In this article, the authors share their favorite "Construct It!" activity, which focuses on rate of change and functions. The initial approach to instruction was procedural in nature and focused on making use of formulas. Specifically, after modeling how to find the slope of the line given two points and use it to solve for the…

Staggered adoption of policies by different units at different times creates promising opportunities for observational causal inference. Estimation remains challenging, however, and common regression methods can give misleading results. A promising alternative is the synthetic control method (SCM), which finds a weighted average of control units…

Recently, quantitative researchers have shown increased interest in two-step factor score regression (FSR) approaches to structural model estimation. A particularly promising approach proposed by Croon involves first extracting factor scores for each latent factor in a larger model, then correcting the variance-covariance matrix of the factor…

Studies that address preservice teachers' knowledge of area measurement emphasize their lack of knowledge and their tendency towards the use of formulas, without offering a body of knowledge that helps to address such difficulties. This study offers an approximation of the mathematical knowledge necessary for preservice teachers to solve area…

A relevant aim of research in education is to find and study the reasoning lines that students deploy when dealing with problematic situations. This can be done through an analysis of the answers students give to a questionnaire. In this paper, we discuss some methodological aspects involved in the quantitative analysis of a questionnaire by means…

The frequently neglected and often misunderstood relationship between classical test theory and item response theory is discussed for the unidimensional case with binary measures and no guessing. It is pointed out that popular item response models can be directly obtained from classical test theory-based models by accounting for the discrete…

To rule out the need for a two-parameter item response theory (IRT) model during item analysis by Rasch models, it is important to check the Rasch model's assumption that all items have the same item discrimination. Biserial and polyserial correlation coefficients measuring the association between items and restscores are often used in an informal…

This study uses simulation techniques to examine the statistical power of the group- randomized design and the matched-pair (MP) randomized block design under various parameter combinations. Both nearest neighbor matching and random matching are used for the MP design. The power of each design for any parameter combination was calculated from…

Estimating the difficulty level of math word problems is an important task for many educational applications. Identification of relevant and irrelevant sentences in math word problems is an important step for calculating the difficulty levels of such problems. This paper addresses a novel application of text categorization to identify two types of…

The online deployment of Technology Engineered online Student Ratings of Instruction (SRIs) by colleges and universities in the United States has dynamically changed the deployment of course evaluation. This research investigation is the fourth part of a post hoc study that analytically and psychometrically examines the design, reliability, and…

A common mistake in analysis of cluster randomized trials is to ignore the effect of clustering and analyze the data as if each treatment group were a simple random sample. This typically leads to an overstatement of the precision of results and anticonservative conclusions about precision and statistical significance of treatment effects. This…

Written by a social worker for social work students, this is a nuts and bolts guide to statistics that presents complex calculations and concepts in clear, easy-to-understand language. It includes numerous examples, data sets, and issues that students will encounter in social work practice. The first section introduces basic concepts and terms to…

A simple proof to some known results on the convergence of linear recursive sequences with nonnegative coefficients is given, using the technique of monotone convergence.

Presents new methods for compressing bit matrices in large information retrieval systems which exploit possible correlations between rows of words and columns of documents. Three encoding methods are tested and compared--Shannon-Fano, arithmetic, and Huffman--and an appendix discusses binomial coefficients. (20 references) (LRW)

In this study the authors investigated the use of 5 (i.e., Claudy, Ezekiel, Olkin-Pratt, Pratt, and Smith) R[squared] correction formulas with the Pearson r[squared]. The authors estimated adjustment bias and precision under 6 x 3 x 6 conditions (i.e., population [rho] values of 0.0, 0.1, 0.3, 0.5, 0.7, and 0.9; population shapes normal, skewness…