Research has accumulated on the effects of teachers on student achievement, especially in mathematics. However, empirical evidence regarding the impact of formal teacher competence indicators presents a mixed picture. This study explores the influence of educational level, subject -- and grade-specific specialization, teaching experience, and…

Questionnaires in educational research assessing students' attitudes and beliefs are low-stakes for the students. As a consequence, students might not always consistently respond to a questionnaire scale but instead provide more random response patterns with no clear link to items' contents. We study inter-individual differences in students'…

Influencing major education policies in the US such as school vouchers and charter schools, market theory assumes that organizational autonomy, parental choice, and competition between schools improve the quality of education. However, whether those policies can influence the instructional core of schools is not well understood. Comparing private…

Concept-based teaching is presumably more effective than popular procedure-based instruction in helping students develop conceptual understanding, an important conceptual base for mathematics teaching reforms in many countries. This study examined the extent to which this assumption is true by controlling the influences of student socioeconomic…

Classical automated test assembly (ATA) methods assume fixed and known coefficients for the constraints and the objective function. This hypothesis is not true for the estimates of item response theory parameters, which are crucial elements in test assembly classical models. To account for uncertainty in ATA, we propose a chance-constrained…