Colleges have increasingly turned to predictive analytics to target at-risk students for additional support. Most of the predictive analytic applications in higher education are proprietary, with private companies offering little transparency about their underlying models. We address this lack of transparency by systematically comparing two…

The importance of teacher effectiveness is well supported by studies that document variation in teachers' abilities to contribute to student achievement gains. All else being equal, students taught by some teachers experience greater achievement gains than do students taught by other teachers. In response to initiatives to increase educator…

One major issue with large-scale assessments is that the respondents might give no responses to many items, resulting in less accurate estimations of both assessed abilities and item parameters. This report studies how the types of items affect the item-level nonresponse rates and how different methods of treating item-level nonresponses have an…

"Science and Engineering Indicators" ("Indicators") is a biennial congressionally mandated report that provides high-quality quantitative information on the U.S. and international science and engineering enterprise. The report employs a variety of presentation styles--such as narrative text, data tables and figures--to make the…

aimswebPlus® is an assessment, data management, and reporting system that provides national and local performance and growth norms for the screening and progress monitoring of math and reading skills for all students in kindergarten through 8th grade. aimswebPlus uses two types of measures: (1) "curriculum-based measures" (CBMs)--brief,…