Social networks in education commonly involve some form of grouping, such as friendship cliques or teacher departments, and blockmodels are a type of statistical social network model that accommodate these grouping or blocks by assuming different within-group tie probabilities than between-group tie probabilities. We describe a class of models,…

Mixed-effects models (MEMs) and latent growth models (LGMs) are often considered interchangeable save the discipline-specific nomenclature. Software implementations of these models, however, are not interchangeable, particularly with small sample sizes. Restricted maximum likelihood estimation that mitigates small sample bias in MEMs has not been…

The item response times (RTs) collected from computerized testing represent an underutilized type of information about items and examinees. In addition to knowing the examinees' responses to each item, we can investigate the amount of time examinees spend on each item. Current models for RTs mainly focus on parametric models, which have the…

In this article, a proposed Bayesian extension of the generalized beta spatial regression models is applied to the analysis of the quality of education in Colombia. We briefly revise the beta distribution and describe the joint modeling approach for the mean and dispersion parameters in the spatial regression models' setting. Finally, we motivate…

Doubly bounded continuous data are common in the social and behavioral sciences. Examples include judged probabilities, confidence ratings, derived proportions such as percent time on task, and bounded scale scores. Dependent variables of this kind are often difficult to analyze using normal theory models because their distributions may be quite…

In this article, we discuss the effect of removing the independence assumptions between the residuals in two-level random effect models. We first consider removing the independence between the Level 2 residuals and instead assume that the vector of all residuals at the cluster level follows a general multivariate normal distribution. We…

The Programme for International Student Assessment comparative study of reading performance among 15-year-olds is reanalyzed using statistical procedures that allow the full complexity of the data structures to be explored. The article extends existing multilevel factor analysis and structural equation models and shows how this can extract richer…

There is an increasing use of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for fitting statistical models in psychometrics, especially in situations where the traditional estimation techniques are very difficult to apply. One of the disadvantages of using an MCMC algorithm is that it is not straightforward to determine the convergence of the…

The randomized response (RR) technique is often used to obtain answers on sensitive questions. A new method is developed to measure latent variables using the RR technique because direct questioning leads to biased results. Within the RR technique is the probability of the true response modeled by an item response theory (IRT) model. The RR…