The current study applied the person-fit statistic, l[subscript z], to data from a Canadian provincial achievement test to explore the usefulness of conducting person-fit analysis on large-scale assessments. Item parameter estimates were compared before and after the misfitting student responses, as identified by l[subscript z], were removed. The…

This manuscript provides an overview of hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), as part of a series of papers covering topics relevant to consumers of educational research. HLM is tremendously flexible, allowing researchers to specify relations across multiple "levels" of the educational system (e.g., students, classrooms, schools, etc.).…

Dominance analysis (DA) is a method used to evaluate the relative importance of predictors that was originally proposed for linear regression models. This article proposes an extension of DA that allows researchers to determine the relative importance of predictors in hierarchical linear models (HLM). Commonly used measures of model adequacy in…