Children live complex social lives that has various aspects, including intimate friendships, peer-acceptance and bullying dynamics which is usually studied separately in research. This study aims to investigate the interplays of these three important fields by analyzing the moderating effects of number of friendships on the relation between…

The Expectancy-Value model has been extensively used to understand students' achievement motivation. However, recent studies propose the inclusion of cost as a separate construct from values, leading to the development of the Expectancy-Value-Cost model. This study aimed to adapt Kosovich et al.'s ("The Journal of Early Adolescence", 35,…

Background: Efficacy trials in education often possess a motivating theory of change: how and why should the desired improvement in outcomes occur as a consequence of the intervention? In scenarios with repeated measurements, certain subgroups may be more or less likely to manifest a treatment effect; the theory of change (TOC) provides guidance…

Brief experimental analysis (BEA) is frequently used to drive intervention selection decisions for students in need of intensive reading fluency intervention. Researchers have demonstrated that most BEA results for students with reading fluency difficulties are undifferentiated when considering the standard error of measurement (SEM) of…

We examined how raters and tasks influence measurement error in writing evaluation and how many raters and tasks are needed to reach a desirable level of 0.90 and 0.80 reliabilities for children in Grades 3 and 4. A total of 211 children (102 boys) were administered three tasks in narrative and expository genres, respectively, and their written…

We examined how raters and tasks influence measurement error in writing evaluation and how many raters and tasks are needed to reach a desirable level of 0.90 and 0.80 reliabilities for children in Grades 3 and 4. A total of 211 children (102 boys) were administered three tasks in narrative and expository genres, respectively, and their written…

This dissertation comprises three papers that propose, discuss, and illustrate models to make improved inferences about research questions regarding student achievement in education. Addressing the types of questions common in educational research today requires three different "extensions" to traditional educational assessment: (1)…

Phonics was identified as one of the critical components in reading development by the National Reading Panel. Over time, research has repeatedly identified phonics as important to early reading development. Given the compelling evidence supporting the teaching of phonics in early reading, it is critical to make sure that instructional decisions…

Effective policymaking requires understanding the causal effects of competing proposals. Relevant causal quantities include proposals' expected effect on different groups of recipients, the impact of policies over time, the potential trade-offs between competing objectives, and, ultimately, the optimal policy. This dissertation studies causal…

Recently, educational researchers and practitioners have turned to value-added models to evaluate teacher performance. Although value-added estimates depend on the assessment used to measure student achievement, the importance of outcome selection has received scant attention in the literature. Using data from a large, urban school district, I…

The dependability of externalizing behavior composites and subscale scores from the Behavior Assessment System for Children, Second Edition, Teacher Rating Scale-Child (Reynolds & Kamphaus, 2004) and the Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment, Teacher's Report Form for Ages 6-18 (Achenbach & Rescorla, 2001) was investigated.…

This study examined the effects of controlling the level of difficulty on the sensitivity of repeated curriculum-based measurement (CBM). Participants included 99 students in Grades 2 through 5 who were administered CBM reading passage probes twice weekly over an 11-week period. Two sets of CBM reading progress monitoring materials were compared:…