[R-sig-ME] Science Fair data

[Doug Adams]

Hi everyone,

I had posted a question on the R Help forum previously about my syntax
of what I was trying to do with this dataset...  But now I'd like to
get an opinion if I'm thinking about it correctly after all.  I've got
data for a science fair, and here's what I have for each student:

School District
School
Teacher
Division (Elementary, Junior, High)
Student, and several scores for each student project

My committee & I decided there aren't enough teachers within each
school to warrant using Teacher as a level in a hierarchical model, so
we decided to go with just 'School' and 'Average Student Project' as
the two levels in the model.  The problem is that sometimes there is
only 1 student from a given school, although it doesn't happen too
often.  Is HLM theory robust enough that that will still give pretty
reliable results?

Does this all sound correct so far?   :-)   And another question: if I
were to include District as a third level, would this look right?

lmer(score ~ division + (1|school|district), data=Age6m)

Thanks for reading my novel  :)

Doug Adams