Background: Education researchers typically estimate average program effects with regression; if they are interested in heterogeneous effects, they include an interaction in the model. Such models quantify and infer the influences of each covariate on the effect via interaction coefficients and their associated p-values or confidence intervals.…

In this study I explored how professional development training impacts Grade 3 teachers' ability to assess reading proficiency and provide targeted support to enhance learner outcomes in Namibia. An action research methodology was used to plan, engage, and reflect on reading assessment. Data were collected from artifacts gathered during training…

Graph Signal Processing (GSP) plays a crucial role in addressing the growing need for information processing across networks, especially in tasks like supervised classification. However, the success of GSP in such tasks hinges on accurately identifying the underlying relational structures, which are often not readily available and must be inferred…

Research has shown that children's responses differ depending on the questions asked. These differences alter the questions that can be posed to children in an educational environment and the expectations about their possible responses. Understanding children's questions and the abstract level of their answers is key to support their development…

Reweighting a distribution to minimize a distance to a target distribution is a powerful and flexible strategy for estimating a wide range of causal effects, but can be challenging in practice because optimal weights typically depend on knowledge of the underlying data generating process. In this paper, we focus on design-based weights, which do…

Bayesian methods seem a natural choice for combining sources of evidence in meta-analyses. However, in practice, their sensitivity to the choice of prior distribution is much less attractive, particularly for parameters describing heterogeneity. A recent non-Bayesian approach to fixed-effects meta-analysis provides novel ways to think about…

The purpose of this study is to further our understanding of orchestrating math-talk with digital technology. The technology used is common in Swedish mathematics classrooms and involves personal computers, a projector directed towards a whiteboard at the front of the class and software programs for facilitating communication and collective…

Most students have interacted with scientific representations that are used as teaching resources in schools. Often these external representations present challenges for understanding. By utilizing a framework based on an inferential, epistemic approach to scientific representations, we have analyzed students' representational constructions of the…

We are sometimes forced to use the Interrupted Time Series (ITS) design as an identification strategy for potential policy change, such as when we only have a single treated unit and cannot obtain comparable controls. For example, with recent county- and state-wide criminal justice reform efforts, where judicial bodies have changed bail setting…

Bayesian inference for structural equation models (SEMs) is increasingly popular in social and psychological sciences owing to its flexibility to adapt to more complex models and the ability to include prior information if available. However, there are two major hurdles in using the traditional Bayesian SEM in practice: (1) the information nested…

Multisite field experiments using the (generalized) randomized block design that assign treatments to individuals within sites are common in education and the social sciences. Under this design, there are two possible estimands of interest and they differ based on whether sites or blocks have fixed or random effects. When the average treatment…

Critical thinking refers to a mode of thinking--about any subject, content, or problem--in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skillfully analyzing, assessing, and reconstructing knowledge. This study evaluates the critical thinking skills of private and public high school students in Kuwait and examines the practices…

Dynamic assessment (DA), based on Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory, integrates instruction and assessment into a single activity through interactive dialog between the mediator and learner to promote development. This research utilized the interactionist DA to assess and enhance five types of listening inferential abilities of Chinese EFL learners.…

One part of COVID-19's staggering impact on education has been to suspend or fundamentally alter ongoing education research projects. This article addresses how to analyze the simple but fundamental example of a multi-cohort study in which student assessment data for the final cohort are missing because schools were closed, learning was virtual,…

The article explores the role that subjective evidence of causality and associated counterfactuals and counterpotentials might play in the social sciences where comparative cases are scarce. This scarcity rules out statistical inference based upon frequencies and usually invites in-depth ethnographic studies. Thus, if causality is to be preserved…