Self-determination theory has been applied in various educational contexts. Language learning researchers have used factor analysis and structural equation modeling to investigate measures designed for this theory, but Rasch analysis has not been conducted. The Basic Psychological Needs Satisfaction and Frustration Scale (BPNSFS) and the Language…

This dissertation is comprised of three essays, each examining a different topic in labor economics. In Chapter 1, I examine the productivity and selection effects of K-12 teacher tenure by leveraging variation from New Jersey's TEACHNJ Act. This law extended the pre-tenure period from three to four years and allowed districts to dismiss…

Moderated mediation analysis is a valuable technique for assessing whether an indirect effect is conditional on values of a moderating variable. We review the basis of moderation and mediation and their integration into a combined model of moderated mediation within a regression framework. Thereafter, an analytic and interpretive illustration of…

Once students meet exit criteria and Tier 2 reading supports are removed, many do not maintain their current progress and fail to meet future performance benchmarks. Although estimates of average growth during intervention exist, typical rates of growth after supports are removed are relatively unknown. In this research brief, we used segmented…

This study aims to comparatively examine the resultant findings by testing the measurement invariance with structural equation modeling in cases where the missing data is handled using the expectation-maximization (EM), regression imputation, and mean substitution methods in the complete data matrix and the 5% missing data matrix that is randomly…

Personnel evaluation systems have historically failed to identify and remediate low-performing teachers. In 2012, Chicago Public Schools implemented an evaluation system that incorporated remediation and dismissal plans for low-rated teachers. Regression discontinuity estimates indicate that the evaluation reform increased the exit of low-rated…

Research has shown that mathematical proficiency gaps are related to students' and schools' indicators of poverty, with fewer studies on neighborhood effects on achievement gaps. Although this literature has accounted for students' nesting within schools, so far, methodological constraints have not allowed researchers to formally account for…

This paper analyses the associations between computer use in schools and at home and test scores by using TIMSS data covering over 900,000 children in fourth grade. When controlling for school fixed effects, pupils who use computers at school, especially those who use them frequently are found to achieve less than students who never use computers.…

When there are no personal consequences associated with test performance for examinees, rapid guessing (RG) is a concern and can differ between subgroups. To date, the impact of differential RG on item-level measurement invariance has received minimal attention. To that end, a simulation study was conducted to examine the robustness of the…

This article illustrates ways that dynamic software using some sophisticated techniques in Excel can be used to demonstrate fundamental ideas related to regression and correlation analysis to increase student understanding of the concepts and methods in elementary statistics courses and in courses at the college algebra/precalculus level that…

In causal matching designs, some control subjects are often left unmatched, and some covariates are often left unmodeled. This article introduces "rebar," a method using high-dimensional modeling to incorporate these commonly discarded data without sacrificing the integrity of the matching design. After constructing a match, a researcher…

Numerous studies have investigated economies of scale and scope in higher education as a means of providing public and private providers of college and university teaching, research and other services and their stakeholders with knowledge of the cost structures that underpin provision in this economically and socially important sector. However,…

Some IRT models can be equivalently modeled in alternative frameworks such as logistic regression. Logistic regression can also model time-to-event data, which concerns the probability of an event occurring over time. Using the relation between time-to-event models and logistic regression and the relation between logistic regression and IRT, this…

For well over a century, scientists have investigated individual differences in performance. The majority of studies have focused on either differences in practice, or differences in cognitive resources. However, the predictive ability of either practice or cognitive resources varies considerably across tasks. We are the first to examine task…

The literature proposes numerous so-called pseudo-R[superscript 2] measures for evaluating "goodness of fit" in regression models with categorical dependent variables. Unlike ordinary least square-R[superscript 2], log-likelihood-based pseudo-R[superscript 2]s do not represent the proportion of explained variance but rather the…