Recently Burkholder "et al." argued that class normalized gains over the entire population of courses is approximated by a Cauchy distribution, not by a normal distribution, and therefore should not be used to compare different classes because means and standard deviations cannot be calculated. They argued that multiple linear regression…

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…

Background: Students face many challenges completing a postsecondary education program, including both administrative hurdles (e.g., course registration) and course management challenges (e.g., scheduling study time, finding academic support). Text-based nudging in the postsecondary context has been a particularly effective tool when targeting…

This article describes an extension to the use of heteroskedastic ordered probit (HETOP) models to estimate latent distributional parameters from grouped, ordered-categorical data by pooling across multiple waves of data. We illustrate the method with aggregate proficiency data reporting the number of students in schools or districts scoring in…

Despite a marked increase in study abroad participation in recent decades, first-generation students and Students of Color remain vastly underrepresented. The current study sought to expand the extant literature on first-generation and Latino/a students' study abroad participation by applying an intersectional approach to identifying predictors of…

Log-linear models for contingency tables are a key tool for the study of categorical inequalities in sociology. However, the conventional approach to model selection and specification suffers from at least two limitations: reliance on oftentimes equivocal diagnostics yielded by fit statistics, and the inability to identify patterns of association…

In Ethiopia, secondary school Civics and Ethical Education has been offered to students with prime objective of producing competent and rational citizens. While policy narratives advocate constructivist pedagogy for achieving this goal of the curriculum, the reality on the ground hints that the subject is far behind achieving its stated goal. In…

In sub-Saharan Africa over 52 million children are living with the death of one or both parents. Drivers of this parental mortality include afflictions at levels endemic to the region, including: HIV; malaria and other parasites; lower respiratory infections; diarrhoeal illnesses; and road accidents, among others. This paper examines the impact of…

Background: We assessed whether self-descriptions, self-perceptions, perceived substance use of friends, and actual substance use were associated with high school girls' frequency of making social comparisons to peers. Methods: We analyzed data from the Adolescent Health Risk Behavior Survey data for 357 high school girls using multinomial…

Employing nested sequences of models is a common practice when exploring the extent to which one set of variables mediates the impact of another set. Such an analysis in the context of logistic regression models confronts two challenges: (1) direct comparisons of coefficients across models are generally biased due to the changes in scale that…

We use a unique dataset of student teaching placements in the State of Washington and a proxy for teacher shortages, the proportion of new teacher hires in a school or district with emergency teaching credentials, to provide the first empirical evidence of a relationship between student teaching placements and teacher shortages. We find that…

With a sample of 160 Muslim college students attending 34 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), ordinary-least-squares regression analyses were conducted to examine students' sense of belonging and mattering. Conceptually grounded in the minoritized religious and spiritual campus climate framework (MRSCC), the findings indicated…

This methods showcase article provides a detailed overview of a mixed-effects modeling analysis of corpus data on the use of "that" in object and subject complementation by native speakers of English compared to its use by German and Spanish learners of English.

Enhancing student engagement and achievement in large undergraduate university courses is a vibrant area of research. Many existing studies have demonstrated the capacity of technologically enhanced formal and informal learning spaces to promote learning. However, this literature is dominated by studies that use assessment to incentivise student…

The purpose of this study is to analyze the relationships between the flow states and undergraduate attitudes' towards math and engagement in a mathematics course in an education faculty. The results showed that the more positive attitudes the students had towards mathematics courses, the more flow they experienced and the less anxiety they had in…