This paper explored whether or not In School Suspensions (ISS) is effective in reducing student behavioral problems. Research was conducted with 6-8th grade students in a rural middle school in the upstate of South Carolina for the purposes of determining if ISS, in its current design a viable and effective method to reduce negative student…

School-wide positive behavior support (SWPBS) focuses on promoting social competence through the establishment of behavior expectations that are explicitly taught and reinforced by all teachers across all settings. This study investigated the validity of using adherence to SWPBS behavior expectations as a screening tool for predicting behavior…

Understanding adolescent self-concept is of great concern for educators, mental health professionals, and parents, as research consistently demonstrates that low self-concept is related to a number of problem behaviors and poor outcomes. Thus, accurate measurements of self-concept are key, and the validity of such measurements, including the…

In recent years, an increasing number of analyses in Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining (EDM) have adopted a "Discovery with Models" approach, where an existing model is used as a key component in a new EDM/analytics analysis. This article presents a theoretical discussion on the emergence of discovery with models, its…

Needs assessments in substance abuse prevention often rely on secondary data measures of consumption and consequences to determine what population subgroup and geographic areas should receive a portion of limited resources. Although these secondary data measures have some benefits (e.g. large sample sizes, lack of survey response biases and cost),…

There is evidence to suggest that the effects of behavioral interventions may be limited to specific types of individuals, but methods for evaluating such outcomes have not been fully developed. This study proposes the use of finite mixture models to evaluate whether interventions, and, specifically, group randomized trials, impact participants…