Competency-based education in social work (CSWE, 2022) demands active learning methods that demonstrate professional competencies and practice behaviors. Role-plays and simulations are methods that link learning in the classroom with practice. This article explores role-play and simulation variants: basic role-play, real play, student-scripted…

Pearson's correlation is widely used to test for an association between two variables and also forms the basis of several multivariate statistical procedures including many latent variable models. Spearman's [rho] is a popular alternative. These procedures are compared with ranking the data and then applying the inverse normal transformation, or…

Data pooling is a powerful strategy in empirical research. However, combining multiple datasets often results in a large amount of missing data, as variables that are not present in some datasets effectively contain missing values for all participants in those datasets. Furthermore, data pooling typically leads to a mix of continuous and…

Conventional random-effects models in meta-analysis rely on large sample approximations instead of exact small sample results. While random-effects methods produce efficient estimates and confidence intervals for the summary effect have correct coverage when the number of studies is sufficiently large, we demonstrate that conventional methods…

There is a current 'theory crisis' in language acquisition research, resulting from fragmentation both at the level of the approaches and the linguistic level studied. We identify a need for integrative approaches that go beyond these limitations, and propose to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of current theoretical approaches of language…

This paper looks at the tension between the desire to claim predictive ability for Agent-Based Models (ABMs) and its extreme difficulty for social and ecological systems, suggesting that this is the main cause for the continuance of a rhetoric of prediction that is at odds with what is achievable. Following others, it recommends that it is better…

Recurrent event analyses have found a wide range of applications in biomedicine, public health, and engineering, among others, where study subjects may experience a sequence of event of interest during follow-up. The R package reReg offers a comprehensive collection of practical and easy-to-use tools for regression analysis of recurrent events,…

Checking for possible inconsistency between direct and indirect evidence is an important task in network meta-analysis. Recently, an evidence-splitting (ES) model has been proposed, that allows separating direct and indirect evidence in a network and hence assessing inconsistency. A salient feature of this model is that the variance for…

Retirement incentives are frequently used by school districts facing financial difficulties. They provide a means of either decreasing staff size or replacing retiring senior teachers with less expensive junior teachers. We analyze a one-time retirement incentive in a large school district paid to teachers willing to retire at the end of the…

Technical difficulties and other unforeseen events occasionally lead to incomplete data on educational tests, which necessitates the reporting of imputed scores to some examinees. While there exist several approaches for reporting imputed scores, there is a lack of any guidance on the reporting of the uncertainty of imputed scores. In this paper,…

Bayesian methods to infer model dimensionality in factor analysis generally assume a lower triangular structure for the factor loadings matrix. Consequently, the ordering of the outcomes influences the results. Therefore, we propose a method to infer model dimensionality without imposing any prior restriction on the loadings matrix. Our approach…

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…

Detection methods for item preknowledge are often evaluated in simulation studies where models are used to generate the data. To ensure the reliability of such methods, it is crucial that these models are able to accurately represent situations that are encountered in practice. The purpose of this article is to provide a critical analysis of…

We present an intriguing topic in a mathematical modelling course where Lanchester models are taught to our students. Lanchester models are some of the earliest and most important models used for combat modelling. We describe modelling activities and the use of technology that can be implemented in teaching this topic in this paper.

Population-adjusted indirect comparison (PAIC) is an increasingly used technique for estimating the comparative effectiveness of different treatments for the health technology assessments when head-to-head trials are unavailable. Three commonly used PAIC methods include matching-adjusted indirect comparison (MAIC), simulated treatment comparison…