This article reviews the origins and use of the terms quasi-experiment and natural experiment. It demonstrates how the terms conflate whether variation in the independent variable of interest falls short of random with whether researchers find, rather than intervene to create, that variation. Using the lens of assignment--the process driving…

Sample size and statistical power are important factors to consider when planning a research synthesis. Power analysis methods have been developed for fixed effect or random effects models, but until recently these methods were limited to simple data structures with a single, independent effect per study. Recent work has provided power…

Social emotional learning (SEL) programs demonstrate that there may be significant benefits for children in early elementary education. Teachers' adherence, or use of resources, may be influenced by the type of training teachers participate in and years of experience teaching SEL. In this study, I aimed to determine if years of experience and type…

There is less attention on examining algorithmic fairness in secondary education dropout predictions. Also, the inclusion of protected attributes in machine learning models remains a subject of debate. This study delves into the use of machine learning models for predicting high school dropouts, focusing on the role of protected attributes like…

Adult students constitute a large and increasing proportion of community college enrollment across the United States. For personal, economic, and sociological reasons, the success of these students is vital to the students themselves, the institutions they attend, and society as a whole. The purpose of this dissertation was to examine results from…

Because studies examining youth drug use often have data with a high proportion of zeros, they often do not meet the assumptions for univariate or linear regression analyses that are typically used. We demonstrate the use of zero-inflated negative binomial regression models to address excessive zeros in drug use frequency on perceptions of…

The present study aimed to examine the parenting hassle experienced by a group of low-resourced families with children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The study was a follow-up to a randomized controlled trial (Kasari et al., 2014), which investigated the efficacy of two treatment interventions. The focus of the current study was to…