In this commentary, Mijke Rhemtulla, Riet van Bork, and Denny Borsboom write that they were delighted to see Bainter and Bollen's paper as a focus article in "Measurement." In their view, psychological researchers who use SEM rely too reflexively on reflective measurement, without sufficiently considering whether their indicators are…

This article is a commentary on the Focus Article, "Interpretational Confounding or Confounded Interpretations of Causal Indicators?" and a commentary that was published in issue 12(4) 2014 of "Measurement: Interdisciplinary Research & Perspectives". The authors challenge two claims: (a) Bainter and Bollen argue that the…

The work of Harris and Martin (2012) on student motivations for choosing to complete online courses provides information on an important area of development within post-secondary education. As noted by the authors, online learning is an expanding field and learning more about why students choose online courses and their experiences in such courses…

The appropriateness of using statistical data to inform the design of any given service development or initiative often depends upon judgements regarding scale. Large-scale data sets, perhaps national in scope, whilst potentially important in informing the design, implementation and roll-out of experimental initiatives, will often remain unused…

Providing basic education for all children by 2015 is one of the world's major educational objectives and teachers are crucial to achieving this. This article argues that not enough attention has been paid to the specific training needs of teachers in rural areas. Focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa it argues (i) that large-scale statistical data…

A robust finding in social psychology is that people judge negative events as less likely to happen to themselves than to the average person, a behavior interpreted as showing that people are "unrealistically optimistic" in their judgments of risk concerning future life events. However, we demonstrate how unbiased responses can result in data…

Like so many other concepts in education, multiculturalism is a term that has lost its potency because of miseducative examples that serve to maintain Whiteness as the cultural norm. At first it offered great promise, but now as a "social science" quite often one is just exchanging one type of essentialism for another. The "packet" approach that…

Maxwell, Cole, and Mitchell (2011) demonstrated that simple structural equation models, when used with cross-sectional data, generally produce biased estimates of meditated effects. I extend those results by showing how simple structural equation models can produce biased estimates of meditated effects when used even with longitudinal data. Even…

This paper is a reply to an earlier piece by Dave Hill, in this journal, that attacked critical race theory (CRT) in general and my own work in particular. I begin with a brief introduction to CRT which highlights the differences between the reality, of a broad and dynamic approach, as opposed to the simple and monolithic version constructed by…

Every two years congressional elections bring a new class of legislators to Washington, DC. The 112th Congress convenes this January and with it, more than 100 new Senators and Representatives, a new majority party in the House and with it new leaders, and in both the House and Senate many new Committee Chairs and legislative staff. The November…

Data collection and analysis are frequently neglected by school leaders over the course of the decision-making process. All schools gather large amounts of information about students and teachers, but most data are used to satisfy administrative requirements rather than evaluate school improvement in a systematic fashion. Apprehension regarding…

This volume contains four papers presented at a 1982 conference sponsored by the National Council on Employment Policy. It begins with a brief policy statement warning that labor force and productivity data systems face deterioration because of budget cuts that have forced a decline in the quality and quantity of the published information and…

Education statistics are rarely neutral; those who collect and analyze them have different purposes. In this article, Bracey discusses several principles of data interpretation to help educators avoid falling into statistical traps. For example, because such reports as A Nation At Risk contain many "selected, spun, distorted, and even manufactured…

Presents eight assumptions to help people understand quantification not only as it is traditionally approached--as a method of measuring reality--but also as a method of shaping reality. The categories we use in creating statistics change the way we perceive the world. (Author/IRT)

Participatory decision making seems to be the new development paradigm in international cooperation. It is still a long way, however, to achieve the objectives that are formulated by the international development actors. Non-state actors are only limitedly involved in the policy decision-making. In this paper, we argue that when these actors take…