The Mantel-Haenszel estimator is one of the most popular techniques for measuring differential item functioning (DIF). A generalization of this estimator is applied to the context of DIF to compare items by taking the covariance of odds ratio estimators between dependent items into account. Unlike the Item Response Theory, the method does not rely…

The growing fiscal cost of K-12 teacher pension plans and pension-induced labor market distortions have led to calls for teacher pension reforms. Dynamic structural econometric models are a useful way to analyze the fiscal and staffing consequences of current and alternative retirement plans. This article lays out the benefits of the structural…

Published research in scientific journals are critical resources for researchers as primary sources about: what is important in the field, the direction the field is headed, how the field relates to other sciences, and as a historical record for each of these. In this exploratory study, we analyzed the articles of five behavior analytic journals…

The goal of this research was to provide a general assessment framework of students' statistical reasoning in medicine, then build three scales to assess students' statistical reasoning ability in solving practical medical problems, including Description, Interpretation and Prediction. On that basis, the study designed a set of tools to assess…

Learning analytics needs to pay more attention to the temporal aspect of learning processes, especially in self-regulated learning (SRL) research. In doing so, learning analytics models should incorporate both the duration and frequency of learning activities, the passage of time, and the temporal order of learning activities. However, where this…

In multisite trials, learning about treatment effect variation across sites is critical for understanding where and for whom a program works. Unadjusted comparisons, however, capture "compositional" differences in the distributions of unit-level features as well as "contextual" differences in site-level features, including…

This paper aims to unsettle assumptions of generalizability and representativeness in quantitative research using queer framings and positionalities. We argue that generalizability and representativeness are tools of supremacist dominance that reinforce harmful and essentialist categories of identities for the false purpose of statistical…

The European Education Area aims to support Member States' efforts in enhancing the educational attainment of younger generations. In this policy context, there is a need for an objective tool to assess the educational outcomes of EU countries. The present report addresses this need by pursuing two objectives: (1) providing a comprehensive method…

In applications of item response theory (IRT) models, it is known that empirical violations of the local independence (LI) assumption can significantly bias parameter estimates. To address this issue, we propose a threshold-autoregressive item response theory (TAR-IRT) model that additionally accounts for order dependence among the item responses…

In continuous testing programs, some items are repeatedly used across test administrations, and statistical methods are often used to evaluate whether items become compromised due to examinees' preknowledge. In this study, we proposed a residual method to detect compromised items when a test can be partitioned into two subsets of items: secure…

Researchers are traditionally advised to plan for their required sample size such that achieving a sufficient level of statistical power is ensured (Cohen, 1988). While this method helps distinguishing statistically significant effects from the nonsignificant ones, it does not help achieving the higher goal of accurately estimating the actual size…

Social science datasets usually have missing cases, and missing values. All such missing data has the potential to bias future research findings. However, many research reports ignore the issue of missing data, only consider some aspects of it, or do not report how it is handled. This paper rehearses the damage caused by missing data. The paper…

Smoothing is designed to yield smoother equating results that can reduce random equating error without introducing very much systematic error. The main objective of this study is to propose a new statistic and to compare its performance to the performance of the Akaike information criterion and likelihood ratio chi-square difference statistics in…

Examples of the impact of statistical theory on assessment practice are provided from the perspective of a statistician trained in theoretical statistics who began to work on assessments. Goodness of fit of item-response models is examined in terms of restricted likelihood-ratio tests and generalized residuals. Minimum discriminant information…

Pairwise comparison is becoming increasingly popular as a holistic measurement method in education. Unfortunately, many comparisons are required for reliable measurement. To reduce the number of required comparisons, we developed an adaptive selection algorithm (ASA) that selects the most informative comparisons while taking the uncertainty of the…