Proactive preliminary minimum sample size determination can be useful for the early planning stages of a latent variable modeling study to set a realistic scope, long before the model and population are finalized. This study examined existing methods and proposed a new method for proactive preliminary minimum sample size determination.

Under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), school districts are required to meet the educational needs of all students with disabilities. However, school districts struggle to provide adequate services to students with disabilities who have extraordinary needs and require unusually high expenditures to meet those…