The use of unidimensional scales that contain both positively and negatively worded items is common in both the educational and psychological fields. However, dimensionality investigations of these instruments often lead to a rejection of the theorized unidimensional model in favor of multidimensional structures, leaving researchers at odds for…

A research question that is of interest across many disciplines is whether and how relationships in a network are related to the attributes of the nodes of the network. In this dissertation, we propose two joint frameworks for modeling the relationship between the network and attributes. In the joint latent space model in Chapter 2, shared latent…

Many applications of structural equation modeling involve ordinal (e.g., Likert) variables. A popular way of dealing with ordinal variables is to estimate the model with polychoric correlations rather than Pearson correlations. Such an estimation also requires the asymptotic covariance matrix of polychoric correlations. It is computationally…

Research questions regarding how, for whom, and where a treatment achieves its effect on an outcome have become increasingly valued in substantive research. Such questions can be answered by causal moderated mediation analysis, which assesses the heterogeneity of the mediation mechanism underlying the treatment effect across individual and…

Metaheuristics are optimization algorithms that efficiently solve a variety of complex combinatorial problems. In psychological research, metaheuristics have been applied in short-scale construction and model specification search. In the present study, we propose a bee swarm optimization (BSO) algorithm to explore the structure underlying a…

Few empirical studies in Science Education have investigated the contributions of integrating scientific practices such as argumentation and modelling. In this article, I examine the characteristics of high school students' argumentative dialogues in different modelling situations. From this, I discuss the influences of modelling and the nature of…

Knowledge tracing is a well-known problem in AI for education, consisting of monitoring how the knowledge state of students changes during the learning process and accurately predicting their performance in future exercises. In recent years, many advances have been made thanks to various machine learning and deep learning techniques. Despite their…

It is common for social scientists to use formal quantitative methods to compare ecological units such as towns, schools, or nations. In many cases, the size of these units in terms of the number of individuals subsumed in each differs substantially. When the variables in question are counts, there is generally some attempt to neutralize…

The higher the level of development of higher education, the larger its contribution to socioeconomic development. In order to predict the trend of higher education development in a country more accurately, a new methodology is employed in this study. A weakening buffer operator-based GM (1, 1) model is constructed using Kazakhstan's gross…

In the present study, we used a modeling approach for measuring task conflict in task switching, assessing the probability of selecting the correct task via multinomial processing tree (MPT) modeling. With this method, task conflict and response conflict can be independently assessed as the probability of selecting the correct task and the…

Using a mixed methods approach, we explore a relationship between students' graph reasoning and graph selection via a fully online assessment. Our population includes 673 students enrolled in college algebra, an introductory undergraduate mathematics course, across four U.S. postsecondary institutions. The assessment is accessible on computers,…

Background: Cognitive rehabilitation is a complex and specialized area of practice, as it aims to support individuals with diverse neuropsychological profiles, personal characteristics, and intersectionalities in achieving meaningful, functional change in personally relevant aspects of their everyday lives. In many ways, cognitive rehabilitation…

We share lessons gained through supporting an institution-wide curriculum innovation via a post-graduate professional learning program. At the inception of the innovation, an intensive Block Model (BM) was unfamiliar to both the institution and its professional learning facilitators. The Graduate Certificate of Tertiary Education was re-modelled…

This paper is concerned with the process of selecting between the increasingly popular bi-factor model and the second-order factor model in measurement research. It is indicated that in certain settings widely used in empirical studies, the second-order model is nested in the bi-factor model and obtained from the latter after imposing appropriate…

Concepts contain rich structures that support flexible semantic cognition. These structures can be characterized by patterns of feature covariation: Certain features tend to cluster in the same items (e.g., "feathers," "wings," "can fly"). Existing computational models demonstrate how this kind of structure can be…