Imitated misbehaviours as a prevalent form of interaction between children often disrupt their classroom experiences. Teachers, being the authority figure in the classroom, are expected to manage imitated misbehaviours and create a classroom climate that can positively influence the children. In line with this, this study analyses the conceptions…

School attendance and absenteeism are critical targets of educational policies and practices that often depend heavily on aggregated attendance/absenteeism data. School attendance/absenteeism data in aggregated form, in addition to having suspect quality and utility, minimizes individual student variation, distorts detailed and multilevel…

An extraordinary amount of data is becoming available in educational settings, collected from a wide range of Educational Technology tools and services. This creates opportunities for using methods from Artificial Intelligence and Learning Analytics (LA) to improve learning and the environments in which it occurs. And yet, analytics results…

Fixed effects (FE) panel models have been used extensively in the past, as those models control for all stable heterogeneity between units. Still, the conventional FE estimator relies on the assumption of parallel trends between treated and untreated groups. It returns biased results in the presence of heterogeneous slopes or growth curves that…

Context: A perennial problem in applied statistics is the inability to justify strong claims about cause-and-effect relationships without full knowledge of the mechanism determining selection into treatment. Few research designs other than the well-implemented random assignment study meet this requirement. Researchers have proposed partial…

In fields (such as population health) where randomised trials are often lacking, systematic reviews (SRs) can harness diversity in study design, settings and populations to assess the evidence for a putative causal relationship. SRs may incorporate causal assessment approaches (CAAs), sometimes called 'causal reviews', but there is currently no…

Causal relationships are traditionally examined in quantitative research. However, this article informs the discussion surrounding the potential use of qualitative data to explore causal relationships qualitatively through an empirical illustration of a school leadership development team. As school leadership development is supposed to offer…

We are sometimes forced to use the Interrupted Time Series (ITS) design as an identification strategy for potential policy change, such as when we only have a single treated unit and cannot obtain comparable controls. For example, with recent county- and state-wide criminal justice reform efforts, where judicial bodies have changed bail setting…

With a growing consensus that students require more than purely academic support, schools across the country have increasingly adopted the community school model, a comprehensive approach to education focused on holistic student development. In these schools, centrally located site coordinators leverage partnerships with local organizations to…

Cluster memberships associated with the mediation effect are often changed due to the temporal distance between the cause-and-effect variables in longitudinal data. Nevertheless, current practices in multilevel mediation analysis mostly assume a purely hierarchical data structure. A Monte Carlo simulation study is conducted to examine the…

How do people come to opposite causal judgments about societal problems, such as whether a public health policy reduced COVID-19 cases? The current research tests an understudied cognitive mechanism in which people may agree about what "actually" happened (e.g., that a public health policy was implemented and COVID-19 cases declined),…

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of the causal connectivity of the statements ("low-medium-high"), elaboration question condition ("focused on the identification of main ideas-focused on the identification of speakers' emotions") and the modality of presentation of discourse ("oral-written") in the…

This paper analyzes the impact of college athletic reclassification for educational institutions in the United States. Most of America's colleges and universities offer athletic opportunities for their students under NCAA governance. The level of competition and associated resource requirements range from relatively low (Division 3) to high…

Reweighting a distribution to minimize a distance to a target distribution is a powerful and flexible strategy for estimating a wide range of causal effects, but can be challenging in practice because optimal weights typically depend on knowledge of the underlying data generating process. In this paper, we focus on design-based weights, which do…

Over the past two decades, family structures have diversified. International migration has led to a rise in the number of families in which at least one parent is foreign-born. Increases have also been observed in both the rate of partnership separation, leading to a greater number of single-parent households and an increase in the number of…