I am conducting a study on whether the No Child Left Behind Act is a
misguided attempt by the Federal Government to show their committment
to education, or whether it is actually improving the quality of
education.

In my study, I will attempt to answer the following questions:

1. Whether there have been improvements in reading, math, and science
proficiencies of 3rd, 6th, 9th, and 12th graders.
2. If correlations exist between teacher certifications and/or
additional educational requirements and improved student performance.
3. How the requirements or bureaucracies of the act are improving or
impeding education?

To collect my data, I have been doing research on the US Dept of
Education websites and have found information on various parent and
teacher polls.

Now that I have collected my data I am to the point of testing. I want
to perform a statistical test on each question.

Without providing my specific data, I was curious about suggestions on
appropriate statistical tests to use. I don't need an explanation of
how to conduct these tests, but may if some names of various tests
could be thrown out there for me to research their methodology and
appropriateness to my data.

For instance, for question number 2 I was thinking the Chi-Square of
goodness-of-fit test could be employed. Here I was thinking I could
test if there is any relationship between the additional education
this legislation requires of teachers and the proficiency improvement
of students in various grade levels. Would this test be appropriate or
would the Chi-square test of independence be more appropriate?

Not being proficient in statistics, I just needed a bit of guidance on
testing methods.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!