Panel studies, in which the same subjects are repeatedly observed at multiple time points, are among the most popular longitudinal designs in psychology. Meanwhile, there exists a wide range of different methods to analyze such data, with autoregressive and cross-lagged models being 2 of the most well known representatives. Unfortunately, in these…

Methods of uniform differential item functioning (DIF) detection have been extensively studied in the complete data case. However, less work has been done examining the performance of these methods when missing item responses are present. Research that has been done in this regard appears to indicate that treating missing item responses as…

Teachers can reflect on and analyze their classroom discourse to inform their instructional practice. When teachers try to do so however, they often face analytic difficulties, which include the data set (e.g., data input, data transformation, and utterances by unknown speakers), coding (e.g., coding complexity, reliability, and efficiency),…

While problem solving as an instructional technique is widely advocated, educators are often challenged in effectively assessing student skill in this area. Students failing to solve a problem might fail in any of several aspects of the effort. The purpose of this research was to validate a scaffolded technique for assessing problem solving in…

While women now earn more bachelor's degrees than men in many parts of the world, large gender gaps persist in fields of study, and women remain underrepresented in the most prestigious institutions. This study updates and extends the literature on gender disparities in higher education by comparing the selectivity of the institutions where men…

This case discusses early work to implement the Common Core State Standards at a fictitious school in Florida. The case is designed to support students' efforts to use school accountability data for inquiry and to conceptualize change in schools where previous leaders' efforts were not successful. Shell Elementary is an exurban school that serves…

Administrators at many colleges and universities have had online courses at their institutions for many years, now. One of the hidden challenges about online courses is that they tend to be observed and evaluated far less frequently than their face-to-face course counterparts. This is party due to the fact that many of us administrators today…

Leadership educators are faced with the challenge of preparing students to serve organizations and people in dynamic and ever changing contexts. The purpose of this study was to examine undergraduate leadership students' self-perceived level of moral imagination to make recommendations for moral imagination curricula. Moral imagination is the…

The essay briefly outlines the history of community engagement at DePaul University in order to explore how and why universities and colleges are increasingly adopting data collections systems for tracking community engagement. I explore the question of why there is a growing interest in tracking engagement within the academy and suggest that…

The primary objective of this special issue is to synthesize results from recent reading fluency research endeavors, and to link these findings to practical uses of reading curriculum-based measurement (R-CBM) tools. Taken together, the manuscripts presented in this issue discuss measurement work related to new metrics of indexing student reading…

Many people are first exposed to code through web development, yet little is known about the barriers beginners face in these formative experiences. In this article, we describe a study of undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory web development course taken by both computing majors and general education students. Using data collected…

The Irish inter-institutional virtual learning environments (VLEs) open dataset stems from ongoing work with a rolling longitudinal survey of students' usage of VLEs which has been ongoing in 12 higher education institutions since 2008. The project has collected over 21,000 student responses to date through the growth of an extended network of…

Open book assessment is not a new idea, but it does not seem to have gained ground in higher education. In particular, not much literature is available on open book examinations in mathematics and statistics in higher education. The objective of this paper is to investigate the appropriateness of open book assessments in a first-year business…

Researchers suggest that certain supportive behaviors of mentors could increase the benefits of school-based mentoring for youth. However, the literature contains few validated instruments to measure these behaviors. In our present study, we aimed to construct and validate a tool to measure the supportive behaviors of mentors participating in…

Many institutions are trying to better understand the factors that drive student success and failure in order to improve the efficiency of degree production. Traditional academic reporting systems are not adequate for this purpose, since they are designed to measure outcomes, not to uncover the factors that influence them. To address this problem,…