LG Futures, The University of Huddersfield and the University of Plymouth were commissioned by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and the Department for Education (DfE) to develop a new model to show relative need to spend on Children and Young People's Services across local authorities in England. This formed part…

Multilevel models are often used to account for the hierarchical structure of social data and the inherent dependencies to produce estimates of regression coefficients, variance components associated with each level, and accurate standard errors. Social network analysis is another important approach to analysing complex data that incorporate the…

The issue of model uncertainty has been gaining interest in education and the social sciences community over the years, and the dominant methods for handling model uncertainty are based on Bayesian inference, particularly, Bayesian model averaging. However, Bayesian model averaging assumes that the true data-generating model is within the…

The present study investigated multilevel models posited to predict student approaches to homework. Participants were 1,072 middle school students in China. Results revealed that deep and surface approaches were positively associated with performance-approach. Furthermore, deep approach to homework was associated negatively with homework cost, yet…

For assessment scales applied to different groups (e.g., students from different states; patients in different countries), multigroup differential item functioning (MG-DIF) needs to be evaluated in order to ensure that respondents with the same trait level but from different groups have equal response probabilities on a particular item. The…

The paper investigates the potential of using international large-scale assessment studies for conducting follow-up studies testing models of educational effectiveness. The impact of teacher factors coming from the "dynamic model of educational effectiveness" and the "dialogic education theory" on student literacy achievement…

When analyzing large-scale assessments (LSAs) that use complex sampling designs, it is important to account for probability sampling using weights. However, the use of these weights in multilevel models has been widely debated, particularly regarding their application at different levels of the model. Yet, no consensus has been reached on the best…

This paper examines whether parental engagement in early childhood and preschooling act as substitutes, or whether their joint effect enhances students' learning outcomes. We utilize the TIMSS 2019 dataset and employ a hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) approach to analyze data from 52 countries, ensuring a robust examination of cross-national…

Estimates show that, in 2019, only 41 per cent of students completed lower secondary and 28 per cent upper secondary education in the sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) region (UNESCO, 2021). One of the reasons for the low completion rates is the poor transition across secondary education due to the significant impact of factors at individual, household,…