This note confronts the common use of a single coefficient alpha as an index informing about reliability of a multicomponent measurement instrument in a heterogeneous population. Two or more alpha coefficients could instead be meaningfully associated with a given instrument in finite mixture settings, and this may be increasingly more likely the…

This position paper examines the phenomenon of the McNamara Fallacy to analyse flawed conceptions of "success" in mathematics learning, normalised assessment structures and their implications for mathematics education. The established presence of the McNamara Fallacy and the ramifications of this statistical fallacy provide a foundation…

School psychology has heavily relied on quantitative methodology to create and sustain our knowledge of best practices regarding academic, behavioral, and mental health outcomes for students. Nevertheless, underlying assumptions of the neutrality of quantitative data have obfuscated how school psychology research has perpetuated oppressive…

Mathematics teacher educators play a key role in supporting secondary mathematics teachers' development of effective, research-based formative assessment (FA) practices. We used qualitative research synthesis as a tool to identify actionable recommendations for mathematics teacher educators as they work with teachers on FA practices in secondary…

How researchers use statistical analyses shapes their research toward or away from an anti-racist agenda. In this article, we demonstrate how developmental scientists can use the QuantCrit framework to critically examine the process of conducting quantitative analyses. In particular, we focus on mixture modeling to clearly demonstrate how the…

Log-linear models for contingency tables are a key tool for the study of categorical inequalities in sociology. However, the conventional approach to model selection and specification suffers from at least two limitations: reliance on oftentimes equivocal diagnostics yielded by fit statistics, and the inability to identify patterns of association…

This methods showcase article provides a detailed overview of a mixed-effects modeling analysis of corpus data on the use of "that" in object and subject complementation by native speakers of English compared to its use by German and Spanish learners of English.

Purpose: As new technologies such as immersive and augmented platforms emerge, training approaches are also transforming. The virtual reality (VR) platform provides a completely immersive learning experience for simulated training. Despite increased prevalence of these technologies, the extent literature is lagging behind in terms of evaluating…

In multisite trials, learning about treatment effect variation across sites is critical for understanding where and for whom a program works. Unadjusted comparisons, however, capture "compositional" differences in the distributions of unit-level features as well as "contextual" differences in site-level features, including…

Moderators are variables that affect the relationship between a predictor and outcome. They help to clarify otherwise ambiguous patterns of results, extend theory, and signal the growth of a field. Given the importance of moderators, the authors offer an overview of methodological and statistical considerations for testing moderation and then…

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…

The individuals living in the 21st century have become the consumers of digital innovations and have to adapt, adopt and adapt to the new norm of surviving and thriving in the digital society. Familiarity with the latest technologies is not the only requirement for survival. One also needs to have relevant digital competencies to complete tasks…

When equating two test forms, the equated scores will be biased if the test groups differ in ability. To adjust for the ability imbalance between nonequivalent groups, a set of common items is often used. When no common items are available, it has been suggested to use covariates correlated with the test scores instead. In this article, we reduce…

Many empirical economists say that the teaching of econometrics is unbalanced, and students are not well-prepared for the serious problems they will encounter with real data. Here, the author considers the problem of noisy data, which is present in most econometric studies, but receives far too little attention. Most econometric studies are done…

Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and orthogonal regression (OR) address different questions and make different assumptions about errors. The OLS regression of Y on X yields predictions of a dependent variable (Y) contingent on an independent variable (X) and minimizes the sum of squared errors of prediction. It assumes that the independent…