This report aims to showcase the value of implementing a Bayesian framework to analyse and report results from international large-scale surveys and provide guidance to users who want to analyse the data using this approach. The motivation for this report stems from the recognition that Bayesian statistical inference is fast becoming a popular…

Educational stakeholders would be better informed if they could use their students' formative assessments results and personal background attributes to predict the conditions for achieving favorable learning outcomes, and conversely, to gain awareness of the "at-risk" signals to prevent unfavorable or worst-case scenarios from happening.…

The educational recommendation system to provide support for academic guidance and adaptive learning has always been an important issue of research for smart education. A bad guidance can give rise to difficulties in further studies and can be extended to school dropout. This paper explores the potential of Educational Data Mining for academic…

In this article we discuss our attempt to incorporate research-informed learning and teaching activities into a final year undergraduate Statistics course. We make use of the Shiny web-based application framework for R to develop "Shiny apps" designed to help facilitate student interaction with methods from recently published papers in…

Given the importance of education and the growing public demand for improving education quality under tight budget constraints, there has been an emerging movement to call for research-informed decisions in educational resource allocation. Despite the abundance of rigorous studies on the effectiveness, cost, and implementation of educational…

In 1881, Donald MacAlister posed a problem in the "Educational Times" that remains relevant today. The problem centers on the statistical evidence for the effectiveness of a treatment based on a comparison between two proportions. A brief historical sketch is followed by a discussion of two default Bayesian solutions, one based on a…

While Educational Data Mining research has traditionally emphasized the practical aspects of learner modeling, such as predictive modeling, estimating students knowledge, and informing adaptive instruction, in the current study, we argue that Educational Data Mining can also be used to test and improve our fundamental theories of human learning.…

In education research, small samples are common because of financial limitations, logistical challenges, or exploratory studies. With small samples, statistical principles on which researchers rely do not hold, leading to trust issues with model estimates and possible replication issues when scaling up. Researchers are generally aware of such…

In this article, I provide a conceptually oriented overview of Bayesian approaches to statistical inference and contrast them with frequentist approaches that currently dominate conventional practice in educational research. The features and advantages of Bayesian approaches are illustrated with examples spanning several statistical modeling…

In this article, a proposed Bayesian extension of the generalized beta spatial regression models is applied to the analysis of the quality of education in Colombia. We briefly revise the beta distribution and describe the joint modeling approach for the mean and dispersion parameters in the spatial regression models' setting. Finally, we motivate…

In recent years, attention in the education community has focused on the need for evidenced-based research, particularly educational policies and interventions that rest on "scientifically based research". The emphasis on scientifically based research in education has led to a corresponding increase in studies designed to provide strong warrants…

Bayesian estimation of a threshold time (hereafter simply threshold) for the receipt of impulse signals is accomplished given the following: 1) data, consisting of the number of impulses received in a time interval from zero to one and the time of the largest time impulse; 2) a model, consisting of a uniform probability density of impulse time…

The well established, gold standard approach to finding out what works in education research is to run a randomized controlled trial (RCT) using a standard pre-test and post-test design. RCTs have been used in the intelligent tutoring community for decades to determine which questions and tutorial feedback work best. Practically speaking, however,…

This paper provides a history of ETS's role in developing assessment instruments and psychometric procedures for measuring change in large-scale national assessments funded by the Longitudinal Studies branch of the National Center for Education Statistics. It documents the innovations developed during more than 30 years of working with…

The 10th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2017) is held under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society at the Optics Velley Kingdom Plaza Hotel, Wuhan, Hubei Province, in China. This years conference features two invited talks by: Dr. Jie Tang, Associate Professor with the Department of Computer…