Tests of statistical significance often play a decisive role in establishing the empirical warrant of evidence-based research in education. The results from pattern-based assessment items, as introduced in this paper, are categorical and multimodal and do not immediately support the use of measures of central tendency as typically related to…

Background: Most of the studies in academic journals use p values to represent statistical significance. However, this is not a good indicator of practical significance. Although confidence intervals provide information about the precision of point estimation, they are, unfortunately, rarely used. The infrequent use of confidence intervals might…

We present three strategies to replace the null hypothesis statistical significance testing approach in psychological research: (1) visual representation of cognitive processes and predictions, (2) visual representation of data distributions and choice of the appropriate distribution for analysis, and (3) model comparison. The three strategies…

Engagement markers (hereafter, EMs) are crucial interpersonal devices to interact with readers through texts. However, little is known about the differences of EMs use in Humanities and Science journal research articles (hereafter, RAs), as well as the changes in markers use over the passage of time. The present study provides a quantitative and…

Despite recent emphasis on the use of randomized control trials (RCTs) for evaluating education interventions, in most areas of education research, observational methods remain the dominant approach for assessing program effects. Over the last three decades, the within-study comparison (WSC) design has emerged as a method for evaluating the…

This paper presents a non-parametric imputation technique, named random forest, from the machine learning field. The random forest procedure has two main tuning parameters: the number of trees grown in the prediction and the number of predictors used. Fifty experimental conditions were created in the imputation procedure, with different…

It is currently unknown how many Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) exist at community colleges. This study investigates the percentage of public and Tribal community colleges that have active IRBs. It also examines the potential relationships between states that allow community colleges to confer baccalaureate degrees, or that have articulation…

The School Composition and the Black-White Achievement Gap study was undertaken by the National Center for Education Statistics to present both descriptive and associative information on the relationships among the percentage of students in a school who were Black (referred to as "Black student density" or "density"), the…

Applied researchers often find themselves making statistical inferences in settings that would seem to require multiple comparisons adjustments. We challenge the Type I error paradigm that underlies these corrections. Moreover we posit that the problem of multiple comparisons can disappear entirely when viewed from a hierarchical Bayesian…

The purpose of this systematic review was to investigate the weight of scientific evidence regarding student outcomes (physical, cognitive and affective) of a Game Centered Approach (GCA) when the quality of a study was taken into account in the interpretation of collective findings. A systematic search of five electronic databases (Sports…

We surveyed researchers in the health and exercise sciences to explore different areas and magnitudes of bias in researchers' decision making. Participants were presented with scenarios (testing a central hypothesis with p = 0.06 or p = 0.04) in a random order and surveyed about what they would do in each scenario. Participants showed significant…

Previous research conducted by Nelson and Coorough (1994) found support for the statement that PhD programs were more research oriented, whereas doctorate of education (EdD) programs were more oriented to the educational practitioner. This previous study, however, had grouped all dissertations in education and had not looked at dissertations by…

With its critical assessments of scientific evidence on the effectiveness of education programs, policies, and practices (referred to as "interventions"), and a range of products summarizing this evidence, the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) is an important part of the Institute of Education Sciences' strategy to use rigorous and relevant…

We consider the effects of daytime fasting by pregnant women during the lunar month of Ramadan on their children's test scores at age seven. Using English register data, we find that scores are 0.05 to 0.08 standard deviations lower for Pakistani and Bangladeshi students exposed to Ramadan in early pregnancy. These estimates are downward biased to…

REL Appalachia conducted a systematic review of the research evidence on the effects of increased learning time. After screening more than 7,000 studies, REL Appalachia identified 30 that met the most rigorous standards for research. A review of those 30 studies found that increased learning time does not always produce positive results. However,…