Background: Developing sufficient mathematical skills is a prerequisite to function adequately in society today. Given this, an important task is to increase our understanding regarding the cognitive mechanisms underlying young people's acquisition of early number skills and formal mathematical knowledge. Aims: The purpose was to examine whether…

Drawing strategies are widely used as a powerful tool for promoting students' learning and problem solving. In this article, we report the results of an inferential mediation analysis that was applied to investigate the roles that strategic knowledge about drawing and the accuracy of different types of drawings play in mathematical modelling…

Formative assessment has been identified as a promising intervention to support students' learning. How to successfully implement this means of assessment, however, is still an open issue. This study contributes to the implementation of formative assessment by analyzing the impact of a training measure on teachers' formative feedback practice,…

Educational reform is most likely to be successful when teachers are knowledgeable about the intended reform, and when their concerns about the reform are understood and addressed. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is an effort to establish a set of nationwide expectations for students and teachers. This study examined teacher understanding…

Criteria for factor identification in factor analysis according to J. Algina (1980) are summarized, and a procedure is presented to determine rotationally underidentified factors by adding restrictors and to carry out the rotation for old and new restrictions and in latent path analysis. Two illustrations are presented. (SLD)

An author of a paper (EC 602 060) that presents two causal models of learning disabilities comments on his interest in the research, how the research design developed, limitations of the research, and the need for replication with other disability groups. (JDD)

Two causal models are presented to describe influences on the performance of students with learning disabilities. The first model associates reading and math with three domains: neuropsychological, linguistic, and social-behavioral. The second model involved relationships among selected individual variables and suggests that learning disability is…

The Werts-Linn procedure for dealing with categorical errors of measurement in "Comments on Boyle's 'Path Analysis and Ordinal Data'" in The American Journal of Sociology, volume 76, number 6, May 1971, is shown to be inappropriate to the problem of ordered categories. (For related document, see TM 002 301.) (DB)

Methods for the path analysis of complex (i.e., not fully recursive) causal models are briefly discussed. A computer program which simplifies analysis of such models and provides an option for automatically deleting marginal paths is described. (Author)

Path analysis is defined for explicitly formulating theory, and for attaching quantitative estimates to causal effects thought to exist on a priori grounds. The four basic kinds of path models are illustrated: (1) recursive; (2) block; (3) block-recursive and (4) nonrecursive. (Author/GDC)

Hierarchial causal models are described as pictorial representations of multiple regression equations. These models are particularly helpful for three reasons: (1) the formulation of problems in a path analytic framework forces a degree of explicitness that is often not present in research reports that rely solely on regression; (2) they provide a…

Several steps are taken to develop methods for analyzing systems that involve probabilistic causation. The basic ideas and distinctions are illustrated for systems with dichotomous variables. It is shown that these basic ideas have analogous counterparts in causal systems with continuous variables. By using a generalized conditional probability…

Using LISREL, the only types of constraints allowed are fixing parameters at a constant value and constraining parameters to be equal. In this paper, two new concepts ("phantom" and "imaginary" latent variables) are introduced which allow fairly general equality and inequality constraints on factor loadings and structural model…

Current computer programs for analyzing linear structural models will apparently handle only two types of constraints: fixed parameter and equal parameters. In this paper, a method for imposing several types of inequality of parameter constraints is described. Several examples are presented. (Author/JKS)

Canonical correlation analysis is considered to be a general model for bivariate and multivariate statistical methods. Some problems involving assumptions and statistical tests for parameters exist for social science data. A resolution for these problems is presented by treating canonical correlation as a special case of linear structural…