A commonly used metric for measuring college costs, drawn from data in the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), is expenditure per full-time equivalent (FTE) student. This article discusses an error in this per FTE calculation when using IPEDS data, especially with regard to community colleges. The problem is that expenditures…

Ithaka S+R's Research Support Services program's most recent project, "Supporting Big Data Research," focused specifically on the rapidly emerging use of big data in research across disciplines and fields. As part of this study, they partnered with librarians from more than 20 colleges and universities, who then conducted over 200…

Citizen science is transforming the ways scientific knowledge is created, in that citizens participate in active scientific research, and large scientific databases can be accessed online. However, data availability does not guarantee public use or the relevance of these resources. This paper addresses the ways in which non-expert adults involved…

Introduction: Interrupted Time Series (ITS) studies may be used to assess the impact of an interruption, such as an intervention or exposure. The data from such studies are particularly amenable to visual display and, when clearly depicted, can readily show the short- and long-term impact of an interruption. Further, well-constructed graphs allow…

Diagnostic test accuracy (DTA) systematic reviews are conducted to summarize evidence on the accuracy of a diagnostic test including a critical evaluation of the primary studies. Where appropriate, the evidence is meta-analyzed to obtain pooled estimates of effectiveness. In this study, we reviewed and critiqued three DTA guidance documents with…

The purpose of this research note is to introduce a latent growth curve reconstruction approach based on the Tabu search algorithm. The approach algorithmically enables researchers to optimally determine at both the individual and the group levels the order of the polynomial needed to represent the latent growth curve model. The procedure is…

Systematic reviews with meta-analyses are powerful tools that can answer research questions based on data from published studies. Ideally, all relevant data is directly available in the text or tables, but often it is only presented in graphs. In those cases, the data can be extracted from graphs, but this potentially introduces errors. Here, we…

Inconsistent filtering of force plate data persists in published studies. Previous evidence suggests that low pass filtering produces the largest error when calculating jump height, but used jump height from unfiltered force plate data as the criterion. This study investigated the effects of low pass filtering on jump height calculated from force…

While a dot plot depicts data on a quantitative variable without distortion, a boxplot shows only the five-number summary. For large data, to aid in counting, we propose an IVY plot as a companion to a dot plot. Also, for large data, if the variable is approximately normally distributed, as a companion to a boxplot, we propose a Gaussian interval…

In co-located, multi-user settings such as multi-touch tables, user interfaces need to be accessible from multiple viewpoints. In this project, we investigated how this goal can be achieved for depictions of data in bar graphs. We designed a laboratory task in which participants answered simple questions based on information depicted in bar graphs…

This paper presents the R Analyzer for Large-Scale Assessments (RALSA), a newly developed R package for analyzing data from studies using complex sampling and assessment designs. Such studies are, for example, the IEA's Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment. The package…

Situations of catastrophic social change, such as COVID-19, raise complex, interdisciplinary research questions that intersect health, education, economics, psychology, and social behavior and require mixed methods research. The pandemic has been a quickly evolving phenomenon, which pressures the time necessary to perform mixed methods research.…

Item harvesters who memorize, record and share test items can jeopardize the validity and fairness of credentialing tests. Item harvesting behaviors are difficult to detect by the existing statistical modeling approaches due to the absence of operational definitions and the idiosyncratic nature of human behaviors. Motivated to detect the…

Machine learning (ML) provides a powerful framework for the analysis of high-dimensional datasets by modelling complex relationships, often encountered in modern data with many variables, cases and potentially non-linear effects. The impact of ML methods on research and practical applications in the educational sciences is still limited, but…

Much of the special education literature features single-case experimental designs, which traditionally require researchers to determine functional relations among variables through the visual analyses of line graphs. Evidence suggests factors aside from the data influence visual analysis, including line graph construction. Fields including…