Educational Testing: Inferences In Relevant Subpopulations

essarily probabilistic in character. The essence of the scientific game is to make the description precise. The concept of population has received much attention in statistical literature in the works of Fisher (1956), Meehl and Rosen (1955), De Finetti (1974), and Lindley and Novick (1981). In this paper I attempt to show that the idea of relevant population is useful in considering a wide variety of otherwise unrelated problems in educational research. Much of the material in this paper is not new (see Novick, 1981a; Novick 1981c, Novick, 1982; Lindley & Novick, 1981). However, the emphasis and range of applications is distinctive. In places, some details are omitted with reference to one or more of the above papers.