Randomized A/B tests within online learning platforms enable us to draw unbiased causal estimators. However, precise estimates of treatment effects can be challenging due to minimal participation, resulting in underpowered A/B tests. Recent advancements indicate that leveraging auxiliary information from detailed logs and employing design-based…

Researchers interested in studying the frequency of events or behaviors among a population must rely on count data provided by sampled individuals. Often, this involves a decision between live event counting, such as a behavioral diary, and recalled aggregate counts. Diaries are generally more accurate, but their greater cost and respondent burden…

Conventional advice discourages controlling for postoutcome variables in regression analysis. By contrast, we show that controlling for commonly available postoutcome (i.e., future) values of the treatment variable can help detect, reduce, and even remove omitted variable bias (unobserved confounding). The premise is that the same unobserved…

Courses: Research methods for undergraduates or graduates. Objectives: The aims of this activity are: (1) to clarify the basics of experimental design; (2) to illustrate the concept of levels of measurement; (3) to demonstrate in-person/hands-on data collection procedures; (4) to understand and practice the steps in null hypothesis testing; and…

This study examined the direct and indirect relations of foundational language skills (vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, and orthographic knowledge), higher-order cognitive skills (inference making and comprehension monitoring), and word reading to reading comprehension in Chinese. Consistent with the hierarchical relations specified in the Direct…

Technical documentation for educational tests focuses primarily on properties of individual scores at single points in time. Reliability, standard errors of measurement, item parameter estimates, fit statistics, and linking constants are standard technical features that external stakeholders use to evaluate items and individual scale scores.…

Analogical reasoning is a core facet of higher cognition in humans. Creating analogies as we navigate the environment helps us learn. Analogies involve reframing novel encounters using knowledge of familiar, relationally similar contexts stored in memory. When an analogy links a novel encounter with a familiar context, it can aid in problem…

Proving and refuting are fundamental aspects of mathematical practice that are intertwined in mathematical activity in which conjectures and proofs are often produced and improved through the back-and-forth transition between attempts to prove and disprove. One aspect underexplored in the education literature is the connection between this…

The purpose of this paper is to highlight issues related to students' personal inferences that arise when students verbally explain their justification for calculus statements. We conducted clinical interviews with three undergraduate students who had taken first-semester calculus but had not yet been exposed to formal proof writing activities…

Using data from teaching experiments and theories from quantitative reasoning, we built second-order accounts of students' mathematics with regards to how they conceived rate of change through operating on existing quantities. In this report, we explain three different ways STEM undergraduates structurally conceive rate of change as they…

A considerable amount of research has emerged in recent years concerning second language (L2) learner sensitivity to various information types. From this, Clahsen and Felser proposed the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH) to account for increased learner sensitivity to certain kinds of non-structural (e.g., contextual, discoursal, semantic, and…

Library and information science (LIS) research is becoming more quantitative. However, statistics is not extensively taught within LIS research methods courses, and statistics courses are uncommon within LIS programs. Previous research on statistics in LIS revealed that researchers have mainly relied on descriptive statistics in publications. This…

Randomized control trials are considered the pinnacle for causal inference. In many cases, however, randomization of participants in social work research studies is not feasible or ethical. This paper introduces the co-twin control design study as an alternative quasi-experimental design to provide evidence of causal mechanisms when randomization…

Background: For decades, education researchers have relied on the work of Campbell, Cook, and Shadish to help guide their thinking about valid impact estimates in the social sciences (Campbell & Stanley, 1963; Shadish et al., 2002). The foundation of this work is the "validity typology" and its associated "threats to…

We developed and field-tested an active learning exercise designed to provide biology students with the opportunity to consider key aspects of the nature of science as a method of inquiry, particularly the roles of observation and inference in the development of scientific explanations and how scientists deal with uncertainty. In the activity…