There has been a wealth of research conducted on the high school dropouts spanning several decades. It is estimated that compared with those who complete high school, the average high school dropout costs the economy approximately $250,000 more over his or her lifetime in terms of lower tax contributions, higher reliance on Medicaid and Medicare,…

Recent literature has underscored the critical role of treatment effect variation in estimating and understanding causal effects. This approach, however, is in contrast to much of the foundational research on causal inference. Linear models, for example, classically rely on constant treatment effect assumptions, or treatment effects defined by…

A gap exists in the information needed to make intervention decisions with preschool children who are unresponsive to instructional intervention. "Multi-Tiered System of Supports/Response to Intervention" (MTSS/RTI) progress monitoring is helpful in indicating when an intervention change is needed but provides little information on what…

Purpose: Responding to social work's grand challenge of smart decarceration, this study investigated whether Family Centered Treatment (FCT), a home-based service for juvenile court-involved youth, is more effective than group care (GC) in reducing recidivism. Outcomes are juvenile readjudication and commitment to placement, and adult conviction…

Since the seminal introduction of the propensity score (PS) by Rosenbaum and Rubin, PS-based methods have been widely used for drawing causal inferences in the behavioral and social sciences. However, the PS approach depends on the ignorability assumption: there are no unobserved confounders once observed covariates are taken into account. For…

Purpose: This paper aims to introduce matching in propensity score analysis (PSA) as an alternative statistical approach for researchers looking to make causal inferences using intact groups. Design/methodology/approach: An illustrative example demonstrated the varying results of analysis of variance, analysis of covariance and PSA on a heuristic…

The Goodenough-Harris Drawing Test (GHDT) is a non-verbal assessment designed to infer young children's levels of intellectual development and understanding via the collection of three human figure drawings (HFDs)--one each of a man, a woman and a self-portrait. This paper presents findings from a research project that applied the Rasch model for…

This study investigates whether the completion of an optional sandwich work placement enhances student performance in final year examinations. Using Propensity Score Matching, our analysis departs from the literature by controlling for self-selection. Previous studies may have overestimated the impact of sandwich work placements on performance…

We examined the role of self-efficacy in preventing bystander inaction in dangerous alcohol situations. Participants (N = 504) completed an online survey that assessed whether they had previously witnessed or intervened in alcohol-related emergencies, their self-efficacy for intervening, and their likelihood of intervening in the future.…

Randomized experiments are considered the gold standard for causal inference because they can provide unbiased estimates of treatment effects for the experimental participants. However, researchers and policymakers are often interested in using a specific experiment to inform decisions about other target populations. In education research,…

Biomodeling is the study of the structures and behaviors of interacting biological entities such as molecules, cells, or organisms. While physical and chemical processes give rise to various spatial and temporal structures, even the simplest biological phenomenon is infinitely more complex (Kling 2004). Over the past decade, much of biomodeling…

The relevance of this problem is related to the urgent need to explain peculiarities of anticipation and probabilistic forecasting in adolescence. It has revealed a contradiction: on the one hand, the problem of anticipation in ontogenesis is well developed, and, on the other hand, there remain understudied mechanisms of anticipation in…

Among the wide range of factors related to the acquisition of statistical knowledge, competence in basic mathematics, including basic probability, has received much attention. In this study, a mediation model was estimated to derive the total, direct, and indirect effects of mathematical competence on statistics achievement taking into account…

This work studied the entrepreneurial aspirations of 3,987 adolescents regarding self-employment and the influence of gender, age, nationality, type of school, location of the school, educational level and performance. The Logit model is used to analyze the data. The results indicate that the pupils' aspirations to be self-employed increase in the…

Growth curve modeling provides a general framework for analyzing longitudinal data from social, behavioral, and educational sciences. Bayesian methods have been used to estimate growth curve models, in which priors need to be specified for unknown parameters. For the covariance parameter matrix, the inverse Wishart prior is most commonly used due…