Colleges have increasingly turned to predictive analytics to target at-risk students for additional support. Most of the predictive analytic applications in higher education are proprietary, with private companies offering little transparency about their underlying models. We address this lack of transparency by systematically comparing two…

Maintaining and cultivating student engagement is critical for learning. Understanding factors affecting student engagement can help in designing better courses and improving student retention. The large number of participants in massive open online courses (MOOCs) and data collected from their interactions on the MOOC open up avenues for studying…

Recent methods have sought to improve precision in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) by utilizing data from large observational datasets for covariate adjustment. For example, consider an RCT aimed at evaluating a new algebra curriculum, in which a few dozen schools are randomly assigned to treatment (new curriculum) or control (standard…

Physics education research (PER) has used quantitative modeling techniques to explore learning, affect, and other aspects of physics education. However, these studies have rarely examined the predictive output of the models, instead focusing on the inferences or causal relationships observed in various data sets. This research introduces a modern…

Organizational commitment is a major determinant of organizational effectiveness and desirable employee attitudes and behaviours. Highly committed academic staff are the backbone of universities since they play an important role in the success of their institutions. This study investigated factors associated with organizational commitment among…

Online education continues to become an increasingly prominent part of higher education, but many students struggle in distance courses. For this reason, there has been considerable interest in predicting which students will succeed in online courses and which will receive poor grades or drop out prior to completion. Effective intervention depends…

Measures of variability are successfully used in predictive modeling in research areas outside of education. This study examined how standard deviations can be used to address research questions not easily addressed using traditional measures such as group means based on index variables. Student survey data were obtained from the Organisation for…

Purpose: The purpose of the present research was to test how behavioral regulations are mediated between basic psychological needs and psychological well-being and ill-being in a sample of team-sport coaches. Based on self-determination theory, we hypothesized a model where satisfaction and thwarting of the basic psychological needs predicted…

Graduate school recommendations are an important part of admissions in higher education, and natural language processing may be able to provide objective and consistent analyses of recommendation texts to complement readings by faculty and admissions staff. However, these sorts of high-stakes, personal recommendations are different from the…

This article shows that the mean and covariance structure of the predetermined autoregressive latent trajectory (ALT) model are very flexible. As a result, the shape of the modeled growth curve can be quite different from what one might expect at first glance. This is illustrated with several numerical examples that show that, for example, a…

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationships between achievement goal orientations and Learning Strategies. The sample of study consists of 350 public high school students (135 males and 215 females, mean age: 17 ± 0.65) from two high schools in Kerman province of Iran selected by random multistage cluster sampling method. In this…

Retention is a complex issue of great importance to community colleges. Several retention models have been developed to help explain this phenomenon. However, these models typically have used four-year college and university environments to build their foundations. Several researchers have attempted to identify predictor variables using…

There is little doubt that career experiences contribute to scientific achievement; however this relationship has yet to be thoroughly investigated in terms the effects on scientific creativity. In this study, a historiometric approach was used to examine 3 areas of adult career experiences common to scientific achievement. In doing so, prior…

This study investigates whether adequate yearly progress (AYP) status, locale, and sector--common variables used to judge the quality of schools--accurately signal true differences in instructional practices in high school mathematics and science. Using data from the High School Longitudinal Study (HSLS), we find the school-to-school variation in…

In large-scale assessments, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), plausible values based on Multiple Imputations (MI) have been used to estimate population characteristics for latent constructs under complex sample designs. Mislevy (1991) derived a closed-form analytic solution for a fixed-effect model in creating…