These are the appendixes for the report, "Stabilizing School Performance Indicators in New Jersey to Reduce the Effect of Random Error." This study applied a stabilization model called Bayesian hierarchical modeling to group-­level data (with groups assigned according to demographic designations) within schools in New Jersey with the aim…

Uncertainty is ubiquitous in science, but scientific knowledge is often represented to the public and in educational contexts as certain and immutable. This contrast can foster distrust when scientific knowledge develops in a way that people perceive as a reversals, as we have observed during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on research in…

Based on 52 studies with samples mostly from English-speaking countries, the current study used Bayesian network meta-analysis to investigate the intervention effectiveness of different reading comprehension strategy combinations on reading comprehension among students with reading difficulties in 3rd through 12th grade. We focused on commonly…

A common practical challenge is how to assign ability estimates to all incorrect and all correct response patterns when using item response theory (IRT) models and maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) since ability estimates for these types of responses equal -8 or +8. This article uses a simulation study and data from an operational K-12…

Based on 52 studies with samples mostly from English-speaking countries, the current study used Bayesian network meta-analysis to investigate the intervention effectiveness of different reading comprehension strategy combinations on reading comprehension among students with reading difficulties in 3rd through 12th grade. We focused on commonly…

The Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 requires states to use a variety of indicators, including standardized tests and attendance records, to designate schools for support and improvement based on schoolwide performance and the performance of groups of students within schools. Schoolwide and group-level performance indicators are also…

This article presents a latent class model for multilevel data to identify latent subgroups and estimate heterogeneous treatment effects. Unlike sequential approaches that partition data first and then estimate average treatment effects (ATEs) within classes, we employ a Bayesian procedure to jointly estimate mixing probability, selection, and…

Understanding whether or not different types of students master various attributes can aid future learning remediation. In this study, two-level diagnostic classification models (DCMs) were developed to represent the probabilistic relationship between external latent classes and attribute mastery patterns. Furthermore, variational Bayesian (VB)…

Integrating engineering design into K-12 curricula is increasingly important as engineering has been incorporated into many STEM education standards. However, the ill-structured and open-ended nature of engineering design makes it difficult for an instructor to keep track of the design processes of all students simultaneously and provide…

This paper presents a mixture item response tree (IRTree) model for extreme response style. Unlike traditional applications of single IRTree models, a mixture approach provides a way of representing the mixture of respondents following different underlying response processes (between individuals), as well as the uncertainty present at the…

Educational stakeholders are keen to know the magnitude and importance of different interventions. However, the way evidence is communicated to support understanding of the effectiveness of an intervention is controversial. Typically studies in education have used the standardised mean difference as a measure of the impact of interventions. This…

Abilities in scientific thinking and reasoning have been emphasized as core areas of initiatives, such as the Next Generation Science Standards or the College Board Standards for College Success in Science, which focus on the skills the future will demand of today's students. Although there is rich literature on studies of how these abilities…

This policy brief reviews evidence about the extent to which disadvantaged students are taught by teachers with lower value-added estimates of performance, and seeks to reconcile differences in findings from different studies. We demonstrate that much of the inequity in teacher value added in Washington state is due to differences across different…

This study reports on the national standardization and validation of the Learning Behaviors Scale (LBS) for use in Trinidad and Tobago. The LBS is a teacher rating scale centering on observable behaviors relevant to identifying childhood approaches to classroom learning. Teachers observed a stratified sample of 900 students across the islands'…

Item response models typically assume that the item characteristic (step) curves follow a logistic or normal cumulative distribution function, which are strictly monotone functions of person test ability. Such assumptions can be overly-restrictive for real item response data. We propose a simple and more flexible Bayesian nonparametric IRT model…