Students often believe that statistical significance is the only determinant of whether a quantitative result is "important." In this paper, I review traditional null hypothesis statistical testing to identify what questions inferential statistics can and cannot answer, including statistical significance, effect size and direction,…

This comment discusses some issues about the use and reporting of experimental studies in education, illustrated by a recently published study that claimed (i) that an educational innovation was effective despite outcomes not reaching statistical significance, and (ii) that this refuted the findings of an earlier study. The two key issues raised…

The purposes of this manuscript are to identify common statistical mistakes in sport management, and to provide scholars with suggestions on how to develop and improve the quality of quantitative research. We have reviewed articles published from 2001 to 2017 in the "Journal of Sport Management," "Sport Management Review,"…

Structured means analysis is a very useful approach for testing hypotheses about population means on latent constructs. In such models, a z test is most commonly used for testing the statistical significance of the relevant parameter estimates or of the differences between parameter estimates, where a z value is computed based on the asymptotic…

Quantitative results from empirical studies are common in the field of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), but it is important to remain aware of what the results from our studies can, and cannot, tell us. Oftentimes studies conducted to examine teaching and learning are constrained by class size. Small sample sizes negatively influence…

Traditions of statistical significance testing in second language (L2) quantitative research are strongly entrenched in how researchers design studies, select analyses, and interpret results. However, statistical significance tests using "p" values are commonly misinterpreted by researchers, reviewers, readers, and others, leading to…

We present three strategies to replace the null hypothesis statistical significance testing approach in psychological research: (1) visual representation of cognitive processes and predictions, (2) visual representation of data distributions and choice of the appropriate distribution for analysis, and (3) model comparison. The three strategies…

Limited research has investigated dissertation methodology choice and the factors that contribute to this choice. Quantitative research is based in mathematics and scientific positivism, and qualitative research is based in constructivism. These underlying philosophical differences posit the question if certain factors predict dissertation…

Engagement markers (hereafter, EMs) are crucial interpersonal devices to interact with readers through texts. However, little is known about the differences of EMs use in Humanities and Science journal research articles (hereafter, RAs), as well as the changes in markers use over the passage of time. The present study provides a quantitative and…

Students in the United Kingdom (UK) are found to lack knowledge and skills in quantitative research methods. To address this gap, a quantitative research method and statistical analysis curriculum comprising 10 individual lessons was developed, piloted, and evaluated at two universities The evaluation found that BSW students' (N = 81)…

Despite recent emphasis on the use of randomized control trials (RCTs) for evaluating education interventions, in most areas of education research, observational methods remain the dominant approach for assessing program effects. Over the last three decades, the within-study comparison (WSC) design has emerged as a method for evaluating the…

Given the American Psychological Association's strong recommendation to always report effect sizes in research, scholars have a responsibility to provide complete information regarding their findings. The purposes of this study were to (a) determine the frequencies with which different effect sizes were reported in published, peer-reviewed…

This paper presents a non-parametric imputation technique, named random forest, from the machine learning field. The random forest procedure has two main tuning parameters: the number of trees grown in the prediction and the number of predictors used. Fifty experimental conditions were created in the imputation procedure, with different…

The purpose of this study was to examine evidence of a hypothesized shift in the operative research paradigms in music education during the first quarter century of the publication of the "Journal of Research in Music Education," during the period 1953 to 1978. This shift was from humanities-oriented historical and philosophical studies…

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the views of German teacher trainers working in Turkey about their level regarding Reigeluth's organizational strategies and to analyze their views in terms of gender, geographic region, seniority, and graduated high school variables. While the population of the study consisted of German teacher trainers…