The goal of this paper is to find better ways to estimate the internal consistency reliability of scores on tests with a specific type of design that are often encountered in practice: tests with constructed-response items clustered into sections that are not parallel or tau-equivalent, and one of the sections has only one item. To estimate the…

Empirical studies often demonstrate multiple causal mechanisms potentially involving simultaneous or causally related mediators. However, researchers often use simple mediation models to understand the processes because they do not or cannot measure other theoretically relevant mediators. In such cases, another potentially relevant but unobserved…

Recent studies have shown that U.S. Census-- and American Community Survey (ACS)--based estimates of income segregation are subject to upward finite sampling bias (Logan et al. 2018; Logan et al. 2020; Reardon et al. 2018). We identify two additional sources of bias that are larger and opposite in sign to finite sampling bias: measurement…

Factor score regression (FSR) is widely used as a convenient alternative to traditional structural equation modeling (SEM) for assessing structural relations between latent variables. But when latent variables are simply replaced by factor scores, biases in the structural parameter estimates often have to be corrected, due to the measurement error…

The focus of the current study is on handling the dependence among multiple regression coefficients representing the treatment effects when meta-analyzing data from single-case experimental studies. We compare the results when applying three different multilevel meta-analytic models (i.e., a univariate multilevel model avoiding the dependence, a…

The popularity of online surveys has increased the prominence of using weights that capture units' probabilities of inclusion for claims of representativeness. Yet, much uncertainty remains regarding how these weights should be employed in analysis of survey experiments: Should they be used or ignored? If they are used, which estimators are…

Multilevel models (MLMs) have proven themselves to be very useful in social science research, as data from a variety of sources is sampled such that individuals at level-1 are nested within clusters such as schools, hospitals, counseling centers, and business entities at level-2. MLMs using restricted maximum likelihood estimation (REML) provide…

Regression, weighting and related approaches to estimating a population mean from a sample with nonrandom missing data often rely on the assumption that conditional on covariates, observed samples can be treated as random. Standard methods using this assumption generally will fail to yield consistent estimators when covariates are measured with…

Though much research and attention has been directed at assessing the correlation coefficient under range restriction, the assessment of reliability under range restriction has been largely ignored. This article uses item response theory to simulate dichotomous item-level data to assess the robustness of KR-20 ([alpha]), [omega], and test-retest…

The surgical theatre educational environment measures STEEM, OREEM and mini-STEEM for students (student-STEEM) comprise an up to now disregarded systematic overestimation (OE) due to inaccurate percentage calculation. The aim of the present study was to investigate the magnitude of and suggest a correction for this systematic bias. After an…

A Monte Carlo simulation was conducted to investigate the robustness of 4 latent variable interaction modeling approaches (Constrained Product Indicator [CPI], Generalized Appended Product Indicator [GAPI], Unconstrained Product Indicator [UPI], and Latent Moderated Structural Equations [LMS]) under high degrees of nonnormality of the observed…

The current main world university rankings broadly group the leading research universities of nations. Australia's Go8 universities are generally within the top 250 ranked universities, with several institutions in the top 50-100 on some measures. This recognition is commendable, however imperfect the individual rankings may be. Use is made of…

Schools and school systems throughout the nation are increasingly experimenting with using various instructional technologies to improve productivity and decrease costs, but evidence on both the effectiveness and the costs of education technology is limited. A recent report published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute sets out to describe "the…

"How New York City's Charter Schools Affect Achievement" estimates the effects on student achievement of attending a New York City charter school rather than a traditional public school and investigates the characteristics of charter schools associated with the most positive effects on achievement. Because the report relies on an…

Large scale surveys usually employ a complex sampling design and as a consequence, no standard methods for estimation of the standard errors associated with the estimates of population means are available. Resampling methods, such as jackknife or bootstrap, are often used, with reference to their properties of robustness and reduction of bias. A…