Survey data are usually of mixed type (quantitative, multistate categorical, and/or binary variables). Multidimensional scaling (MDS) is one of the most extended methodologies to visualize the profile structure of the data. Since the past 60s, MDS methods have been introduced in the literature, initially in publications in the psychometrics area.…

High-ability students have special education needs that are often overlooked or misunderstood (Blaas in "Aust J Guid Couns" 24(2):243-255, 2014) which may result in talent loss (Saha and Sikora in "Int J Contemp Sociol Discuss J Contemp Ideas Res" 48(1):9-34, 2011). Educational acceleration can help avoid these circumstances…

With approximately 30 million students the Chinese higher education system is the largest in the world. In every publicly funded institution there is a communist party secretary, however, little is known about these party secretaries. The purpose of the study was to understand who these people were. We collected data from 1,751 party secretaries…

User-centered evaluations of information systems often focus on the usability of the system rather its usefulness. This study examined how a using an interactive knowledge-domain visualization (KDV) system affected users' understanding of a domain. Interactive KDVs allow users to create graphical representations of domains that depict important…

This paper discusses how a seldom-used statistical procedure, recursive regression (RR), can numerically and graphically illustrate data-driven nonlinear relationships and interaction of variables. This routine falls into the family of exploratory techniques, yet a few interesting features make it a valuable compliment to factor analysis and…

Recently, nonparametric methods have been proposed that provide a dimensionally based description of test structure for tests with dichotomous items. Because such methods are based on different notions of dimensionality than are assumed when using a psychometric model, it remains unclear whether these procedures might lead to a different…