Higher education institutions have consistently strived to provide students with top-notch education. To achieve better outcomes, machine learning (ML) algorithms greatly simplify the prediction process. ML can be utilized by academicians to obtain insight into student data and mine data for forecasting the performance. In this paper, the authors…

Background: Rooted in problems of social justice, intersectionality addresses intragroup differences in impacts and outcomes and the compound discrimination at specific intersections of classification (Crenshaw,1991). It stresses that deficits/debts in outcomes often occur non-additively; for example, discriminatory hiring practices can be…

Social desirability bias (SDB) is a common threat to the validity of conclusions from responses to a scale or survey. There is a wide range of person-fit statistics in the literature that can be employed to detect SDB. In addition, machine learning classifiers, such as logistic regression and random forest, have the potential to distinguish…

In every culture and era, education is considered the most fundamental reality and rule that societies prioritize and deem essential. Throughout the process spanning thousands of years, from the emergence of writing to the present day, education has undergone various forms and formats of change. Education has been a continuous guide for shaping,…

This dissertation examined classification outcome differences among four popular individual supervised machine learning (ISML) models (logistic regression, decision tree, support vector machine, and multilayer perceptron) when predicting minor class membership within imbalanced datasets. The study context and the theoretical population sampled…

Methods based on machine learning have become increasingly popular in many areas as they allow models to be fitted in a highly-data driven fashion and often show comparable or even increased performance in comparison to classical methods. However, in the area of educational sciences, the application of machine learning is still quite uncommon.…

Every year, the national high school graduation rate is declining and impacting the number of students applying to colleges. Moreover, the majority of students are applying to more than one college. This makes a lot of colleges to be highly competitive in student recruitment for enrollment and thus, the necessity for institutions to anticipate…

Normative studies are needed to obtain norms for comparing individuals with the reference population on relevant clinical or educational measures. Norms can be obtained in an efficient way by regressing the test score on relevant predictors, such as age and sex. When several measures are normed with the same sample, a multivariate regression-based…

Purpose: This article provides a tutorial introduction to ordinal pattern analysis, a statistical analysis method designed to quantify the extent to which hypotheses of relative change across experimental conditions match observed data at the level of individuals. This method may be a useful addition to familiar parametric statistical methods…

In education, machine learning (ML), especially deep learning (DL) in recent years, has been extensively used to improve both teaching and learning. Despite the rapid advancement of ML and its application in education, a few challenges remain to be addressed. In this thesis, in particular, we focus on two such challenges: (i) data scarcity and…

Student growth percentiles (SGPs) have become a common means to measure and report on student academic growth for state education accountability, and some states have adopted SGP cutscores as a means of classifying student growth into categories like "high/medium/low" growth. It has therefore become important to understand properties of…

Using data from multiple informants has long been considered best practice in education. However, multiple informants often disagree on similar constructs, complicating decision-making. Polynomial regression and response-surface analysis (PRA) is often used to test the congruence effect between multiple informants on an outcome. However, PRA…

Takers of educational tests often receive proficiency levels instead of or in addition to scaled scores. For example, proficiency levels are reported for the Advanced Placement (AP®) and U.S. Medical Licensing examinations. Technical difficulties and other unforeseen events occasionally lead to missing item scores and hence to incomplete data on…

The Wechsler Intelligence Scales for Children (WISC) are the most widely used instrument in assessing cognitive ability, especially with children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Previous literature on the WISC has demonstrated a divergent pattern of performance on the WISC for children ASD compared to their typically developing peers;…

Measurement error affects the quality of population orderings of an index and, hence, increases the misclassification of the poor and the non-poor groups and affects statistical inferences from binary regression models. Hence, the conclusions about the extent, profile, and distribution of poverty are likely to be misleading. However, the size and…