Statistical investigations, a thread within the statistics strand of the mathematics and statistics learning area (Ministry of Education, 2007), are underpinned by the statistical enquiry cycle. As teachers introduce their students to the statistical enquiry cycle, they are supporting their students to become data detectives, posing and answering…

Sport management research has evolved significantly despite its relatively short history as an academic discipline. Although the pace of scholarly progress has been impressive, the extent to which many research efforts have aided sport management in becoming a distinct academic discipline is, at times, questionable. A major challenge many scholars…

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a growing literature bemoaning the level of quantitative methods provision within the U.K. Higher Education sector, noting its negative impact upon the subsequent skills of graduates and their preparedness for the workplace. The present paper documents and evaluates an attempt to counter these issues…

Events such as curriculum changes or practice effects can lead to item parameter drift (IPD) in computer adaptive testing (CAT). The current investigation introduced a point- and weight-adjusted D[superscript 2] method for IPD detection for use in a CAT environment when items are suspected of drifting across test administrations. Type I error and…

We present a classroom-ready activity for high school or college students involving an investigation of a rich, multivariate data set concerning educational and demographic characteristics of K-12 schools at the state level in the United States. The data set includes educational characteristics such as per-pupil revenue and graduation rate along…

Students encounter difficulties when entering into the fog of historical analysis, a place where evidence rarely lines up neatly and contradictions abound. Too often, novices conveniently ignore any sort of counterevidence that could muddy a clean explanation, thus reverting to safe truisms that sidestep key problems. Meanwhile, professional…

Measures of socioeconomic status (SES) are widely used in educational research and policy applications in no small part because of a deeply rooted belief of the importance of SES. This paper argues that the usefulness of common SES measures can be undermined by (a) an atheoretical approach to conceptualizing SES and selecting measures, which…

Identifying mediators in variable chains as part of a causal mediation analysis can shed light on issues of causation, assessment, and intervention. However, coefficients and effect sizes in a causal mediation analysis are nearly always small. This can lead those less familiar with the approach to reject the results of causal mediation analysis.…

Survival is difficult to estimate when observation periods of individuals differ in length. Students imagine sailing the Titanic and then recording whether they "live" or "die." A clever algorithm is performed which results in the Kaplan-Meier estimate of survival.

This paper offers a defense of Robin Barrow's main arguments in "Giving Teaching Back to Teachers", including additional material concerning the inability of the aggregate data and statistical methods employed in research in education (and research on teaching) to speak to individual teachers and students or to particular classrooms.…

Librarians are committed to supporting teaching, learning, and research. They are equally committed to supporting student success and retention. Demonstrating the impact that learning management system (LMS) embedded librarians make on student learning has been difficult to correlate, however. Studies that assess this connection, using qualitative…

This article reviews and compares recently proposed factor analytic and item response theory approaches to the study of invariance across groups. Two methods are described and contrasted. The alignment method considers the groups as a fixed mode of variation, while the random-intercept, random-loading two-level method considers the groups as a…

The importance of data analysis software in graduate programs in education and post-graduate educational research is self-evident. However the role of this software in facilitating supererogated statistical practice versus "cookbookery" is unclear. The need to rigorously document the role of data analysis software in students' graduate…

While social justice advocacy likely has been present in school psychology throughout its history, the last few years have seen a marked increase in the prominence of social justice language and ideas within the National Association of School Psychologists. Existing research suggests that applying social justice principles requires both…

The recent change in the general social survey (GSS) to a rotating panel design is a landmark development for social scientists. Sociological methodologists have argued that fixed-effects (FE) models are generally the best starting point for analyzing panel data because they allow analysts to control for unobserved time-constant heterogeneity. We…