Computational thinking is believed to be beneficial for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) learning as it is closely related to many other skills required by STEM disciplines. There has been an increasing interest in integrating computational thinking into STEM and many studies have been conducted to examine the effects of…

Network meta-analysis has been an essential methodology of systematic reviews for comparative effectiveness research. The restricted maximum likelihood (REML) method is one of the current standard inference methods for multivariate, contrast-based meta-analysis models, but recent studies have revealed the resultant confidence intervals of average…

Before embarking on an individual participant data meta-analysis (IPDMA) project, researchers should consider the power of their planned IPDMA conditional on the studies promising their IPD and their characteristics. Such power estimates help inform whether the IPDMA project is worth the time and funding investment, before IPD are collected. Here,…

Many educational and psychological studies have shown that the development of students is generally step-by-step (i.e. ordinal development) to a specific level. This study proposed a novel longitudinal learning diagnosis model with polytomous attributes to track students' ordinal development in learning. Using the concept of polytomous attributes…

Purpose: This article provides a tutorial introduction to ordinal pattern analysis, a statistical analysis method designed to quantify the extent to which hypotheses of relative change across experimental conditions match observed data at the level of individuals. This method may be a useful addition to familiar parametric statistical methods…

The meta-analytic-predictive (MAP) approach is a Bayesian method to incorporate historical controls in new trials that aims to increase the statistical power and reduce the required sample size. Here we investigate how to calculate the sample size of the new trial when historical data is available, and the MAP approach is used in the analysis. In…

Teaching programming and computational thinking to young students has gained increasing attention in recent years. This great attention is attributed partially to the emergence of easy-to-use visual programming environments. These environments help students focus on the logic and concepts of programming and at the same time enhance their…

The cultivation of computational thinking (CT) skills is a key issue in talent cultivation today. This study reported a meta-analysis of 22 empirical studies to determine the effectiveness of using educational games to improve students' CT skills and the influence of various factors in instructional design on acquiring CT skills. The results…

Research showed that the capacity of making simple estimations begins to develop already at the age of five, but little is known about the early development of this estimation capacity and the strategies that underly it. The current study longitudinally followed the estimation capacity and strategies of 332 children from first to second grade of…

Many generalization studies in education are typically based on a sample of 30-70 schools while the inference population is at least twenty times larger. This small sample to population size ratio limits the precision of design-based estimators of the population average treatment effect. Prior work has shown the potential of small area estimation…

Unplugged activities as a low-cost solution to foster computational thinking (CT) skills seem to be a trend in recent years. However, current evidence of the effectiveness of unplugged activities in promoting students' CT skills has been inconsistent. To understand the potential of unplugged activities on computational thinking skills, a…

Fixed effects (FE) panel models have been used extensively in the past, as those models control for all stable heterogeneity between units. Still, the conventional FE estimator relies on the assumption of parallel trends between treated and untreated groups. It returns biased results in the presence of heterogeneous slopes or growth curves that…

Conducting research with human subjects can be difficult because of limited sample sizes and small empirical effects. We demonstrate that this problem can yield patterns of results that are practically indistinguishable from flipping a coin to determine the direction of treatment effects. We use this idea of random conclusions to establish a…

Even though game elements can increase motivation and engagement, they also might distract learners and thereby decrease performance and learning outcomes. In the current study, we investigated the effects of intrinsically integrated game elements on performance and learning outcomes. In a pre-post training study, 85 adult participants were…

E-assessments are becoming increasingly common and progressively more complex. Consequently, how these longer, more complex questions are designed and marked is imperative. This article uses the NUMBAS e-assessment tool to investigate the best practice for creating longer questions and their mark schemes on surveying modules taken by engineering…