The natural experiment proposed in this article extracts three stories from boxes of "100 paper clips". The activity requires students to apply three lessons from inferential statistics, starting with a hypothesis test and including confidence intervals as well as tolerance intervals.

Cronbach's alpha is the most frequently used measure to investigate the reliability of measurement instruments. Despite its frequent use, many warn for misinterpretations of alpha. These claims about regular misunderstandings, however, are not based on empirical data. To understand how common such beliefs are, we conducted a survey study to test…

Cohen's kappa coefficient is commonly used for assessing agreement between classifications of two raters on a nominal scale. Three variants of Cohen's kappa that can handle missing data are presented. Data are considered missing if one or both ratings of a unit are missing. We study how well the variants estimate the kappa value for complete data…

Benefiting from item preknowledge (e.g., McLeod, Lewis, & Thissen, 2003) is a major type of fraudulent behavior during educational assessments. This paper suggests a new statistic that can be used for detecting the examinees who may have benefitted from item preknowledge using their response times. The statistic quantifies the difference in…

Mixed methods research is still an evolving area. However, it has various characteristics like "paradigm pluralism", "focus on research questions than the research design" etc. Mixed methods research is not just one phase of a research but it enters into all stages of research process right from the stage of writing the…

Quantitative Critical Race Theory (QuantCrit) is a burgeoning field of study seeking to challenge and improve the use of statistical data in social research. It pulls lessons and insights from Critical Race Theory and applies them to understanding social challenges. In this paper, we aim to improve the quality of quantitative research produced by…

This study investigates the trends of doctoral dissertations produced in Türkiye in the field of Educational Technologies. 292 doctoral dissertations were included in this study which was conducted in the design of document analysis in the period between 2011 and 2020. The dissertations were put to content analysis by using the Dissertation…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to test the relationship between instructional related expenditures and student performance on a state mandated exam while controlling for various district-level and student-level variables for school districts in the state of Texas. The study had two research questions regarding student performance in…

We used simulation techniques to assess the item-level and familywise Type I error control and power of an IRT item-fit statistic, the "S-X"[superscript 2]. Previous research indicated that the "S-X"[superscript 2] has good Type I error control and decent power, but no previous research examined familywise Type I error control.…

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…

We address measurement error bias in propensity score (PS) analysis due to covariates that are latent variables. In the setting where latent covariate X is measured via multiple error-prone items W, PS analysis using several proxies for X--the W items themselves, a summary score (mean/sum of the items), or the conventional factor score (i.e.,…

In this paper we reflect on the looming question of what constitutes expertise in ethics. Based on an empirical program that involved qualitative and quantitative as well as participatory research elements we show that expertise in research ethics and integrity is based on experience in the assessment processes. We then connect traditional…

Large amounts of missing data could distort item parameter estimation and lead to biased ability estimates in educational assessments. Therefore, missing responses should be handled properly before estimating any parameters. In this study, two Monte Carlo simulation studies were conducted to compare the performance of four methods in handling…

This research article reports on the initial findings of a critical quantitative study, which developed and implemented a series of quantitative scales utilizing conceptualizations of racial fragility and anti-racist teacher self-efficacy scales. The scales were administered through a survey and yielded a usable sample of 4770 teachers in…

The observed increase in economic inequality, where the major concern is relative to the huge growth of the highest incomes, motivates to revisit classical measures of inequality and to offer new ways to synthesize the variability of the entire income distribution. The idea is to provide policy makers a way to contrast the economic position of the…