Recent critiques of physics education research (PER) studies have revoiced the critical issues when drawing causal inferences from observational data where no intervention is present. In response to a call for a "causal reasoning primer" in PER, this paper discusses some of the fundamental issues in statistical causal inference. In…

Structural equation modeling (SEM) is widely used in behavioral, social, and education research. Drawing publication-ready path diagrams for SEM is not a pleasant task with the existing software. The article introduces an open-source web-based graphical application, "semdiag," for drawing WYSIWYG SEM path diagrams interactively. The…

Two different tools for assessing pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of mathematics teachers used in the framework of the COACTIV study are systematically compared in this paper, namely the paper-and-pencil test consisting of items on the three facets "knowledge of explaining and representation," "knowledge of student thinking and…

Data collected from surveys can result in hundreds of variables and thousands of respondents. This implies that time and energy must be devoted to (a) carefully entering the data into a database, (b) running preliminary analyses to identify any problems (e.g., missing data, potential outliers), (c) checking the reliability and validity of the…

In policy evaluations, interest may focus on why a particular treatment works. One tool for understanding why treatments work is causal mediation analysis. In this essay, I focus on the assumptions needed to estimate mediation effects. I show that there is no "gold standard" method for the identification of causal mediation effects. In…

University rankings are key drivers in national and institutional strategic planning. The increase in the number of university ranking systems and the diversity of methods and indicators used by these systems necessitate the development of an index that can measure a university's performance in all these systems at once. This article presents…

The social sciences have traditionally assumed that education is a major determinant of citizens' political orientations and behavior. Several studies have also shown that intelligence has an impact. According to a theory that conceptualizes intelligence as a "burgher" (middle-class, civil) phenomenon--intelligence should promote civil…

The current study investigates associations among marital satisfaction, family emotional expressiveness, the home learning environment, and preschool-aged children's emergent literacy skills among 385 Midwestern mothers and their children. Path analyses examined how marital satisfaction related to emotional expressiveness in the home and whether…

Emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the concept of individual student planning developed as a component of school guidance counseling programs. The underlying significance of these plans, such as the Individual Career Plan (ICP), is that "it gives [students] a chance to tell and develop their story" (N. Gysbers, personal communication,…

An extended Heaviside calculus proposed by Peraire in a recent paper is similar to a generalization of the Laplace transform proposed by the present author. This similarity will be illustrated by analysis of an example supplied by Peraire.

We use the Implicit Function Theorem to establish a result of non-existence of limit to a certain class of functions of several variables. We consider functions given by quotients such that both the numerator and denominator functions are null at the limit point. We show that the non-existence of the limit of such function is related with the…

This article reports the findings of a national survey study of school counseling professionals to determine if higher ego development contributed to a lower degree of burnout. Although the primary path analysis model tested did not fit the data observed, a significant positive relationship indicated that participants scoring at higher levels of…

In this essay, the author tries to look forward into the 21st century to divine three things: (i) What skills will researchers in the future need to solve the most pressing problems? (ii) What are some of the most likely candidates to be those problems? and (iii) What are some current areas of research that seem mined out and should not distract…

Generalized Structured Component Analysis (GSCA) was recently introduced by Hwang and Takane (2004) as a component-based approach to path analysis with latent variables. The parameters of GSCA are estimated by pooling data across respondents under the implicit assumption that they all come from a single, homogenous group. However, as has been…

In China's current educational fiscal decision making, problems are as follows: no law to trust or not abiding by available laws, absence of equity and efficiency, as well as the standardization of decision-making procedures. It is necessary to set up effective fiscal decision-making mechanism in education and rationally devise reliable paths.