Current practice for conducting power analyses in hierarchical trials using survey based ICC and effect size estimates may be misestimating power because ICCs are not being adjusted to account for treatment effect heterogeneity. Results presented in Table 1 show that the necessary adjustments can be quite large or quite small. Furthermore, power…

Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) is a useful tool when analyzing data collected from groups. There are many decisions to be made when constructing and estimating a model in HLM including which estimation technique to use. Three of the estimation techniques available when analyzing data with HLM are maximum likelihood, restricted maximum…

A central assumption of identity theory is that adolescents reconsider current identity commitments and explore identity alternatives before they make new commitments in various identity domains (Erikson, 1968; Marcia, 1966). Yet, little empirical evidence is available on how commitment and exploration dynamics of identity formation affect each…

Researchers designing multisite and cluster randomized trials of educational interventions will usually conduct a power analysis in the planning stage of the study. To conduct the power analysis, researchers often use estimates of intracluster correlation coefficients and effect sizes derived from an analysis of survey data. When there is…

Like studies focused on the detection of a main or total effect, a principal consideration in the design of studies examining mediation is the power with which mediation effects can be detected if they exist (e.g., Raudenbush, 1997). However, unlike studies concerning the detection of main effects, literature has not established power formulas for…

The Woodcock-Johnson (fourth edition; WJ IV; Schrank, McGrew, & Mather, 2014a) was recently redeveloped and retains its linkage to Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory (CHC). Independent reviews (e.g., Canivez, 2017) and investigations (Dombrowski, McGill, & Canivez, 2017) of the structure of the WJ IV full test battery and WJ IV Cognitive have…

The traditional approach to estimating the consistency of school effects across subject areas and the stability of school effects across time is to fit separate value-added multilevel models to each subject or cohort and to correlate the resulting empirical Bayes predictions. We show that this gives biased correlations and these biases cannot be…

We compared students' performance on a paper-based test (PBT) and three computer-based tests (CBTs). The three computer-based tests used different test navigation and answer selection features, allowing us to examine how these features affect student performance. The study sample consisted of 9,698 fourth through twelfth grade students from across…

Researchers are often interested in studying how the timing of a specific event affects concurrent and future development. When faced with such research questions there are multiple statistical models to consider and those models are the focus of this paper as well as their theoretical underpinnings and assumptions regarding the nature of the…

To assess the direct and indirect effect of an intervention, multilevel 2-1-1 studies with intervention randomized at the upper (class) level and mediator and outcome measured at the lower (student) level are frequently used in educational research. In such studies, the mediation process may flow through the student-level mediator (the within…

The paper extends the literature on grade repetition in Brazil by (a) describing and synthesizing the main research findings and contributions since 1940, (b) enlarging the understanding of the inequity mechanism in education, and (c) providing new findings on the effects of the school socioeconomic composition and school proportion of repeaters…

The purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which faculty culture pertaining to student-centered pedagogy, student-faculty interactions, and faculty goals of enhancing spirituality is associated with spirituality in college students. While individual interactions with faculty have been the focus of spirituality research in recent years,…

The employment of expatriate teachers is explored here through the perspective of their organisational commitment. Drawing on the results of a public school teacher survey conducted in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi in 2014, this study used a multilevel framework to investigate the effects of teacher characteristics, school environment, and district…

Research on teacher and school academic optimism has abounded ever since these two constructs were confirmed and shown to have positive effects on student achievement. However, one overlooked research question is the nested association between teacher and school academic optimism. This study intends to fill this gap by using hierarchical linear…

The hierarchical network model (HNM) is a framework introduced by Sweet, Thomas, and Junker for modeling interventions and other covariate effects on ensembles of social networks, such as what would be found in randomized controlled trials in education research. In this article, we develop calculations for the power to detect an intervention…