Background: Studying causal effects is an important aim in education. Causal relationships indicate how well implements (e.g., interventions) work for the target subjects. A good strategy to get the inference in such relationships is to conduct randomized experiments. However, random assignment is limited in education research, even is discouraged…

Combining observational and experimental data for causal inference can improve treatment effect estimation. However, many observational data sets cannot be released due to data privacy considerations, so one researcher may not have access to both experimental and observational data. Nonetheless, a small amount of risk of disclosing sensitive…

In measurement theory, causal indicators are controversial and little understood. Methodological disagreement concerning causal indicators has centered on the question of whether causal indicators are inherently sensitive to interpretational confounding, which occurs when the empirical meaning of a latent construct departs from the meaning…

In this article, the authors extend the results of Aguirre-Urreta, Rönkkö, and Marakas (2016) concerning the omission of a relevant causal indicator by testing the validity of the assumption that causal indicators are entirely superfluous to the measurement model and discuss the implications for measurement theory. Contrary to common wisdom…

This dissertation is composed of three distinct chapters, each of which addresses issues of estimating treatment effects. The first chapter empirically tests the Value-Added (VA) model using school lotteries. The second chapter, co-authored with Michael Wood, considers properties of inverse probability weighting (IPW) in simple treatment effect…

The 7th International Conference on Education Data Mining held on July 4th-7th, 2014, at the Institute of Education, London, UK is the leading international forum for high-quality research that mines large data sets in order to answer educational research questions that shed light on the learning process. These data sets may come from the traces…