Curriculum-Based Measurement of Reading (CBM-R) is frequently used to monitor instructional effects and evaluate response to instruction. Educators often view the data graphically on a time-series graph that might include a variety of statistical and visual aids, which are intended to facilitate the interpretation. This study evaluated the effects…

Previous experimental psycholinguistic studies suggested that the probabilistic phonotactics information might likely to hint the locations of word boundaries in continuous speech and hence posed an interesting solution to the empirical question on how we recognize/segment individual spoken word in speech. We investigated this issue by using…

This paper discusses investigations in science education addressing the nonlinear dynamical hypothesis. Learning science is a suitable field for applying interdisciplinary research and predominately for testing psychological theories. It was demonstrated that in this area the paradigm of complexity and nonlinear dynamics have offered theoretical…

This study analyzed the debt profile of low-income households before and after the Great Recession using the 2007, 2010, and 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). We used Heckman selection models to investigate three debt characteristics: (a) the amount of debt, (b) debt-to-income ratio, and (c) debt delinquency. Before and after the Great…

In this paper, we investigate two purported problems with Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT), a popular statistical model of student learning: "identifiability" and "semantic model degeneracy." In 2007, Beck and Chang stated that BKT is susceptible to an "identifiability problem"--various models with different…

BKT and other classical student models are designed for binary environments where actions are either correct or incorrect. These models face limitations in open-ended and data-driven environments where actions may be correct but non-ideal or where there may even be degrees of error. In this paper we present BKT-SR and RKT-SR: extensions of the…

The purpose of this paper is to provide guidance in choice of analytic bias reduction methods for educational studies in which the goal is to estimate a treatment effect in the presence of selection bias into treatment. In addition, issues of dimensionality, collinearity, omitted confounders, missing outcomes, and non-independence may be factors…

Policymakers are increasingly interested in the extent to which experimental results generalize from a sample to a population of inference. When the sample is not randomly selected, propensity score methods are used to reweight the sample. Subclassification by propensity score is commonly used in which the population is partitioned into strata…

This case study examines the research process used to assess the intermediate effects of a community-based college preparation program in a fast growth, high needs exurban school district in Texas. Because it was not possible to randomly assign participants to treatment or control conditions, a nonexperimental design using propensity score…

We exploit differences in state special education funding systems based on special education enrollment ('bounty systems') or on total student enrollment ('census systems') to assess whether funding systems impact teacher turnover, teacher specialty, special education enrollment, state education spending, average class sizes, and teacher effort.…

To support efforts to improve students' college readiness and success, leaders at the Palau Ministry of Education and Palau Community College want to understand the experiences and background of Palau High School graduates who are better prepared for Palau Community College. This study identified the Palau High School academic preparation…

Data science has maintained its popularity for about 20 years. This study adopts a bottom-up approach to understand what data science is by analyzing the descriptions of courses offered by the data science programs in the United States. Through topic modeling, 14 topics are identified from the current curricula of 56 data science programs. These…

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a debated phenomenon and the link between schooling and the occurrence of ADHD diagnoses is worth critical scrutiny. This paper contributes to the academic debate by providing a literature review of the evidence on the influence of relative age effect (RAE) on being diagnosed with ADHD. Firstly,…

In May 2019, College Board published the first national operational SAT® validity study on the new SAT introduced in 2016. Based on data from more than 221,000 students across 169 four-year colleges and universities, the study showed that the SAT was essentially as effective as high school grades in predicting students' college performance and…

This study employed design-based logistic regression to examine the extent to which attending a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) magnet high school, school demographics, and student-level factors explain racial/ethnic differences in a student's intent to declare a STEM major in the first semester of college. Data were drawn…