Understanding software modelers' difficulties and evaluating their performance is crucial to Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) education. The software modeling process contains fine-grained information about the modelers' analysis and thought processes. However, existing research primarily focuses on identifying obvious issues in the software…

Research and policy reports estimate that 10%-40% of U.S. children and adolescents currently have or very recently have had at least one significant mental health condition. Students who exhibit substantial behavior and emotional problems in school often show less severe problems when younger. Screening for less severe problems at younger ages can…

In scholarly research, racial categories are typically taken for granted. However, race categories vary over time and geography and reflect the social beliefs of the people who use them. Informed by quantitative critical race theory analysis, we interrogate how race categories align (or not) with 24,000 U.S. higher education students' responses to…

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by impairments in many functional areas requiring long-term interventions to promote autonomy. This study aims to map The Sensory Profile™ 2 (SP-2), one of the most widely used assessment tools in children with ASD, with the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health for…

Student evaluations of teaching (SET) act as the primary means to gauge instructor effectiveness. Likewise, SETs provide the primary qualitative feedback to instructors via student comments. However, mostly students with strong feelings tend to write comments. Among the most recallable are toxic comments: comments that are unhelpful/hurtful in…

Preschool children considered at risk for future reading difficulties experience unique and complex combinations of risk factors. In this exploratory study, we used latent profile analysis (LPA) to investigate the underlying classifications of children identified as at-risk for reading difficulties (N = 281) along selected cognitive,…

Behavioral and emotional disorders in childhood can have lasting impacts in areas such as education and future employment, often extending into adulthood. Identifying the potential disorders in children's early grades is beneficial to provide proactive assistance. In this study, we employed a well-validated scale - the Strengths and Difficulties…

This study explores machine learning (ML) approaches for identifying gifted students by integrating academic and socioemotional characteristics from the data collected with the Having Opportunities Promotes Excellence teacher rating scale. By using the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and ML approaches, including support vector machine (SVM) and…

It is very important to identify talented students as soon as they are admitted to college so that appropriate resources are provided and allocated to them to optimize and excel in their education. Currently, this process is labor-intensive and time-consuming, as it involves manual reviews of each student's academic record. This raises the…

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (2004) allows alternate pathways for school districts to identify and classify students with a specific learning disability (SLD). Response to Intervention (RtI) is one of the frameworks schools can use when eliminating the use of the discrepancy model. The premise of RtI posits that…

This paper investigates the differential effectiveness of teachers across student populations, with a focus on gifted and talented (GT) students. Using data from Los Angeles, we estimate teacher effectiveness (proxied by value-added measures (VAMs) of teachers' contributions to student achievement growth) for GT students and examine how they are…

Feasible and accurate assessment tools developed for non-specialists are needed to scale community-based models of autism evaluation. The purpose of this study was to evaluate use of the Screening Tool for Autism in Toddlers and Young Children (STAT) when used by primary care practitioners (n = 10) across a statewide system of early diagnosis set…

We use data from Michigan and an interrupted time series strategy to show how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted special education identifications and discontinuations. We find a substantial decrease in K-5 identifications and discontinuations during the 2019 to 2020 and 2020 to 2021 school years. Identifications fell by 19% and 12% in the first two…

The International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health is a biopsychosocial framework of health-related functioning designed to provide a unifying system for health care, social services, education, and policy sectors. Since its publication in 2001, the International Classification of Functioning has been used to guide clinical…