This study aims to apply the model principal component analysis to reduce multicollinearity on variable currency exchange rate in eight countries in Asia against US Dollar including the Yen (Japan), Won (South Korea), Dollar (Hong Kong), Yuan (China), Bath (Thailand), Rupiah (Indonesia), Ringgit (Malaysia), Dollar (Singapore). It looks at yield…

We examine the performance of planned missing (PM) designs for correlated latent growth curve models. Using simulated data from a model where latent growth curves are fitted to two constructs over five time points, we apply three kinds of planned missingness. The first is item-level planned missingness using a three-form design at each wave such…

In large-scale educational surveys, a latent regression model is used to compensate for the shortage of cognitive information. Conventionally, the covariates in the latent regression model are principal components extracted from background data. This operational method has several important disadvantages, such as the handling of missing data and…

I discuss the recommendations and cautions in Steinley and Brusco's (2011) article on the use of finite models to cluster a data set. In their article, much use is made of comparison with the "K"-means procedure. As noted by researchers for over 30 years, the "K"-means procedure can be viewed as a special case of finite mixture modeling in which…

Profile data abound in a broad range of research settings. Often it is of considerable theoretical importance to address specific structural questions with regard to the major pattern as included in such data. A key challenge in this regard pertains to identifying which type of interaction (double ordinal, mixed ordinal/disordinal, double…

The authors discuss empirically determined competence areas to K-12 computer science education, emphasizing the cognitive level of competence. The results of a questionnaire with 120 professors of computer science serve as a database. By using multi-dimensional scaling and cluster analysis, four competence areas to computer science education…

Steinley and Brusco (2011) presented the results of a huge simulation study aimed at evaluating cluster recovery of mixture model clustering (MMC) both for the situation where the number of clusters is known and is unknown. They derived rather strong conclusions on the basis of this study, especially with regard to the good performance of…

Latent class models for cognitive diagnosis often begin with specification of a matrix that indicates which attributes or skills are needed for each item. Then by imposing restrictions that take this into account, along with a theory governing how subjects interact with items, parametric formulations of item response functions are derived and…

A fundamental goal of educational research is identifying students' current stage of skill mastery (complete/partial/none). In recent years a number of cognitive diagnosis models have become a popular means of estimating student skill knowledge. However, these models become difficult to estimate as the number of students, items, and skills grows.…

The study of confusion data is a well established practice in psychology. Although many types of analytical approaches for confusion data are available, among the most common methods are the extraction of 1 or more subsets of stimuli, the partitioning of the complete stimulus set into distinct groups, and the ordering of the stimulus set. Although…

Psychological tests often involve item clusters that are designed to solicit responses to behavioral stimuli. The dependency between individual responses within clusters beyond that which can be explained by the underlying trait sometimes reveals structures that are of substantive interest. The paper describes two general classes of models for…

Three analyses of /-t,d/ deletion are undertaken to investigate whether convergence with the matrix regional dialect has taken place in Los Angeles Chicano English. Two superficial analyses mistakenly find convergence. A third emic multivariate analysis finds no phonological convergence. (33 references) (Author/CK)

The Second International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM2009) was held at the University of Cordoba, Spain, on July 1-3, 2009. EDM brings together researchers from computer science, education, psychology, psychometrics, and statistics to analyze large data sets to answer educational research questions. The increase in instrumented…