To enable optimal decision-making based on the best evidence available, open syntheses are called for. To make data accessible and comprehensible even for decision-makers without proficient knowledge in meta-analysis, a graphical user interface (GUI) provides flexible data visualizations including interpretation aids. Moreover, due to a growing…

Technological advances have led to an abundance of widely available data on every aspect of life today. Psychologists today have more information than ever before on human cognition, emotion, attitudes, and behavior. "Big Data in Psychological Research" addresses the opportunities and challenges that this data presents to psychological…

Across continental Europe, educational research samples are often divided by 'migrant background', a binary variable criticized for masking participant heterogeneity and reinforcing exclusionary norms of belonging. This study endorses more meaningful, representative, and precise research by offering four guiding questions for selecting relevant,…

Background: Online crowdsourcing platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), have become popular alternatives to the ubiquitous student samples used in psychology research. r/SampleSize, an alternative pool on the website Reddit, allows for online participant recruitment without compulsory or immediate payment, making it potentially useful…

Digital technologies play an important role in our daily lives. Smartphones and tablet computers are very common worldwide and are available for everybody from a very early age. This trend offers the opportunity to track digital usage data for psychological and educational research purposes. The current paper introduces two research projects, the…

Exploratory factor analysis is a statistical method commonly used in psychological research to investigate latent variables and to develop questionnaires. Although such self-report questionnaires are prone to missing values, there is not much literature on this topic with regard to exploratory factor analysis--and especially the process of factor…

Preregistration and registered reports are two promising open science practices for increasing transparency in the scientific process. In particular, they create transparency around one of the most consequential distinctions in research design: the data analytics decisions made before data collection and post-hoc decisions made afterwards.…

As frequent consumers and disseminators of research, school psychologists have an ethical obligation to critically evaluate the findings of studies (National Association of School Psychologists, 2010); however, this can feel burdensome when studies are behind paywalls and require hours to properly scrutinize. Particularly when studies utilizing…

Immersive virtual reality (VR) carries important potential, both for the creation of scientific knowledge and also for its communication. This is particularly important for studies of human spatial cognition, where psychologists now possess the power to combine the scale and fidelity of the real world with the malleability and control of the…

Many education researchers have advocated grounding abstract mathematical and scientific concepts in students' lived experiences, environmental interactions, and perceptions. This dissertation explores the causal effects of various grounding strategies in instructional settings, specifically on the topic of statistical sampling. The first chapter…

Data collected in psychological studies are mainly characterized by containing a large number of variables (multidimensional data sets). Analyzing multidimensional data can be a difficult task, especially if only classical approaches are used (hypothesis tests, analyses of variance, linear models, etc.). Regarding multidimensional models, visual…

Research based on single-case designs (SCD) are frequently utilized in educational settings to evaluate the effect of an intervention on student behavior. Visual analysis is the primary method of evaluation of SCD, despite research noting concerns regarding reliability of the procedure. Recent research suggests that characteristics of the graphic…

Inherent in applied developmental sciences is the threat to validity and generalizability due to missing data as a result of participant drop-out. The current paper provides an overview of how attrition should be reported, which tests can examine the potential of bias due to attrition (e.g., t-tests, logistic regression, Little's MCAR test,…

Reproducibility crises have arisen in psychology and other behavioral sciences, spurring efforts to ensure research findings are credible and replicable. Although reforms are occurring at professional levels in terms of new publication parameters and open science initiatives, the credibility and reproducibility of undergraduate research deserves…

Missing data are a persistent problem in psychological research. Peer nomination data present a unique missing data problem, because a nominator's nonparticipation results in missing data for other individuals in the study. This study examined the range of effects of systematic nonparticipation on the correlations between peer nomination data when…