Various areas of educational research are interested in the transitions between different states--or events--in sequential data, with the goal of understanding the significance of these transitions; one notable example is affect dynamics, which aims to identify important transitions between affective states. Unfortunately, several works have…

This article discusses the nonuse, misuse, and proper use of pilot studies in experimental evaluation research. The authors first show that there is little theoretical, practical, or empirical guidance available to researchers who seek to incorporate pilot studies into experimental evaluation research designs. The authors then discuss how pilot…

In 2002, an article entitled "Four assumptions of multiple regression that researchers should always test" by Osborne and Waters was published in "PARE." This article has gone on to be viewed more than 275,000 times (as of August 2013), and it is one of the first results displayed in a Google search for "regression…

The number of years a child of school-entry age can expect to remain in school is of great interest both as a measure of individual human capital and of the performance of an education system. An approximate indicator of this concept is the sum of age-specific enrolment rates. The relatively low data demands of this indicator that are feasible to…

A simulation study compared the performance of robust normal theory maximum likelihood (ML) and robust categorical least squares (cat-LS) methodology for estimating confirmatory factor analysis models with ordinal variables. Data were generated from 2 models with 2-7 categories, 4 sample sizes, 2 latent distributions, and 5 patterns of category…

This article describes the results of a simulation study to investigate the impact of missing data on the detection of differential item functioning (DIF). Specifically, it investigates how four methods for dealing with missing data (listwise deletion, zero imputation, two-way imputation, response function imputation) interact with two methods of…