 1. Figure 4 Key formulas for worksheet in Figure 3. As can be seen from Figure 3, the omission of any single question doesnt change the Cronbachs alpha very much. Removal of Q8 affects the result the most. Observation Another way to calculate Cronbachs alpha is to use the Two Factor ANOVA without Replication data analysis tool on the raw data and note that Example 3 Calculate the Cronbachs alpha for Example 1 using ANOVA. We begin by running Excels Anova Two Factor without Replication data analysis tool using the data in range B4 L1. Figure 1. Figure 5 Calculation of Cronbachs alpha using ANOVAAs you can see from Figure 5, Cronbachs alpha is. Figure 1. Observation Alternatively, we could use the Real Statistics Two Factor ANOVA data analysis tool, setting the Number of Rows per Sample to 1. We can also obtain the same result using the following supplemental function. Real Statistics Functions The following functions are provided in the Real Statistics Resource Pack CRONALPHAR1, k Cronbachs alpha for the data in range R1 if k 0 default and Cronbachs alpha with kth item i. CALPHAR1 array function which returns a row of Cronbachs alpha for R1 with each item removed. Thus for the data in Example 1, we can obtain the results shown in Figure 1 and 3 using CRONALPHAB4 L1. CRONALPHAB4 L1. Also the formula CALPHAB4 L1. B4. 3 L4. 3 of Figure 3. Example 4 Calculate Cronbachs alpha for a 1. Likert scores between 1 and 7 based on the 1. Figure 6. Figure 6 Calculation of Cronbachs alpha for Example 4. As you can see from Figure 6, Cronbachs alpha is 0. We get the same answer by using the supplemental formula in the Real Statistics Resource Pack, namely CRONALPHAB4 K1. Real Statistics Data Analysis Tool The Real Statistics Resource Pack provides the Reliability data analysis tool which can be used to calculate Cronbachs alpha. We now show how to calculate Cronbachs alpha for Example 4 using the Reliability data analysis tool. Start, as usual, by pressing Ctrl m and choose the Reliability option from the menu that appears. Fill in the dialog box that appears as shown in Figure 7. Figure 7 Dialog box for Reliability data analysis tool. The output is shown in Figure 8. Cronbachs alpha is shown in cell M3, while the Cronbachs alpha values with one question removed are shown in range M8 V8, which is the same as the output from CALPHAB4 K1. Figure 8  Cronbachs alpha option of Reliability data analysis tool. Additional information about Cronbachs Alpha can be found by clicking here. This includes how to perform hypothesis testing on Cronbachs Alpha, confidence intervals, statistical power and sample size requirements.