The research reported here uses a pre/post-test model and stimulated recall interviews to assess teachers' statistical reasoning about comparing distributions, when enrolled in a graduate-level statistics education course. We discuss key aspects of the course design aimed at improving teachers' learning and teaching of statistics, and the…

Teachers today operate in highly politicized accountability environments where quick results, typically measured by K-12 test scores, are demanded. Although focusing on student learning outcomes is critical, equally essential is assuring that teacher learning opportunities which can strengthen instruction are available to teachers. A decade ago,…

Item response theory (IRT) uses a family of statistical models for estimating stable characteristics of items and examinees and defining how these characteristics interact in describing item and test performance. With a focus on the three-parameter logistic IRT (Birnbaum, 1968; Lord, 1980) model, the current study examines the accuracy and…

The main purpose of this study is to improve estimation efficiency in obtaining maximum marginal likelihood estimates of contextual effects in the framework of nonlinear multilevel latent variable model by adopting the Metropolis-Hastings Robbins-Monro algorithm (MH-RM). Results indicate that the MH-RM algorithm can produce estimates and standard…

The main purpose of this study is to improve estimation efficiency in obtaining maximum marginal likelihood estimates of contextual effects in the framework of nonlinear multilevel latent variable model by adopting the Metropolis-Hastings Robbins-Monro algorithm (MH-RM; Cai, 2008, 2010a, 2010b). Results indicate that the MH-RM algorithm can…

Although International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement-pioneered international large-scale assessment (ILSA) of education is now a well-established science, non-practitioners and many users often substantially misunderstand how large-scale assessments are conducted, what questions and challenges they are designed to…

Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is used routinely in the development and validation of assessment instruments. One of the most significant challenges when one is performing EFA is determining how many factors to retain. Parallel analysis (PA) is an effective stopping rule that compares the eigenvalues of randomly generated data with those for…

Effect size use has been increasing in the past decade in many research areas. Confidence intervals associated with effect sizes are encouraged to be reported. Prior work has investigated the performance of confidence interval estimation with Cohen's d. This study extends this line of work to the analysis of variance case with more than two…

This research aimed to (1) design a curriculum on Production of Charcoal Briquettes from Agricultural Residues, (2) implement the designed curriculum, and (3) study and compare the learning achievements of Matthayomsuksa 3 students at Samakee Wittaya Municipality School in terms of knowledge, learning skills, and participation in the production of…

Negative societal attitudes toward ex-offenders serve as barriers to jobs and opportunities. Released offenders with limited opportunities revert to what they know best and end up re-incarcerated with failed reentry. The purpose of this study was to analyze attitudes of college students toward ex-offenders. A correlation quantitative research…

This study, comparing the academic achievement levels of the students with different primary school entrance age, is in survey model. 60 students, at the second grade of a primary school centrally located in Tokat province in the year the study was conducted and were 60-66 and 73-84 months old when entered the primary school, were selected with…

Many current national and institutional education policies address the issue of raising participation amongst young people and enhancing employability after leaving school or university. What sort of information are these policies built on? This paper compares national information systems from the last three decades across Europe that gather…

This study examined a five-year project initiated by the Women's Global Connection (WGC) to train pre-primary teachers in schools serving HIV/AIDS orphans in Zambia. The researchers evaluated the contextual factors of the training initiative to clarify why some teachers possess high self-efficacy, while others do not. The article analyses the…

Although there is much research to support the effectiveness of classwide interventions aimed at improving student engagement, there is also a great deal of variability in terms of how response to group-level intervention has been measured. The unfortunate consequence of this procedural variability is that it is difficult to determine whether…

The increasing use of ordinal variables in different fields has led to the introduction of new statistical methods for their analysis. The performance of these methods needs to be investigated under a number of experimental conditions. Procedures to simulate from ordinal variables are then required. In this article, we deal with simulation from…