Most researchers receive formal training in frequentist statistics during their undergraduate studies. In particular, hypothesis testing is usually rooted on the null hypothesis significance testing paradigm and its p-value. Null hypothesis Bayesian testing and its so-called Bayes factor are now becoming increasingly popular. Although the Bayes…

In psychology, researchers are often interested in testing hypotheses about mediation, such as testing the presence of a mediation effect of a treatment (e.g., intervention assignment) on an outcome via a mediator. An increasingly popular approach to testing hypotheses is the Bayesian testing approach with Bayes factors (BFs). Despite the growing…

Item response theory (IRT) models typically rely on a normality assumption for subject-specific latent traits, which is often unrealistic in practice. Semiparametric extensions based on Dirichlet process mixtures (DPMs) offer a more flexible representation of the unknown distribution of the latent trait. However, the use of such models in the IRT…

Power analysis based on the analytical t-test is an important aspect of a research study to determine the sample size required to detect the effect for the comparison of two means. The current paper presents a reader-friendly procedure for carrying out the t-test power analysis using the various R add-on packages. While there is a growing of R…

With the prevalence of missing data in social science research, it is necessary to use methods for handling missing data. One framework in which data with missing values can still be used for parameter estimation is the Bayesian framework. In this tutorial, different missing data mechanisms including Missing Completely at Random, Missing at…

Correct specifications of hierarchical attribute structures in analyses using diagnostic classification models (DCMs) are pivotal because misspecifications can lead to biased parameter estimations and inaccurate classification profiles. This research is aimed to demonstrate DCM analyses with various hierarchical attribute structures via Bayesian…

Adaptivity in advanced learning technologies offer the possibility to adapt to different student backgrounds, which is difficult to do in a traditional classroom setting. However, there are mixed results on the effectiveness of adaptivity based on different implementations and contexts. In this paper, we introduce AI adaptivity in the context of a…

Missing data are exceedingly common across a variety of disciplines, such as educational, social, and behavioral science areas. Missing not at random (MNAR) mechanism where missingness is related to unobserved data is widespread in real data and has detrimental consequence. However, the existing MNAR-based methods have potential problems such as…

This paper introduces AMMORE, a new dataset of 53,000 math open-response question-answer pairs from Rori, a mathematics learning platform used by middle and high school students in several African countries. Using this dataset, we conducted two experiments to evaluate the use of large language models (LLM) for grading particularly challenging…

The thriving developer community has a significant impact on the widespread use of R software. To better understand this community, we conducted a study analyzing all R packages available on CRAN. We identified the most popular topics of R packages by text mining the package descriptions. Additionally, using network centrality measures, we…

Teacher shortages and attrition are problems of international concern. One of the most frequent reasons for teachers leaving the profession is a lack of job satisfaction. Accordingly, in this study we have adopted a causal inference machine learning approach to identify practical interventions for improving overall levels of job satisfaction. We…

Model selection is important in any statistical analysis, and the primary goal is to find the preferred (or most parsimonious) model, based on certain criteria, from a set of candidate models given data. Several recent publications have employed the deviance information criterion (DIC) to do model selection among different forms of multilevel item…

Model selection is important in any statistical analysis, and the primary goal is to find the preferred (or most parsimonious) model, based on certain criteria, from a set of candidate models given data. Several recent publications have employed the deviance information criterion (DIC) to do model selection among different forms of multilevel item…

Multilevel modeling is a statistical approach to analyze hierarchical data, which consist of individual observations nested within clusters. Bayesian methods is a well-known, sometimes better, alternative of Maximum likelihood methods for fitting multilevel models. Lack of user-friendly and computationally efficient software packages or programs…

Knowledge tracing algorithms such as Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT) can provide students and teachers with helpful information about their progress towards learning objectives. Despite the popularity of BKT in the research community, the algorithm is not widely adopted in educational practice. This may be due to skepticism from users and…