The partial correlation coefficient (PCC) is used to quantify the linear relationship between two variables while taking into account/controlling for other variables. Researchers frequently synthesize PCCs in a meta-analysis, but two of the assumptions of the common equal-effect and random-effects meta-analysis model are by definition violated.…

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) introduced creative thinking as an innovative domain in 2022. This paper examines the unique methodological issues in international assessments and the implications of measuring creative thinking within PISA's framework, including stratified sampling, rotated form designs, and a distinct…

Biased sampling occurs frequently in economics, epidemiology, and medical studies either by design or due to data collecting mechanism. Failing to take into account the sampling bias usually leads to incorrect inference. We propose a unified estimation procedure and a computationally fast resampling method to make statistical inference for…

While regression discontinuity has usually been applied retrospectively to secondary data, it is even more attractive when applied prospectively. In a prospective design, data collection can be focused on cases near the discontinuity, thereby improving internal validity and substantially increasing precision. Furthermore, such prospective…

Methodologies to identify and enumerate children outside of family care vary as do the vulnerability categories of the children themselves. Children outside of family care is a broad term encompassing children absent of permanent family care, e.g., institutionalized children, children on/of the street, child-headed households, separated or…

How can humans acquire relational representations that enable analogical inference and other forms of high-level reasoning? Using comparative relations as a model domain, we explore the possibility that bottom-up learning mechanisms applied to objects coded as feature vectors can yield representations of relations sufficient to solve analogy…

In multilevel modeling, group-level variables (L2) for assessing contextual effects are frequently generated by aggregating variables from a lower level (L1). A major problem of contextual analyses in the social sciences is that there is no error-free measurement of constructs. In the present article, 2 types of error occurring in multilevel data…

Early on during word recognition, letter positions are not accurately coded. Evidence for this comes from transposed-letter (TL) priming effects, in which letter strings generated by transposing two adjacent letters (e.g., "jugde") produce large priming effects, more than primes with the letters replaced in the corresponding position (e.g.,…

In this paper we discuss several key challenges encountered when conducting a study of the continuity of participation in the child care subsidy program. While many of these issues are familiar to those who have studied participation dynamics in other assistance programs, and to those familiar with survival analysis, we describe these challenges…

We review the concept of response to intervention (RtI) as it is being applied to emotional and behavioral disorders (EDB) in the early part of the 21st century, examining how it differs from and incorporates features of other approaches to addressing those problems, including pre-referral interventions, applied behavior analysis, functional…

Practitioner use of the revised Individual Child Engagement Record--Revised (ICER-R) for observing children with disabilities in inclusive childcare is examined. Training in the use of the ICER-R, which includes both a momentary time sampling observation system and rating scales, was provided across two training phases with five to seven…

Effective teaching and teachers are key to producing high-performing students worldwide. So how can countries prepare teachers to face the diverse challenges in today's schools? The Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) helps answer this question. TALIS asks teachers and schools about their working conditions and the learning…

Equating functions are supposed to be population invariant, meaning that the choice of subpopulation used to compute the equating function should not matter. The extent to which equating functions are population invariant is typically assessed in terms of practical difference criteria that do not account for equating functions' sampling…

This exploratory study was built on research spanning three decades. Petersen, Marco, and Stewart (1982) conducted a major empirical investigation of the efficacy of different equating methods. The studies reported in Dorans (1990) examined how different equating methods performed across samples selected in different ways. Recent population…

For the past 25 years, methodological advances have been made in missing data treatment. Most published work has focused on missing data in dependent variables under various conditions. The present study seeks to fill the void by comparing two approaches for handling missing data in categorical covariates in logistic regression: the…