Determining how learners use MOOCs effectively is critical to providing feedback to instructors, schools, and policy-makers on this highly scalable technology. However, drawing inferences about student learning outcomes in MOOCs has proven to be quite difficult due to large amounts of missing data (of various kinds) and to the diverse population…

In almost all applications of measurement there is some sort of response by a human subject. Almost always, the response scale is ordinal, but almost always it is treated as if it were an interval measure. Methods for treating data ordinally are currently being developed in three areas: ordinal analysis for questionnaire responses, ordinal…

Problems in measuring change abound. For many purposes, a pretest score is best treated as any other measure obtained at the time of the pretest. Where appropriate, regression analyses that treat the pretest no differently from other independent variables, and the posttest as the dependent variable avoid many difficulties introduced by gain…