This study uses the PIAAC data to examine the relationships between education system characteristics (e.g. early tracking and vocational education orientation) and distributions of adult numeracy skills. It also investigates the effects of postponing the tracking age and easing university access for students on a vocational track on the average…

Meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) involves fitting models to a common population correlation matrix that is estimated on the basis of correlation coefficients that are reported by a number of independent studies. MASEM typically consist of two stages. The method that has been found to perform best in terms of statistical…

This thesis examined middle school students' current understanding of variability using a constructed response item assessment question. Variability is an essential concept in the teaching and learning of statistics. However, many students have difficulty with the concept of variability especially when constructing boxplots. Using a framework…

The underrepresentation of women in secondary school headship in England and elsewhere is an early and longstanding theme in the women and gender in educational leadership literature. The purpose of this article is to report findings from a statistical survey of secondary school head teachers across England. Data available in the public domain on…

Libraries before the 21st century carried out daily routine library task such as cataloguing and classification, acquisition, reference services etc using manual procedures only but the advent of Information Technology as transformed these routine task that libraries can now automate their activities by deploying the use of library software in…

The author responds to the article by Warne, Godwin, and Smith (2013) on the question of whether there are more gifted people than would be expected in a Gaussian normal distribution. He asserts that the answer to this question is yes, based on (a) data that he and his colleagues have collected, (b) data that are already available and quoted by…

Box plots are frequently misinterpreted and educational attempts to correct these misinterpretations have not been successful. In this study, we used two instructional techniques that seemed powerful to change the misinterpretation of the area of the box in box plots, both separately and in combination, leading to three experimental conditions,…

This research provides new evidence on the political activity and policy-setting agenda of the largest national teachers' union during a time of political change. Using a longitudinal dataset comprised of election outcomes and campaign contributions for all candidates for federal office and the National Education Association's (NEA) official…

The aim of this study is to find out young Turkish students' opinions about living thing concept in detail and to investigate the criteria used by the students to define this concept. The study sample consisted of randomly selected 140 students studying at the 3rd, 4th and 5th grades in four different primary and middle schools located in the…

Children acquiring languages with noun classes (grammatical gender) have ample statistical information available that characterizes the distribution of nouns into these classes, but their use of this information to classify novel nouns differs from the predictions made by an optimal Bayesian classifier. We use rational analysis to investigate the…

We present three strategies to replace the null hypothesis statistical significance testing approach in psychological research: (1) visual representation of cognitive processes and predictions, (2) visual representation of data distributions and choice of the appropriate distribution for analysis, and (3) model comparison. The three strategies…

For Fall 2016, of the 175,509 students enrolled in the Utah System of Higher Education at third week, 69,535 (39.6 %) are participating in some form of technology delivered instruction. Of that total, 54,269 (30.9%) enrolled in at least one online class. Despite availability of online courses and degrees, students prefer using online courses to…

Growth curve modeling provides a general framework for analyzing longitudinal data from social, behavioral, and educational sciences. Bayesian methods have been used to estimate growth curve models, in which priors need to be specified for unknown parameters. For the covariance parameter matrix, the inverse Wishart prior is most commonly used due…

We consider the relative performance of two common approaches to multiple imputation (MI): joint multivariate normal (MVN) MI, in which the data are modeled as a sample from a joint MVN distribution; and conditional MI, in which each variable is modeled conditionally on all the others. In order to use the multivariate normal distribution,…

The aim of this article is to propose a new breakdown of the Gini inequality ratio into three components ("within-group" inequality, "between-group" inequality, and intensity of "transvariation" between groups to the total inequality index). The between-group inequality concept computes all the differences in salaries…