This note is concerned with evaluation of location parameters for polytomous items in multiple-component measuring instruments. A point and interval estimation procedure for these parameters is outlined that is developed within the framework of latent variable modeling. The method permits educational, behavioral, biomedical, and marketing…

Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs) are an integral part of evaluating course outcomes. They are routinely used to evaluate teaching quality for the purposes of reappointment, promotion, and tenure (RPT), annual review, and the rehiring of adjunct faculty and lecturers. These evaluations are often based almost entirely on the mean or proportion…

The aim of the study is to analyze how classification performances change in accordance with sample size in logistic regression and CHAID analyses. The dataset used in this study was obtained by means of "Attentional Control Scale." The scale was applied to 1824 students and the analyses were done by randomly choosing the samples from…

This article reviews the evidence on the extent to which experts' perceptions of item difficulties, captured using comparative judgement, can predict empirical item difficulties. This evidence is drawn from existing published studies on this topic and also from statistical analysis of data held by Cambridge Assessment. Having reviewed the…

Social scientists are often interested in estimating the marginal effects of a time-varying treatment on an end-of-study continuous outcome. With observational data, estimating these effects is complicated by the presence of time-varying confounders affected by prior treatments, which may lead to bias in conventional regression and matching…

Count responses with grouping and right censoring have long been used in surveys to study a variety of behaviors, status, and attitudes. Yet grouping or right-censoring decisions of count responses still rely on arbitrary choices made by researchers. We develop a new method for evaluating grouping and right-censoring decisions of count responses…

The present guide provides a practical guide to conducting latent profile analysis (LPA) in the Mplus software system. This guide is intended for researchers familiar with some latent variable modeling but not LPA specifically. A general procedure for conducting LPA is provided in six steps: (a) data inspection, (b) iterative evaluation of models,…

In narrative synthesis of evidence, it can be the case that the only quantitative measures available concerning the efficacy of an intervention is the direction of the effect, that is, whether it is positive or negative. In such situations, the sign test has been proposed in the literature and in recent Cochrane guidelines as a way to test whether…

A new index of item discrimination power (IDP), dimension-corrected Somers' D (D2) is proposed. Somers' D is one of the superior alternatives for item-total- (Rit) and item-rest correlation (Rir) in reflecting the real IDP with items with scales 0/1 and 0/1/2, that is, up to three categories. D also reaches the extreme value +1 and -1 correctly…

Exploratory factor analysis is a statistical method commonly used in psychological research to investigate latent variables and to develop questionnaires. Although such self-report questionnaires are prone to missing values, there is not much literature on this topic with regard to exploratory factor analysis--and especially the process of factor…

The purpose of this study was to investigate a new way of evaluating interrater reliability that can allow one to determine if two raters differ with respect to their rating on a polytomous rating scale or constructed response item. Specifically, differential item functioning (DIF) analyses were used to assess interrater reliability and compared…

Evidence-based research is becoming increasingly important in educational research. Calculation and test methods available in statistical software packages such as SPSS and STATA are widely used. To evaluate teaching innovations such as blended learning against classical classroom settings, for example, previous studies have mainly applied…

Background: The association between problem behavior in children and adolescents and creativity has hardly been examined. The few studies available report contradictory findings. There is some empirical evidence that a low socioeconomic status coincides with lower creativity test achievements. Objective: The current study addresses the question…

The Michelson interferometer is one of the key experiments in modern physics when it comes to the topic of interference (Box 1). Experiments using interferometry have a high historic relevance as well as uses in current areas of research (quantum erasers, gravitational wave detection) and are used in higher education. Because of the high cost of…

This study compares two missing data procedures in the context of ordinal factor analysis models: pairwise deletion (PD; the default setting in Mplus) and multiple imputation (MI). We examine which procedure demonstrates parameter estimates and model fit indices closer to those of complete data. The performance of PD and MI are compared under a…