Text is a burgeoning data source for psychological researchers, but little methodological research has focused on adapting popular modeling approaches for text to the context of psychological research. One popular measurement model for text, topic modeling, uses a latent mixture model to represent topics underlying a body of documents. Recently,…

A distinctive feature of game-based learning environments is their capacity for enabling stealth assessment. Stealth assessment analyzes a stream of fine-grained student interaction data from a game-based learning environment to dynamically draw inferences about students' competencies through evidence-centered design. In evidence-centered design,…

Data from student learning provide learning curves that, ideally, demonstrate improvement in student performance over time. Existing data mining methods can leverage these data to characterize and improve the domain models that support a learning environment, and these methods have been validated both with already-collected data, and in…

Structural equation models with interaction and quadratic effects have become a standard tool for testing nonlinear hypotheses in the social sciences. Most of the current approaches assume normally distributed latent predictor variables. In this article, we present a Bayesian model for the estimation of latent nonlinear effects when the latent…

In studies of change in education and numerous other fields, interest often centers on how differences in the status of individuals at the start of a period of substantive interest relate to differences in subsequent change. In this article, the authors present a fully Bayesian approach to estimating three-level Hierarchical Models in which latent…

Researchers often have one or more theories or expectations with respect to the outcome of their empirical research. When researchers talk about the expected relations between variables if a certain theory is correct, their statements are often in terms of one or more parameters expected to be larger or smaller than one or more other parameters.…

The Second International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM2009) was held at the University of Cordoba, Spain, on July 1-3, 2009. EDM brings together researchers from computer science, education, psychology, psychometrics, and statistics to analyze large data sets to answer educational research questions. The increase in instrumented…