Background: For decades, education researchers have relied on the work of Campbell, Cook, and Shadish to help guide their thinking about valid impact estimates in the social sciences (Campbell & Stanley, 1963; Shadish et al., 2002). The foundation of this work is the "validity typology" and its associated "threats to…

The authors of the focus article describe an important issue related to the use and interpretation of causal indicators within the context of structural equation modeling (SEM). In the focus article, the authors illustrate with simulated data the effects of omitting a causal indicator. Since SEMs are used extensively in the social and behavioral…

Despite the prevalence of research on the Community of Inquiry framework and its associated measurement instrument, more research is needed to re-evaluate the factor structure, study the effects of covariates or measurement invariance, and explore the relationships among the three presences. Results of this study indicated that (a) teaching,…