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,…

Heterogeneity is commonplace in meta-analysis. When heterogeneity is found, researchers often aim to identify predictors that account for at least part of such heterogeneity by using mixed-effects meta-regression models. Another potentially relevant goal is to focus on the amount of heterogeneity as a function of one or more predictors, but this…

The article focuses on estimating effects in nonrandomized studies with two outcome measurement occasions and one predictor variable. Given such a design, the analysis approach can be to include the measurement at the previous time point as a predictor in the regression model (ANCOVA), or to predict the change-score of the outcome variable…

This study provides evidence about factors that facilitate the development of computational thinking (CT) in Costa Rican elementary school students, including the description of the contribution of the LIE++ proposal that addresses CT knowledge and practices through programming and physical computing projects. A quasi-experimental design was used…

Observable data in empirical social and behavioral science studies are often categorical (i.e., binary, ordinal, or nominal). When categorical data are outcomes, they fail to maintain the scale and distributional properties of linear regression and factor analysis. Attempting to estimate model parameters for categorical outcome data with the…

The ability of universities and colleges to predict the success of admitted students continues to be a key concern of higher education officials. Apart from a desire to see students have successful academic careers, there is also the fiscal reality of greater tuition revenues providing needed support for university budgets. Using administrative…

The present simulation study indicates that a method where the regression effect of a predictor (X) on an outcome at follow-up (Y1) is calculated while adjusting for the outcome at baseline (Y0) can give spurious findings, especially when there is a strong correlation between X and Y0 and when the test-retest correlation between Y0 and Y1 is…

The commenter's proposal may be a reasonable method for addressing uncertainty in predictive modeling, where the goal is to predict "y." In a treatment effects framework, where the goal is causal inference by conditioning-on-observables, the commenter's proposal is deeply flawed. The proposal (1) ignores the definition of…

We consider two-level models where a continuous response R and continuous covariates C are assumed missing at random. Inferences based on maximum likelihood or Bayes are routinely made by estimating their joint normal distribution from observed data R[subscript obs] and C[subscript obs]. However, if the model for R given C includes random…

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,…

Researchers and data analysts are sometimes faced with the problem of very small samples, where the number of variables approaches or exceeds the overall sample size; i.e. high dimensional data. In such cases, standard statistical models such as regression or analysis of variance cannot be used, either because the resulting parameter estimates…

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…

Survival is difficult to estimate when observation periods of individuals differ in length. Students imagine sailing the Titanic and then recording whether they "live" or "die." A clever algorithm is performed which results in the Kaplan-Meier estimate of survival.

The goal of this paper is to promote computational thinking among mathematics, engineering, science and technology students, through hands-on computer experiments. These activities have the potential to empower students to learn, create and invent with technology, and they engage computational thinking through simulations, visualizations and data…

Introduction: This study analyses the predictive role of several specific components of early numerical skills on the fluency calculation. Method: A total of 122 students (Mean age = 69.89 months; SD = 3.44), 54 girls and 68 boys participated in the study. The early numeracy skills were assessed by the end of pre primary school education, and…