COVID-19 pandemic policies requiring disease testing provide a rich context to build insights on true positives versus false positives. Our main contribution to the pedagogy of data analytics and statistics is to propose a method for teaching updating of probabilities using Bayes' rule reasoning to build understanding that true positives and false…

The COVID-19 pandemic is arguably the worst crisis the world has faced, so far, in this new century. We haven't seen a pandemic like this since the "1918 Flu" at the beginning of the last century, and, as of this writing, there appears to be no end in sight. What those of us who're focused on quantitative methods have noticed, in…

Assessment is fundamental to school psychology, but its purpose has shifted from making predictions about children to improving outcomes for children. This commentary on the special issue focuses on screening and progress-monitoring decisions that can be used to solve student problems. We outline several psychometric and practical issues that…

This article describes the development of early warning indicators for high school and beyond in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) by the Value-Added Research Center (VARC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, working in conjunction with staff from the Division of Research and Evaluation at MPS. Our work in MPS builds on prior early warning…

Perhaps the greatest value of response to intervention (RTI) as a decision framework is that it brings attention to variables (e.g., mastery of prerequisite skills, frequency of instructional corrective feedback, reinforcement schedules for correct responding) that if changed might make a meaningful difference for students (e.g., child rate of…

Courses in clinical epidemiology usually include acquainting students with a single 2X2 table. All diagnostic test characteristics are explained using this table. This pedagogic approach may be misleading. A new didactic approach is hereby proposed, using two tables, each with specific analogous notations (uppercase and lowercase) and derived…