Cost-effectiveness analysis is a widely used educational evaluation tool. The randomized controlled trials that aim to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of the treatment are commonly referred to as randomized cost-effectiveness trials (RCETs). This study provides methods of power analysis for two-level multisite RCETs. Power computations take…

This article reviews PROC IRT, which was added to Statistical Analysis Software in 2014. We provide an introductory overview of a free version of SAS, describe what PROC IRT offers for item response theory (IRT) analysis and how one can use PROC IRT, and discuss how other SAS macros and procedures may compensate the IRT functionalities of PROC IRT.

Equivalence assessment is becoming an increasingly important topic in many application areas including behavioral and social sciences research. Although there exist more powerful tests, the two one-sided tests (TOST) procedure is a technically transparent and widely accepted method for establishing statistical equivalence. Alternatively, a direct…

Given the natural hierarchical structure in school-setting data, multilevel modeling (MLM) has been widely employed in education research using a number of different statistical software packages. The purpose of this article is to review a recent feature of Stat-JR, the statistical analysis assistants (SAAs) embedded in Stat-JR (Version 1.0.5),…

In this article, we review four software packages for implementing propensity score analysis in R: "Matching, MatchIt, PSAgraphics," and "twang." After briefly discussing essential elements for propensity score analysis, we apply each package to a data set from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study in order to estimate the…

The purpose of this article is to introduce and review the capability and performance of the Stata item response theory (IRT) package that is available from Stata v.14, 2015. Using a simulated data set and a publicly available item response data set extracted from Programme of International Student Assessment, we review the IRT package from…

Mixed-effects models (MEMs) and latent growth models (LGMs) are often considered interchangeable save the discipline-specific nomenclature. Software implementations of these models, however, are not interchangeable, particularly with small sample sizes. Restricted maximum likelihood estimation that mitigates small sample bias in MEMs has not been…

Applications of multilevel models to continuous outcomes nearly always assume constant residual variance and constant random effects variances and covariances. However, modeling heterogeneity of variance can prove a useful indicator of model misspecification, and in some educational and behavioral studies, it may even be of direct substantive…

Researchers often compare the relationship between an outcome and covariate for two or more groups by evaluating whether the fitted regression curves differ significantly. When they do, researchers need to determine the "significance region," or the values of the covariate where the curves significantly differ. In analysis of covariance (ANCOVA),…

We describe the design and implementation of a web-based statistical program--the Interactive Profiler (IP). The prototypical program, developed in Java, was motivated by the need for the general public to query against data collected from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a large-scale US survey of the academic state of…