Six-year college graduation rates for Hispanic and White students from 17 cohorts were analyzed using data from the U.S. Department of Education's IPED System. Results from regression analyses confirmed statistically significant positive linear trends for Hispanic and White students and statistically significant differences between the two…

The present study examined demographic and academic predictors of astronomy performance among a cohort of N=1909 community college students enrolled in astronomy courses in a large suburban community college during a four-year time frame, 2015-2019. The theoretical framework was based upon a deconstructive approach for predicting community college…

Linking classroom quality to separate domains of child development might neglect the transactional interactions across developmental domains. This research utilized latent profiles across academic and social-emotional development to explore which aspects of classroom quality can predict children's profiles at the classroom level. Data were drawn…

Despite the fact that third parties are present during a substantial amount of face-to-face interviews, bystander influence on respondents' response behavior is not yet fully understood. We use nine waves of the German Family Panel "pairfam" and apply fixed effects panel regression models to analyze effects of third-party presence on…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the predictive effects of maternal parenting styles and beliefs about emotions on the social skills and problem behaviours of preschoolers. The study involved 227 mothers of 3-6-year-old preschool children (M[subscript age] = 63 months). Two hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to determine to…

Open Educational Resources (OER) are regularly adopted, yet questions persist about efficacy. Do OER improve student performance? Research produces ambiguous results, because these are derived from small sample sizes, inadequate efficacy measures, and neglect of interactional effects. We examine the effect of OER on student grades using over…

We provide tools for identification and exploration of data with very large variability having power law tails. Such data describe extreme features of processes such as fire losses, flood, drought, financial gain/loss, hurricanes, population of cities, among others. Prediction and quantification of extreme events are at the forefront of the…

The administration of college financial aid is a key venue through which colleges can affect the likelihood that students will make it to graduation. We investigate the effects of an understudied yet consequential federal student aid policy: Return of Title IV Funds (R2T4). Under R2T4, students "earn" Federal Student Aid over a term or…

Composite scores are an exceptionally important psychometric tool for behavioral science research applications. A prototypical example occurs with self-report data, where researchers routinely use questionnaires with multiple items that tap into different features of a target construct. Item-level missing data are endemic to composite score…

A mixture of logit models is proposed that discriminates between responses to rating questions that are affected by a tendency to prefer middle or extremes of the scale regardless of the content of the item (response styles) and purely content-driven preferences. Explanatory variables are used to characterize the content-driven way of answering as…

International students in the United States face unique challenges of adjusting to college life in a foreign country due to additional stressors of language, differing academic and study habits, and being socially isolated from their home environment. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the levels of acculturative stress of…

The estimation of high-dimensional latent regression item response theory (IRT) models is difficult because of the need to approximate integrals in the likelihood function. Proposed solutions in the literature include using stochastic approximations, adaptive quadrature, and Laplace approximations. We propose using a second-order Laplace…

Conventional estimators for indirect effects using a difference in coefficients and product of coefficients produce the same results for continuous outcomes. However, for binary outcomes, the difference in coefficient estimator systematically underestimates the indirect effects because of a scaling problem. One solution is to standardize…

As we take advantage of new technologies that allow us to streamline the coding process of large qualitative datasets, we must consider whether human cognitive bias may introduce statistical bias in the process. Our research group analyzes large sets of student responses by developing computer models that are trained using human-coded responses…

This study explores the performance of classical methods for detecting publication bias--namely, Egger's regression test, Funnel Plot test, Begg's Rank Correlation and Trim and Fill method--in meta-analysis of studies that report multiple effects. Publication bias, outcome reporting bias, and a combination of these were generated. Egger's…