We consider estimating the effect of a treatment on a given outcome measured on subjects tested both before and after treatment assignment in observational studies. A vast literature compares the competing approaches of modelling the post-test score conditionally on the pre-test score versus modelling the difference, namely, the gain score. Our…

Research Context: In educational research, "context effects" are often of inferential interest to researchers as well as of evaluative interest to policymakers. While student education outcomes likely depend on individual-level influences like individual academic achievement, school contexts may also make a difference. Such questions are…

We consider two-level models where a continuous response R and continuous covariates C are assumed missing at random. Inferences based on maximum likelihood or Bayes are routinely made by estimating their joint normal distribution from observed data R[subscript obs] and C[subscript obs]. However, if the model for R given C includes random…

Many national and international educational data collection programs offer researchers opportunities to investigate contextual effects related to student performance. In those programs, schools are often used in the first-stage sampling process and students are randomly drawn from selected schools. However, the "incidental" dependence of…

The integration of technology in teachers' pedagogical practices has become the norm within various educational settings including the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) praxis. Although the technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge (TPACK) of EFL teachers has been explored previously, the contextual effects of the diffusion of technology at…

In many areas of sport management, individual behavior is not only driven by individual characteristics but also by higher level contextual factors. For instance, voluntary engagement in nonprofit sports clubs is influenced by organizational characteristics. Such multilevel structures should not only be considered theoretically, as in ecological…

Recent studies show cluster randomized trials may be well powered to detect mediation or indirect effects in multilevel settings. However, literature has rarely provided guidance on designing cluster-randomized trials aim to assess indirect effects. In this study, we developed closed-form expression to estimate the variance of and the statistical…

Educational innovations often involve intact subgroups, such as school classes or university departments. In small-scale educational evaluation research, typically involving 1 to 20 subgroups, differences among these subgroups are often neglected. This article presents a mixed method from a qualitative perspective, in which differences among…

School-level contextual factors have been found to influence reports of school climate. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the extent to which these associations are related to the school climate traits being measured or the methods (i.e., informants) used to obtain them. Data from a multilevel multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) design in…

This study examines the general question of how classroom characteristics are linked with differences among students in civic competence, which is seen to be an important basis for political inequality. A resource-mobilisation account of youth civic competence is presented, and this is tested using hierarchical linear modelling and International…

This research examines empirically the relationship between two measures of teacher quality: one based on professional standards and a second one using teacher value-added estimates. It also studies the extent to which teacher observable characteristics, such as teacher training variables, are associated to better performance on either of these…

Background/Context: Studies that compare the achievement benefits of charter public schools versus traditional public schools (TPSs) yield quite uneven results. The quality and long-term commitment of teachers represent related mediators that may help to explain effective and ineffective charter schools. Early findings on the comparative rates of…

Multilevel modeling has grown in use over the years as a way to deal with the nonindependent nature of observations found in clustered data. However, other alternatives to multilevel modeling are available that can account for observations nested within clusters, including the use of Taylor series linearization for variance estimation, the design…

A mixed methods approach was applied to examine the effects of a naturally occurring teamwork intervention supported with training. The first objective was to integrate qualitative process evaluation and quantitative effect evaluation to examine "how" and "why" the training influence intervention outcomes. The intervention (N =…

We present a multi-level model of contextual factors that may influence teachers' assessment practices, and use this model in a selected review of existing literature on teachers' assessment knowledge, views and conceptions with respect to these contextual factors. Adapting Kozma's model, we distinguish three levels of influence on teachers'…