Matching methods are widely used in educational research to estimate causal effects when randomization is not feasible. These techniques pair treated units (such as schools receiving an intervention) with similar control units based on observable characteristics. However, current statistical inference procedures for these methods can produce…

Background: Education researchers typically estimate average program effects with regression; if they are interested in heterogeneous effects, they include an interaction in the model. Such models quantify and infer the influences of each covariate on the effect via interaction coefficients and their associated p-values or confidence intervals.…

This article describes an activity and resource from The New York Times that can be used to help learners cultivate critical statistical literacy. Critical statistical literacy involves understanding, interpreting, and questioning statistical information to make informed decisions (Casey et al., 2023; Franklin et al., 2015; Weiland, 2017). It is a…

The difference in differences design is widely used to assess treatment effects in natural experiments or other situations where random assignment cannot, or is not, used (see, e.g., Angrist & Pischke, 2009). The researcher must make important decisions about which comparisons to make, the measurements to make, and perhaps the number of…

Factor score regression (FSR) is widely used as a convenient alternative to traditional structural equation modeling (SEM) for assessing structural relations between latent variables. But when latent variables are simply replaced by factor scores, biases in the structural parameter estimates often have to be corrected, due to the measurement error…

Real-world applications of statistics are rarely 'off the top of your head'; however, statistics and research methods courses default to closed-book exams that only test rote learning. Trending research supports open-book exams testing the application of student knowledge rather than memory, however statistics courses in psychology are lagging…

An operational multistage adaptive test (MST) requires the development of a large item bank and the effort to continuously replenish the item bank due to concerns about test security and validity over the long term. New items should be pretested and linked to the item bank before being used operationally. The linking item volume fluctuations in…

Lagged dependent variables (LDVs) are often used as predictors in ordinary least squares (OLS) models in the social sciences. Although several estimators are commonly employed, little is known about their relative merits in the presence of classical measurement error and different longitudinal processes. We assess the performance of four commonly…

With unprecedented and growing interest in data science education, there are limited educator materials that provide meaningful opportunities for learners to practice "statistical thinking," as defined by Wild and Pfannkuch, with messy data addressing real-world challenges. As a solution, Nolan and Speed advocated for bringing…

Academic and practitioner interest in data science has increased considerably. Yet scholarly understanding of what motivates students to learn data science is still limited. Drawing on the theory of planned behavior, we propose a research model to examine the determinants of behavioral intentions to learn data science. In the proposed research…

As part of the effort to develop an improved oral reading fluency (ORF) assessment system, Kara et al. (2020) estimated the ORF scores based on a latent variable psychometric model of accuracy and speed for ORF data via a fully Bayesian approach. This study further investigates likelihood-based estimators for the model-derived ORF scores,…

As part of the effort to develop an improved oral reading fluency (ORF) assessment system, Kara et al. estimated the ORF scores based on a latent variable psychometric model of accuracy and speed for ORF data via a fully Bayesian approach. This study further investigates likelihood-based estimators for the model-derived ORF scores, including…

The phenomenon of statistics anxiety, prevalent particularly among students engaged in non-mathematical disciplines such as the social sciences, has been linked to a multitude of detrimental outcomes. Over time, several instruments have been developed to measure this construct; however, a comprehensive analysis of these instruments and an adequate…

Two novel proofs show that the sum of a specific pair of normal random variables is not normal are established in this note. This is one of the most often misunderstood facts by first-year students in probability theory and statistics. The first proof is concise using the moment generating function. The second proof checks whether the moments of…

As data have become more prevalent in academia, industry, and daily life, it is imperative that undergraduate students are equipped with the skills needed to analyze data in the modern environment. In recent years there has been a lot of work innovating introductory statistics courses and developing introductory data science courses; however,…