Mixture modeling is a widely applied data analysis technique used to identify unobserved heterogeneity in a population. Despite mixture models' usefulness in practice, one unresolved issue in the application of mixture models is that there is not one commonly accepted statistical indicator for deciding on the number of classes in a study…

Monitoring school performance increasingly uses sophisticated analytical techniques. This document investigates whether one such method, hierarchical growth modeling, yields consistent school performance results when different metrics are used as the outcome variable. It is examined as to whether statistical and substantive inferences are altered…