The current study details the development of an undergraduate business analytics course that combines components of both active and experiential learning. The course offering is designed to expose students from different backgrounds to an intermediate-to-advanced level of business analytics. The course is unique in that it was designed to be…

The tremendous growth of educational institutions' electronic data provides the opportunity to extract information that can be used to predict students' overall success, predict students' dropout rate, evaluate the performance of teachers and instructors, improve the learning material according to students' needs, and much more. This paper aims to…

Preferences for schools are important determinants of equitable access to high-quality education, effects of expanded choice on school improvement and school choice mechanism design. Standard methods for estimating consumer preferences are not applicable in education markets because students do not always get their first choice school. This review…

Missing data occur in virtually every study. This paper reviews some of the various strategies for addressing this problem. The paper also provides instructional detail on two accessible ways of estimating missing data, both using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences for Windows: (1) substitution of missing values with the variable mean…

Outlines concerns that must be addressed by those who advocate replacing statistical hypothesis-testing with alternative data-analysis strategies. Suggests that commonly recommended alternatives are not perfect and that various hypothesis-testing modifications can be implemented to make the process and its conclusions more credible. Hypothesis…

Missing data analyses have received considerable recent attention in the methodological literature, and two "modern" methods, multiple imputation and maximum likelihood estimation, are recommended. The goals of this article are to (a) provide an overview of missing-data theory, maximum likelihood estimation, and multiple imputation; (b) conduct a…

The paper analyses qualitative data on the topic of "international graduate student life," and especially on the cultural and academic adaptation processes that graduates go through in a new environment. The paper describes and discusses the process of the work on the data. It deals with the theories and hypotheses that were generated during the…

Discusses methodological issues concerning qualitative research and describes research practices that qualitative researchers use to address these methodological issues. Topics discussed include the researcher as interpreter, the emergent nature of qualitative research, understanding the experience of others, trustworthiness in qualitative…

Getting a "wrong" sign in empirical work is a common phenomenon. Remarkably, econometrics textbooks provide very little information to practitioners on how this problem can arise. The author exposits a long list of ways in which a wrong sign can occur and how it might be corrected.

Discussion of educational evaluation focuses on five topics critical to evaluating adaptive learning environment systems: (1) the system being evaluated; (2) standards, both engineering standards and standards for assessing learning outcomes such as task transfer; (3) gathering appropriate data; (4) processes for gathering data; and (5) rules for…

I. Klugkist, O. Laudy, and H. Hoijtink (2005) presented a Bayesian approach to analysis of variance models with inequality constraints. Constraints may play 2 distinct roles in data analysis. They may represent prior information that allows more precise inferences regarding parameter values, or they may describe a theory to be judged against the…

The techniques for calculating marginal costs in higher education are examined in detail. Marginal costs, as defined in economics, is the change in total cost associated with producing one additional unit of output. In higher education, the most frequently selected unit of output is a full-time-equivalent student or, alternatively, a student…

Sketches the development of business graphs in America. Examines their early use at Du Pont and the origin of the chart room around 1920, an important factor in the executive control systems at Du Pont. Draws lessons from this case study for managers and teachers of business communication. (PD)

Surveys the field and literature of geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial data representation as it relates to GIS. Highlights include GIS terms, data types, and operations; vector representations and raster, or grid, representations; spatial indexing; elevation data representations; large spatial databases; and problem areas and future…

This paper reviews analytic methods for estimating growth curves or developmental trajectories from longitudinal data. Traditional models for studying change are contrasted with a relatively new method, hierarchical linear models. Evidence is presented indicating that hierarchical linear models can overcome some of the methodological limitations…