We assessed whether an adaptation of value-added analysis (VAA) can provide evidence on the relative effectiveness of interventions implemented in a large school district. We analyzed two datasets, one documenting interventions received by underperforming students, and one documenting interventions received by students in schools benefiting from…

We conduct the first quantitative analysis of "blind removals," an increasingly popular reform that seeks to reduce the over-representation of Black children in foster care by eliminating biases in the removal decisions of investigators. We first show that over-representation in most foster care systems is driven by Black children being…

Today's citizens are expected to use evidence, frequently presented in the media, to inform decisions about health, behavior, and public policy. However, science misinformation is ubiquitous in the media, making it difficult to apply research appropriately. Across two experiments, we addressed how anecdotes and prior beliefs impact readers'…

To evaluate the fit of a confirmatory factor analysis model, researchers often rely on fit indices such as SRMR, RMSEA, and CFI. These indices are frequently compared to benchmark values of 0.08, 0.06, and 0.96, respectively, established by Hu and Bentler (1999). However, these indices are affected by model characteristics and their sensitivity to…

Pacing guides are commonplace yet controversial in American public schools. For teachers who question their usefulness, one means to circumvent them is to exercise autonomy in pedagogical decision-making, though doing so comes with challenges. Through interviews, we examined how 87 gifted and general education 4th and 5th grade math and…

This research-practice partnership (RPP) focused on developing and testing metrics and tools to foster improved evidence-based budgetary decision-making. The expectation was that research findings would directly influence decisions about program expansion, contraction, or elimination. Instead, unexpected findings led to unexpected uses: changes in…

A variety of measures have been developed to quantify intervention effects for single-case experimental design studies. Within the family of non-overlap indices, the Tau-U measure is one of the most popular indices. There are several Tau-U variants, each one calculated differently. The appropriateness of each Tau-U variant depends upon the data…

Mental health organizations that serve youth are under pressure to adopt measurement-based care (MBC), defined as the continuous collection of client-report data used to support clinical decision making as part of standard care. However, few frameworks exist to help leadership ascertain how to select an MBC approach for a clinical setting. This…

Understanding fraction magnitudes is especially important in daily life, but fraction reasoning is quite difficult. To accurately reason about fraction magnitudes, adults need to monitor what they know and what they do not know. However, little is known about which cues adults use to monitor fraction performance. Across two studies, we examined…

An important component of many Adaptive Instructional Systems (AIS) is a 'Learner Model' intended to track student learning and predict future performance. Predictions from learner models are frequently used in combination with mastery criterion decision rules to make pedagogical decisions. Important aspects of learner models, such as learning…

Probabilistic machine learning increasingly informs critical decisions in medicine, economics, politics, and beyond. To aid the development of trust in these decisions, we develop a taxonomy delineating where trust in an analysis can break down: (1) in the translation of real-world goals to goals on a particular set of training data, (2) in the…

Despite the potential benefits of integrating family-school partnerships into school-wide PBIS, many barriers persist that limit a school's ability to engage in meaningful family-school partnerships. These barriers to implementation suggest the importance of understanding the extent to which school teams can overcome these obstacles and promote…

Text classification has allowed researchers to analyze natural language data at a previously impossible scale. However, a text classifier is only as valid as the the annotations on which it was trained. Further, the cost of training a classifier depends on annotators' ability to quickly and accurately apply the coding scheme to each text. Thus,…

Assessing youth psychopathology involves collecting multiple informants' reports. Yet, multi-informant reports often disagree, necessitating integrative strategies that optimize predictive power. The "Trait" score approach leverages principal components analysis (PCA) to account for the context and perspective from which informants…

There is a dearth of research examining school and district factors associated with the abandonment of evidence-based practice in schools. In this mixed-methods study, we surveyed 23 school personnel working with 30 schools that abandoned and then readopted school-wide positive behavioral interventions and supports (SWPBIS). Our aims were to…