This article proposes a new approach to factor analysis and structural equation modeling using Bayesian analysis. The new approach replaces parameter specifications of exact zeros with approximate zeros based on informative, small-variance priors. It is argued that this produces an analysis that better reflects substantive theories. The proposed…

This article addresses likely error rates for measuring teacher and school performance in the upper elementary grades using value-added models applied to student test score gain data. Using a realistic performance measurement system scheme based on hypothesis testing, the authors develop error rate formulas based on ordinary least squares and…

Research Findings: Behavior regulation, including paying attention, remembering instructions, and controlling action, contributes to children's successful adaptation to and functioning in preschool and school settings. This study examined the development of behavior regulation in early childhood and its potential contribution to individual…

The existence of gender-STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) stereotypes has been repeatedly documented. This article examines physics teachers' gender bias in grading and the influence of teaching experience in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany. In a 2?×?2 between-subjects design, with years of teaching experience included as…

"Growth mixture models" (GMMs) with nonignorable missing data have drawn increasing attention in research communities but have not been fully studied. The goal of this article is to propose and to evaluate a Bayesian method to estimate the GMMs with latent class dependent missing data. An extended GMM is first presented in which class…

Diagnosis of misconceptions or "bugs" in procedural skills is difficult because of their unstable nature. This study addresses this problem by proposing and evaluating a probability-based approach to the diagnosis of bugs in children's multicolumn subtraction performance using Bayesian networks. This approach assumes a causal network relating…

Human response time (RT) data are widely used in experimental psychology to evaluate theories of mental processing. Typically, the data constitute the times taken by a subject to react to a succession of stimuli under varying experimental conditions. Because of the sequential nature of the experiments there are trends (due to learning, fatigue,…

Identifying price sensitive consumers is an important problem in marketing. We develop a Bayesian multi-level factor analytic model of the covariation among household-level price sensitivities across product categories that are substitutes. Based on a multivariate probit model of category incidence, this framework also allows the researcher to…

Hierarchical modeling of responses and response times on test items facilitates the use of response times as collateral information in the estimation of the response parameters. In addition to the regular information in the response data, two sources of collateral information are identified: (a) the joint information in the responses and the…

In this article the authors focus on the issue of the nonuniqueness of the maximum likelihood (ML) estimator of proficiency level in item response theory (with special attention to logistic models). The usual maximum a posteriori (MAP) method offers a good alternative within that framework; however, this article highlights some drawbacks of its…

Students conducted inquiry using simulations within a rich learning environment for 4 science topics. By applying educational data mining to students' log data, assessment metrics were generated for two key inquiry skills, testing stated hypotheses and designing controlled experiments. Three models were then developed to analyze the transfer of…

How can humans acquire relational representations that enable analogical inference and other forms of high-level reasoning? Using comparative relations as a model domain, we explore the possibility that bottom-up learning mechanisms applied to objects coded as feature vectors can yield representations of relations sufficient to solve analogy…

In administration of individually administered intelligence tests, items are commonly presented in a sequence of increasing difficulty, and test administration is terminated after a predetermined number of incorrect answers. This practice produces stochastically censored data, a form of nonignorable missing data. By manipulating four factors…

Our first review article (Wagemans et al., 2012) on the occasion of the centennial anniversary of Gestalt psychology focused on perceptual grouping and figure-ground organization. It concluded that further progress requires a reconsideration of the conceptual and theoretical foundations of the Gestalt approach, which is provided here. In…

This paper describes how item response theory (IRT) methods of test-equating could be applied to the maintenance of public examination standards in England. IRT methods of test-equating have been sparingly applied to the main public examinations in England, namely the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), the equivalent of a school…