SAS

SAS (pronounced “sass”) is a computer software package that began as a project at North Carolina State University to analyze large amount of agricultural data collected through U.S. Department of Agriculture grants. Due to the need to develop a general-purpose statistical software package for agricultural data, the resulting program, the Statistical Analysis System, was popularly known as SAS, the basis for the software name and the corporate (i.e., SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC). Nowadays, SAS is a leading statistical package installed and used at different customer sites, including colleges and universities, governmental entities, pharmaceutical companies, and banks. The actual installation of the software can be customized at each site to satisfy different needs of the specific products. This entry describes the application of SAS in educational measurement and statistics. Specifically, this entry focuses on four SAS products—Base SAS, SAS/STAT, SAS/econometrics and time series (ETS), and SAS/IML—because the functions and procedures included in these products are frequently used by researchers in education.

It is not the intention of this entry to cover all the available tools provided by SAS, but an overview of what are commonly used is given. The content of this entry is organized as follows. First, some data management tools in SAS are introduced. Second, basic applications of statistical methods are briefly covered, which is immediately followed by more detailed discussions on advanced applications in educational measurement and statistics. Finally, this entry concludes with some useful resources. For simplicity and to avoid confusion, a particular SAS procedure will be referred to as PROC XXX instead of the XXX procedure throughout this entry.