The 0.05 boundary within Null Hypothesis Statistical Testing (NHST) "has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move" (to quote Douglas Adams). Here, we move past meta-scientific arguments and ask an empirical question: What is the psychological standing of the 0.05 boundary for statistical significance? We…

In this paper, we address the following questions: What misconceptions do high school students exhibit in their first encounter with significance test problems through a repeated sampling approach? Which theory or framework could explain the presence and features of such patterns? With brief prior instruction on the use of Fathom software to…

Using data from multiple informants has long been considered best practice in education. However, multiple informants often disagree on similar constructs, complicating decision-making. Polynomial regression and response-surface analysis (PRA) is often used to test the congruence effect between multiple informants on an outcome. However, PRA…

Sampling distributions are fundamental for statistical inference, yet their abstract nature poses challenges for students. This research investigates the development of high school students' conceptions of sampling distribution through informal significance tests with the aid of digital technology. The study focuses on how technological tools…

The early detection of item drift is an important issue for frequently administered testing programs because items are reused over time. Unfortunately, operational data tend to be very sparse and do not lend themselves to frequent monitoring analyses, particularly for on-demand testing. Building on existing residual analyses, the authors propose…

A multiple testing method for examining factorial invariance for latent constructs evaluated by multiple indicators in distinct populations is outlined. The procedure is based on the false discovery rate concept and multiple individual restriction tests and resolves general limitations of a popular factorial invariance testing approach. The…

This brief paper introduces a new approach to assessing the trustworthiness of research comparisons when expressed numerically. The 'number needed to disturb' a research finding would be the number of counterfactual values that can be added to the smallest arm of any comparison before the difference or 'effect' size disappears, minus the number of…

This study was aimed to find out from the teachers in Nigeria, their perception of the functionalism and their participation in the internal testing programme of secondary schools special reference to a state in southern Nigeria. A sample of 1,000 teachers was randomly stratified from the entire teachers' population of 6,000 in government-own…

The city of New Orleans has embarked on an historic experiment reinventing its schools--once considered among the worst in the country--from a centralized, single district model of education to a two district model in which both the Recovery School District (RSD) and the preexisting Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) both operate direct run and…

Standardized testing has been part of the American educational system for decades. Controversy from the beginning has plagued standardized testing, is plaguing testing today, and will continue to be controversial. Given the current federal educational policies supporting increased standardized testing, psychometricians, educators and policy makers…

Assessing the comparability of different groups is an issue facing many researchers and evaluators in a variety of settings. Commonly, null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) is incorrectly used to demonstrate comparability when a non-significant result is found. This is problematic because a failure to find a difference between groups is not…

This study investigated the influence of host community on industrial relations practices and policies using Agbara community and Power Holding Company of Nigeria PLC as a case. The study adopted both the qualitative and quantitative methods. A total of 120 samples were drawn from the population using the simple random sampling technique in which…

Background/Purpose: In response to concerns with increasing rates of childhood obesity, many states have enacted policies that affect physical education. A commonly used approach is state mandated fitness test administration in school-based settings. While this approach is widely debated throughout the literature, one area that lacks research is…

There have been many discussions of how Type I errors should be controlled when many hypotheses are tested (e.g., all possible comparisons of means, correlations, proportions, the coefficients in hierarchical models, etc.). By and large, researchers have adopted familywise (FWER) control, though this practice certainly is not universal. Familywise…

In the context of existing "quantitative"/"qualitative" schisms, this paper briefly reminds readers of the current practice of testing for statistical significance in social science research. This practice is based on a widespread confusion between two conditional probabilities. A worked example and other elements of logical argument demonstrate…