While doctoral leadership programs have widely adopted Improvement Science (IS) as a signature pedagogy, few studies have examined how to best equip doctoral students with the knowledge and research skills they need to utilize IS in practice. More specifically, research is needed to determine the most effective and meaningful pedagogy for…

There is considerable debate and evidence about how governments should regulate contractors and other firms, but little on how government should regulate schools. In the first phase of this study, we focus on the correlation between indices of state charter school policies and measures of charter quantity (market share) and three measures of…

Research questions regarding how, for whom, and where a treatment achieves its effect on an outcome have become increasingly valued in substantive research. Such questions can be answered by causal moderated mediation analysis, which assesses the heterogeneity of the mediation mechanism underlying the treatment effect across individual and…

We consider two-level models where a continuous response R and continuous covariates C are assumed missing at random. Inferences based on maximum likelihood or Bayes are routinely made by estimating their joint normal distribution from observed data R[subscript obs] and C[subscript obs]. However, if the model for R given C includes random…

In 1996, the Chemistry Department at Norwich University converted its two-semester General Chemistry course from a traditional lecture to a Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) classroom. The change to POGIL teaching in Norwich General Chemistry classes was brought about by a steady decline in student performance, as demonstrated by…

Futsal, which can be defined as a new sports branch compared to football, has some shortcomings in comparison with football as well according to the studies carried out. Studies have rather focused on the movement characteristics of futsal players during the game and the physiological effects of games. On the other hand, there are only a limited…

A visual aid for teaching the formula for the Mann-Whitney U statistic is proposed, inspired by 'proof without words', a didactic exercise from the mathematics literature that uses a visual approach to justify mathematical statements, including formulas and theorems.

In cognitive diagnosis modeling, the attributes required for each item are specified in the Q-matrix. The traditional way of constructing a Q-matrix based on expert opinion is inherently subjective, consequently resulting in serious validity concerns. The current study proposes a new validation method under the deterministic inputs, noisy…

Several statistical models have been developed in educational measurement to determine and track the performance of students in longitudinal studies. An example of a model designed for such purpose is the latent transition analysis (LTA) model. The LTA model (Graham, Collins, Wugalter, Chung, & Hansen 1991) is a type of autoregressive model…

Longitudinal models provide researchers with a framework for investigating key aspects of change over time, but rarely is "time" itself modeled as a focal parameter of interest. Rather than treat time as purely an index of measurement occasions, the proposed Time to Criterion (T2C) growth model allows for modeling individual variability…

Studies measuring teachers' beliefs quantitatively by using self-report Likert scale instruments often face methodological difficulties. Such difficulties might be due to the fact that those instruments often provide less or no contexts. Whereas, several studies have shown that contexts at school, particularly contexts related to students'…

Low test-taking effort as a validity threat is common when examinees perceive an assessment context to have minimal personal value. Prior research has shown that in such contexts, subgroups may differ in their effort, which raises two concerns when making subgroup mean comparisons. First, it is unclear how differential effort could influence…

Scholars of civil society organizations (CSOs) have long been concerned with face-to-face interactions among participants at meetings, events, and activities--what we collectively call "convenings." Small-N ethnographies have uncovered substantial differences in the dynamics of convenings within and across CSOs. Large-N quantitative…

This reflective commentary on the character and role of methodology in educational and social inquiry recounts my 45-year journey as an applied researcher and evaluator, primarily in the domain of education. The journey starts in graduate school in the early 1970s, where the methodological challenge was to master "the proper methods, properly…

This study investigated the extent to which class-specific parameter estimates are biased by the within-class normality assumption in nonnormal growth mixture modeling (GMM). Monte Carlo simulations for nonnormal GMM were conducted to analyze and compare two strategies for obtaining unbiased parameter estimates: relaxing the within-class normality…