Parallel analysis has been considered one of the most accurate methods for determining the number of factors in factor analysis. One major advantage of parallel analysis over traditional factor retention methods (e.g., Kaiser's rule) is that it addresses the sampling variability of eigenvalues obtained from the identity matrix, representing the…

The second version of Kaiser's Measure of Sampling Adequacy (MSA[subscript 2]) has been widely applied to assess the factorability of data in psychological research. The MSA[subscript 2] is developed in the population and little is known about its behavior in finite samples. If estimated MSA[subscript 2]s are biased due to sampling errors,…

Recent research has suggested that students prefer restudying over retrieval practice when learning difficult materials, despite the latter being a more effective learning strategy. The current study investigated whether an instructional intervention can improve the use of retrieval practice for both easy and difficult materials. In Experiment 1,…

Effective educational measurement relies heavily on the curation of well-designed item pools. However, item calibration is time consuming and costly, requiring a sufficient number of respondents to estimate the psychometric properties of items. In this study, we explore the potential of six different large language models (LLMs; GPT-3.5, GPT-4,…

Accelerated longitudinal designs (ALDs) provide an opportunity to capture long developmental periods in a shorter time framework using a relatively small number of assessments. Prior literature has investigated whether univariate developmental processes can be characterized with data obtained from ALDs. However, many important questions in…

The problem of local item dependencies (LIDs) is very common in personality and attitude measures, particularly in those that measure narrow-bandwidth dimensions. At the structural level, these dependencies can be modeled by using extended factor analytic (FA) solutions that include correlated residuals. However, the effects that LIDs have on the…

This paper demonstrated how to apply Machine Learning (ML) techniques to analyze student interaction data collected in an online mathematics game. Using a data-driven approach, we examined 1) how different ML algorithms influenced the precision of middle-school students' (N = 359) performance (i.e. posttest math knowledge scores) prediction and 2)…