The issue of model uncertainty has been gaining interest in education and the social sciences community over the years, and the dominant methods for handling model uncertainty are based on Bayesian inference, particularly, Bayesian model averaging. However, Bayesian model averaging assumes that the true data-generating model is within the…

Large-scale assessments (LSAs) use Mislevy's "plausible value" (PV) approach to relate student proficiency to noncognitive variables administered in a background questionnaire. This method requires background variables to be completely observed, a requirement that is seldom fulfilled. In this article, we evaluate and compare the…

Despite the widespread popularity of growth curve analysis, few studies have investigated robust growth curve models. In this article, the "t" distribution is applied to model heavy-tailed data and contaminated normal data with outliers for growth curve analysis. The derived robust growth curve models are estimated through Bayesian…