Students' feedback is usually gathered in institutions of higher education to evaluate the teaching quality from the students' perspective, using questionnaires administered at the end of the courses. These evaluations are useful to pinpoint the course strengths, identify areas of improvement, and understand the factors that contribute to…

Background: Network meta-analysis (NMA) produces complex outputs as many comparisons between interventions are of interest. The estimated relative treatment effects are usually displayed in a forest plot or in a league table and several ranking metrics are calculated and presented. Methods: In this article, we estimate relative treatment effects…

Background: When RCTs are not feasible and time series data are available, panel data methods can be used to estimate treatment effects on outcomes, by exploiting variation in policies and conditions over time and across locations. A complication with these methods, however, is that treatment timing often varies across the sample, for example, due…

Performance-based funding (PBF) policies with research incentives have grown in popularity over the years despite little understanding regarding whether they actually work. This study leverages a novel national data set to examine the impact of PBF research incentives on the research expenditures and total state appropriations among public 4-year…

Purpose: This study aims to properly and objectively assess the students' study progress in bachelor programmes by applying statistical process control (SPC). Specifically, the authors focused their analysis on the variation in performance rates in business studies courses taught at a Spanish University. Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative…

This research explores the emerging field of data science from the scientometric, curricular, and altmetric perspectives and addresses the following six research questions: 1.What are the scientometric features of the data science field? 2.What are the contributing fields to the establishment of data science? 3.What are the major research areas of…

Library and information science (LIS) research is becoming more quantitative. However, statistics is not extensively taught within LIS research methods courses, and statistics courses are uncommon within LIS programs. Previous research on statistics in LIS revealed that researchers have mainly relied on descriptive statistics in publications. This…

I discuss a published paper in political science that made a claim that aroused skepticism. The reanalysis is an example of how we, as consumers as well as producers of science, can engage with published work. This can be viewed as a sort of collaboration performed implicitly between the authors of a published paper and later researchers who want…

This article offers some less-than-rigorous explanations for the notion of degrees of freedom, and for the particular formulae to be used when computing those values.

The article presents some notes on normalization and illustrates these procedures using graphing functions in R. Using real data, the paper also presents an R package and online Shiny app that efficiently transforms variables in large datasets.

Objective: This study examined relationships between eating disorder risk (EDR), lifestyle variables (e.g., exposure to healthy eating media), and differences among male and female college students. Participants: College students (N = 323) completed survey questionnaires (Fall, 2016). Fifty-three participants retook the survey at a later time.…

In the last 40 years in much of the western world dropout rates in higher education have remained almost unchanged. Although student retention seems to be the most studied and discussed aspect, nearly every empirical study on the causes of dropout in higher education and even more the impact of retention actions carried out by universities, in…

The increased Simon effect with increasing the ratio of congruent trials may be interpreted by both attention modulation and irrelevant stimulus-response (S-R) associations learning accounts, although the reversed Simon effect with increasing the ratio of incongruent trials provides evidence supporting the latter account. To investigate if…

Several studies with quantitative, qualitative or theoretical approaches have been carried out, focusing on the application of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) in the educational sector. However, despite the literature on the subject, it is difficult to draw an overview of the use of the BSC in this sector. In order to fill this gap, our research…

We examined the performance of coefficient alpha and its potential competitors (ordinal alpha, omega total, Revelle's omega total [omega RT], omega hierarchical [omega h], greatest lower bound [GLB], and coefficient "H") with continuous and discrete data having different types of non-normality. Results showed the estimation bias was…