Group projects are widely used in higher education, but they can be problematic if all group members are given the same grade for a project to which they might not have contributed equally. Most scholars recommend addressing these problems by awarding individual grades, computing some kind of individual weighting factor (IWF) from peer and…

The author's goals in this exercise were to use an Excel project to teach students about the effects of changing states of nature on critical path emergence as well as compare the impact of the PERT beta and triangular distributions on project completion times. Previous research into the PERT (program evaluation and review technique) beta…

Bayesian methods incorporate model parameter information prior to data collection. Eliciting information from content experts is an option, but has seen little implementation in Bayesian item response theory (IRT) modeling. This study aims to use ethical reasoning content experts to elicit prior information and incorporate this information into…

Meta-analysis can necessitate the combination of parallel and cross-over trial designs. Because of the differences in the trial designs and potential biases notably associated with the crossover trials, one often combines trials of the same designs only, which decreases the power of the meta-analysis. To combine results of clinical trials from…

Response accuracy and response time data can be analyzed with a joint model to measure ability and speed of working, while accounting for relationships between item and person characteristics. In this study, person-fit statistics are proposed for joint models to detect aberrant response accuracy and/or response time patterns. The person-fit tests…

Purpose: This study aims to reveal effects of content balancing and item selection method on ability estimation in computerized adaptive tests by comparing Fisher's maximum information (FMI) and likelihood weighted information (LWI) methods. Research Methods: Four groups of examinees (250, 500, 750, 1000) and a bank of 500 items with 10 different…

Application of MIRT modeling procedures is dependent on the quality of parameter estimates provided by the estimation software and techniques used. This study investigated model parameter recovery of two popular MIRT packages, BMIRT and flexMIRT, under some common measurement conditions. These packages were specifically selected to investigate the…

Stan is a probabilistic programming language for specifying statistical models. A Stan program imperatively defines a log probability function over parameters conditioned on specified data and constants. As of version 2.14.0, Stan provides full Bayesian inference for continuous-variable models through Markov chain Monte Carlo methods such as the…

When researchers fit statistical models to multiply imputed datasets, they have to fit the model separately for each imputed dataset. Since there are multiple datasets, there are always multiple sets of model results. It is possible for some of these sets of results not to converge while some do converge. This study examined occurrence of such a…

In education, sample characteristics can be complex due to the nested structure of students, teachers, classrooms, schools, and districts. In the past, not many considerations were given to such complex sampling schemes in statistical power analysis. More recently in the past two decades, however, education scholars have developed tools to conduct…

The uncertainty arising from item parameter estimation is often not negligible and must be accounted for when calculating latent variable (LV) scores in item response theory (IRT). It is particularly so when the calibration sample size is limited and/or the calibration IRT model is complex. In the current work, we treat two-stage IRT scoring as a…

Coefficient omega and alpha are both measures of the composite reliability for a set of items. Unlike coefficient alpha, coefficient omega remains unbiased with congeneric items with uncorrelated errors. Despite this ability, coefficient omega is not as widely used and cited in the literature as coefficient alpha. Reasons for coefficient omega's…

Two new methods for the meta-analysis of factor loadings are introduced and evaluated by Monte Carlo simulations. The direct method pools each factor loading individually, whereas the indirect method synthesizes correlation matrices reproduced from factor loadings. The results of the two simulations demonstrated that the accuracy of…

Although immediacy is one of the necessary criteria to show strong evidence of a causal relation in SCDs, no inferential statistical tool is currently used to demonstrate it. We propose a Bayesian unknown change-point model to investigate and quantify immediacy in SCD analysis. Unlike visual analysis that considers only 3-5 observations in…

A mixed-effects item response theory (IRT) model is presented as a logical extension of the generalized linear mixed-effects modeling approach to formulating explanatory IRT models. Fixed and random coefficients in the extended model are estimated using a Metropolis-Hastings Robbins-Monro (MH-RM) stochastic imputation algorithm to accommodate for…