This dissertation compares the performance of equivalence test (EQT) and null hypothesis test (NHT) procedures for identifying invariant and noninvariant factor loadings under a range of experimental manipulations. EQT is the statistically appropriate approach when the research goal is to find evidence of group similarity rather than group…

Recent research in multidimensional item response theory has introduced within-item interaction effects between latent dimensions in the prediction of item responses. The objective of this study was to extend this research to bifactor models to include an interaction effect between the general and specific latent variables measured by an item.…

Combining multiple regression estimates with meta-analysis has continued to be a difficult task. A variety of methods have been proposed and used to combine multiple regression slope estimates with meta-analysis, however, most of these methods have serious methodological and practical limitations. The purpose of this study was to explore the use…

Making decisions over multivariate time series is an important topic which has gained significant interest in the past decade. A time series is a sequence of data points which are measured and ordered over uniform time intervals. A multivariate time series is a set of multiple, related time series in a particular domain in which domain experts…

In this thesis, we study the importance of background knowledge in relation extraction systems. We not only demonstrate the benefits of leveraging background knowledge to improve the systems' performance but also propose a principled framework that allows one to effectively incorporate knowledge into statistical machine learning models for…

Uncertainty occurs when there is more than one realization that can represent an information. This dissertation concerns merely discrete realizations of an uncertainty. Different interpretations of an uncertainty and their relationships are addressed when the uncertainty is not a probability of each realization. A well known model that can handle…

Probe-level microarray data are usually stored in matrices. Take a given probe set (gene), for example, each row of the matrix corresponds to an array, and each column corresponds to a probe. Often, people summarize each array by the gene expression level. Is one number sufficient to summarize a whole probe set for a specific gene in an array?…

This case study was conducted to analyze what happened when administrators in Wedgewood School District mandated special and regular education teachers on the elementary level to begin a special education inclusion model. Teachers were not permitted to adopt their own models of inclusion and were given the five Lipsky and Gartner (1995)…

In the current era of educational reform and accountability, co-teaching has emerged as a popular and widely implemented service delivery model for students with special needs. The intent of this inquiry was to examine the roles and responsibilities assumed by the elementary special educator during the practice of co-teaching. Using naturalistic…