Sociologists increasingly face choices among competing algorithms that represent reasonable approaches to the same task, with little guidance in choosing among them. We develop a strategy that uses simulated data to identify the conditions under which different methods perform well and applies what is learned from the simulations to predict which…

Amidst ongoing technological and social change, this article explores the implications for critical education that result from a data-driven model of digital governance. The article argues that traditional notions of critique which rely upon the deconstruction and analysis of texts are increasingly redundant in the age of datafication, where the…

The Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA) launched in 2016 to provide nationally comparable, publicly available test score data for U.S. public school districts. I introduce a special collection of six articles that each use SEDA to lend their questions and findings a national scope. Together, these articles demonstrate a range of uses of SEDA…

Measures of association, which typically require pairwise data, are widespread in many aspects of educational research. However, due to the need to reduce their content to equal numbers of units of analysis, they are rarely found in the analysis of textbooks. In this paper, we present two methods for overcoming this limitation, one through the use…

In several sporting events, the winner is chosen on the basis of a subjective score. These sports include gymnastics, ice skating, and diving. Unlike for other subjectively judged sports, diving competitions consist of multiple rounds in quick succession on the same apparatus. These multiple rounds lead to an extra layer of complexity in the data,…

School climate has received considerable attention in the literature and educational policy as a potential target for school improvement and school safety efforts. This paper provides a critical review and synthesis of the literature on school climate, with a particular focus on topics related to measurement, data collection, analysis, as well as…

The purpose of this article is to further the methodological cross-fertilization between qualitative social science researchers and psychoanalytic theoreticians by outlining and demonstrating a method of intertextual psychoanalytic-intersubjective analysis (IPIA) in qualitative research. The authors believe that such a bridge between the…

School climate has received considerable attention in the literature and educational policy as a potential target for school improvement and school safety efforts. This paper provides a critical review and synthesis of the literature on school climate, with a particular focus on topics related to measurement, data collection, analysis, as well as…

Missing data are ubiquitous in studies examining preventive interventions. This missing data need to be handled appropriately for data analyses to yield unbiased results. After a brief discussion of missing data mechanisms, inappropriate missing data treatments and appropriate missing data treatments, we review the current state of missing data…

We study learning outcome prediction for online courses. Whereas prior work has focused on semester-long courses with frequent student assessments, we focus on short-courses that have single outcomes assigned by instructors at the end. The lack of performance data and generally small enrollments makes the behavior of learners, captured as they…

This paper provides an account of the topological and its description of contemporary culture and use as a research methodology, a topological lens, generally, and in education research specifically. Some commentary is proffered on the relationships between the topological and the topographical, between relations and locations. A critical account…

Meta-analyses of clinical trials typically focus on one outcome at a time. However, treatment decision-making depends on an overall assessment of outcomes balancing benefit in various domains and potential risks. This calls for meta-analysis methods for combined outcomes that encompass information from different domains. When individual patient…

Single-case design (SCD) methodology, in which data are displayed in a line graph, can be helpful in determining intervention effectiveness in research and practice. Using visual inspection of graphed data, researchers and practitioners can explore the existence of a functional relationship between implementation of the intervention and a…

Supplemental Instruction (SI) is a voluntary, non-remedial, peer-facilitated, course-specific intervention that has been widely demonstrated to increase student success, yet concerns persist regarding the biasing effects of disproportionate participation by already higher-performing students. With a focus on maintaining access for all students, a…

This paper aims to illustrate how data visualization could be utilized to identify errors prior to modeling, using an example with multi-dimensional item response theory (MIRT). MIRT combines item response theory and factor analysis to identify a psychometric model that investigates two or more latent traits. While it may seem convenient to…