The District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) was created by Congress to provide tuition vouchers to low-income parents who want their child to attend a private school. The Scholarships for Opportunity and Results (SOAR) Act of 2011 also mandated an evaluation of the OSP program. This report examines impacts one year after…

Despite consensus that school absenteeism has negative consequences for children's life outcomes, until recently, little was known about the prevalence of absenteeism or its potential to moderate the impacts of school-based interventions. This study provides evidence from a randomized experiment of a preschool intervention involving 1,876 children…

We explore how the dynamics of the tutor-tutee relationship influence students' self-reliance and, ultimately, course performance. We examine 333 tutor and tutee pairs at a student success center at a public, comprehensive, university attended by approximately 5,000 undergraduates enrolled in more than 60 courses during spring 2015. The results…

This study investigated the relationship between self-directedness (as measured by the Adult Learner Self-Directedness Scale) and biographical factors such as age, race, and gender of adult learners enrolled at a South African open distance learning (ODL) higher education institution. Correlational and inferential statistical analyses were used. A…

The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) is a national network of public charter schools whose stated mission is to help underserved students enroll in and graduate from college. As of 2014-2015 the network included 162 elementary, middle, and high schools serving 59,495 students. Questions remain, however, about the ability of charter school…

There is currently a nursing shortage in the United States. By 2022, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) expects, the number of job openings for Practical Nurses (PN) will be 168,500, an increase of 25% over 2012 (BLS, 2014). Nursing education does not currently meet present, much less future needs. Nursing programs have limited space; according…

This dissertation is comprised of three essays, all of which focus on various impacts of economic recession. The first two essays utilize county-level data to examine differences between rural and urban response to economic downturn, while the final essay makes use of individual-level data to examine the impact of recession on enrollment in higher…

The aim of this paper is to provide an introduction of new imputation algorithms for estimating missing values from official statistics in larger data sets of data pre-processing, or outliers. The goal is to propose a new algorithm called IRMI (iterative robust model-based imputation). This algorithm is able to deal with all challenges like…

The purpose of this study was to empirically test two major theoretical models: a modified version of the social capital model (Pattie, Seyd and Whiteley, 2003), and the Informed Social Engagement Model (Barr and Selman, 2014; Selman and Kwok, 2010), to explain civic participation and civic knowledge of adolescents from Chile, Colombia and Mexico,…

"Cross-situational statistical learning" of words involves tracking co-occurrences of auditory words and objects across time to infer word-referent mappings. Previous research has demonstrated that learners can infer referents across sets of very phonologically distinct words (e.g., WUG, DAX), but it remains unknown whether learners can…

Learning experiences regarding the line of best fit are typically students' first encounters with the fundamental topic of statistical association. Students bring with them into these learning experiences prior knowledge and experiences about mathematical lines and their properties, namely slope. This study investigated the role students'…

The goal of this research was to examine reported service needs among individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) of all ages. Data were generated from a state survey that queried the needs of children, adolescents and adults with ASD. Logistic regression was used to compare service use and need among these age groups. Adults with ASD were…

The fit of cognitive diagnostic models (CDMs) to response data needs to be evaluated, since CDMs might yield misleading results when they do not fit the data well. Limited-information statistic M[subscript 2] and the associated root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA[subscript 2]) in item factor analysis were extended to evaluate the fit of…

in this article, Andrew Dean Ho presents a response to David Thissen's essay, "Bad Questions: An Essay Involving Item Response Theory (2016)," calling it an excellent contribution to the genre of commentaries on the field which joins the likes of the piece by Thissen's frequent collaborator, Howard Wainer (2010), who published "14…

An important concern when planning research studies is to obtain maximum precision of an estimate of a treatment effect given a budget constraint. When research designs have a "multilevel" or "hierarchical" structure changes in sample size at different levels of the design will impact precision differently. Furthermore, there…