The University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC) is an urban research university with a special emphasis on fostering diversity. In 2021, the Center for Advancing Faculty Excellence created a Faculty Fellows program to develop comprehensive resources and support in four areas: teaching and learning, service and engagement, research and creativity,…

Social media platforms are rich and dynamic spaces where individuals communicate on a person-to-person level and to broader audiences. These platforms provide a wealth of publicly available data that can shed light on the lived experiences of people from numerous clinical populations. Twitter can be used to examine individual expressions and…

The priority goals of the development of Czech higher education include ensuring the quality of its activities, improving the availability and relevance of flexible forms of education, and increasing efficiency in teaching and research. Several professional articles evaluated educational efficiency, but the proposed models did not include…

This research aims to build economic research skills and stimulate students' interest in the local economy through data-based undergraduate research in entry-level economics courses. The authors developed two assignments and one student survey assessing students' learning outcomes and implemented them in two introductory-level classes from fall…

The Cross Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM) framework was developed in the 1990s and has been widely used as the most relevant and comprehensive leading principle for conducting analytics projects. Despite the wide acceptance and adoption of the CRISP-DM framework, the current business analytics discipline often focuses on the…

Challenges in the measurement of racial disparities in school discipline are a significant barrier to identifying policy and programmatic reforms that are effective at closing gaps. This article reviews key measurement issues and presents a set of empirical analyses as an illustrative case study. Specifically, we reframe the interpretation of…

"Champions of Literacy" is a guide designed for Alaska school board members. This guide recognizes school board members as Champions of Literacy in their local education ecosystem and provides them with the tools to plan strategically, analyze school and district data, understand key approaches, and deepen their commitment to…

This dissertation seeks to investigate how digital gestures connect to students' mathematical understanding when playing "From Here to There!" (FH2T). This investigation explores the intersection of three fields, game-based learning, embodied cognition, and mathematics education. I used three studies which break down the different…

The framework of cyber-archaeology was developed by Jones (1997, 2003) and later modified by Zimbra et al. (2010) to examine online networks and virtual communities. Since the modification, the method has fallen out of favor and is no longer utilized by qualitative researchers. To rebuild the method for qualitative research, we engaged in four…

Estimation of causal effects requires making comparisons across groups of observations exposed and not exposed to a a treatment or cause (intervention, program, drug, etc). To interpret differences between groups causally we need to ensure that they have been constructed in such a way that the comparisons are "fair." This can be…

Assessing sensitivity to unmeasured confounding is an important step in observational studies, which typically estimate effects under the assumption that all confounders are measured. In this paper, we develop a sensitivity analysis framework for balancing weights estimators, an increasingly popular approach that solves an optimization problem to…

Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is a relatively young method of causal inference that continues to diffuse across the social sciences. However, recent methodological research has found the conservative (QCA-CS) and the intermediate solution type (QCA-IS) of QCA to fail fundamental tests of correctness. Even under conditions otherwise ideal…

This study addresses a gap in the literature by examining K-12 administrators' perceptions of school social workers' usage of student data. Before the start of the 2020-2021 school year, school social workers from a national organization invited their administrators via email to complete a survey, producing 48 responses. Administrators perceived…

Takers of educational tests often receive proficiency levels instead of or in addition to scaled scores. For example, proficiency levels are reported for the Advanced Placement (AP®) and U.S. Medical Licensing examinations. Technical difficulties and other unforeseen events occasionally lead to missing item scores and hence to incomplete data on…

Participatory Theme Elicitation (PTE) is a new approach to increasing user-involvement in qualitative data analysis. In this five-step method, participants independently identify themes in the data using open card sorting, and are supported in their development of a set of themes that reflect all participant views. We describe and evaluate PTE…