"Data modeling" is an approach that helps students to transform initial, and often misguided, understandings of variability and chance to forms of reasoning that coordinate chance with variability by designing learning environments that support this reasoning by allowing students to invent and revise models. The Assessing Data Modeling…

A jack knife is a pocket knife that is put to many tasks, because it's ready to hand. Often there could be a better tool for the job, such as a screwdriver, a scraper, or a can-opener, but these are not usually pocket items. In statistical terms, the expression implies making do with what's available. Another simile, of an extreme situation, is…

We propose a new limited-information goodness of fit test statistic C[subscript 2] for ordinal IRT models. The construction of the new statistic lies formally between the M[subscript 2] statistic of Maydeu-Olivares and Joe (2006), which utilizes first and second order marginal probabilities, and the M*[subscript 2] statistic of Cai and Hansen…

School districts and states across the Regional Educational Laboratory Mid-Atlantic Region and the country as a whole have been modifying their teacher evaluation systems to identify more effective and less effective teachers and provide better feedback to improve instructional practice. The new systems typically include components related to…

The OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) constitute two of the largest ongoing international student and teacher surveys presently underway. Data generated from these surveys offer researchers and policy-makers opportunities to identify particular educational…

Equating functions are supposed to be population invariant, meaning that the choice of subpopulation used to compute the equating function should not matter. The extent to which equating functions are population invariant is typically assessed in terms of practical difference criteria that do not account for equating functions' sampling…

The authors identify 2 major types of statistical data from which semantic representations can be learned. These are denoted as "experiential data" and "distributional data". Experiential data are derived by way of experience with the physical world and comprise the sensory-motor data obtained through sense receptors. Distributional data, by…

Across many areas of psychology, concordance is commonly used to measure the (intragroup) agreement in ranking a number of items by a group of judges. Sometimes, however, the judges come from multiple groups, and in those situations, the interest is to measure the concordance between groups, under the assumption that there is some within-group…

A recent series of papers has renewed interest in the question of whether consumption data are superior to income data for poverty measurement. Although the Census Bureau has provided researchers with an experimental series of variables that can produce a comprehensive income measure, this resource has not been fully exploited in previous…

A number of important applications require the clustering of binary data sets. Traditional nonhierarchical cluster analysis techniques, such as the popular K-means algorithm, can often be successfully applied to these data sets. However, the presence of masking variables in a data set can impede the ability of the K-means algorithm to recover the…

Introduces William Sanders, a professor of statistics who has created a controversial method of evaluating teachers and schools. He takes students' test scores, enters them into a computer, and measures how students improve from year to year. He claims this system is more fair, realistic, and reasonable than other methods because it emphasizes…

When studying different types of returns to education, educational reforms are commonly used in the economics literature as a source of exogenous variation in education. The Swedish compulsory school reform is one example; the reform extended compulsory education throughout the country, in different municipalities at different points in time. Such…

More attention should focus on sample sizes and the concept of statistical power in research in the field of health, physical education, and recreation. (JD)

Since problems associated with the statistical methodology of educational research are becoming increasingly important, this paper examines a subset of problems associated with the analysis and interpretation of aggregated data. Two major questions arise: (1) if a researcher knows the level (e.g., individual, teacher/classroom, school, school…

A Course Barometer is a method for addressing the loss of informal feedback in a distance education setting. Originally proposed and used at the University of Trollhattan Uddevella this paper describes how the idea of a course barometer has been adopted by Central Queensland University. The paper suggests connections between anonymity, observable…