A global education race now pits countries, regions, and school systems against one another. The racecourse has been created by a small number of influential international testing programs, and the popular media announces winners and losers. Fear of falling behind haunts policy-makers and shapes educational priorities around the world. But are we running in the right direction? We all have a stake in education, and as informed citizens we need to understand the increasingly influential and...

Winner of the 2017 AERA Division D Significant Contribution to Educational Measurement and Research Methodology Award! Technological and statistical advances, along with a strong interest in gathering more information about the state of our educational systems, have made it possible to assess more students, in more countries, more often, and in more subject domains. The Handbook of International Large-Scale Assessment: Background, Technical Issues, and Methods of Data Analysis brings toget...

Education has played an important role in making Vietnam a development success story over the last twenty years. In the 1990s and early 2000s Vietnam experienced rapid economic growth and poverty reduction in the wake of a rapid shift of employment from low-productivity agriculture to higher-productivity nonfarm jobs. Vietnam's committed effort to promote access to quality primary education for all has enabled this transformation and contributed to the country's reputation for having a you...

Applauded for its clarity, this accessible introduction helps readers apply multilevel techniques to their research. The book also includes advanced extensions, making it useful as both an introduction for students and as a reference for researchers. Basic models and examples are discussed in nontechnical terms with an emphasis on understanding the methodological and statistical issues involved in using these models. The estimation and interpretation of multilevel models is demonstrated us...

This book develops an intuitive understanding of IRT principles through the use of graphical displays and analogies to familiar psychological principles. It surveys contemporary IRT models, estimation methods, and computer programs. Polytomous IRT models are given central coverage since many psychological tests use rating scales.Ideal for clinical, industrial, counseling, educational, and behavioral medicine professionals and students familiar with classical testing principles, exp...

Scale Development: Theory and Applications, by Robert F. DeVellis and new co-author Carolyn T. Thorpe, demystifies measurement by emphasizing a logical rather than strictly mathematical understanding of concepts. The Fifth Edition includes a new chapter that lays out the key concepts that distinguish indices from scales, contrasts various types of indices, suggests approaches for developing them, reviews validity and reliability issues, and discusses in br...

Change is constant in everyday life. Infants crawl and then walk, children learn to read and write, teenagers mature in myriad ways, the elderly become frail and forgetful. Beyond these natural processes and events, external forces and interventions instigate and disrupt change: test scores may rise after a coaching course, drug abusers may remain abstinent after residential treatment. By charting changes over time and investigating whether and when events occur, researchers reveal the tem...

This volume introduces the statistical, methodological, and conceptual aspects of mediation analysis. Applications from health, social, and developmental psychology, sociology, communication, exercise science, and epidemiology are emphasized throughout. Single-mediator, multilevel, and longitudinal models are reviewed. The author's goal is to help the reader apply mediation analysis to their own data and understand its limitations.Each chapter features an overview, numerous worked ...

Categorical data are quantified as either nominal variables--distinguishing different groups, for example, based on socio-economic status, education, and political persuasion--or ordinal variables--distinguishing levels of interest, such as the preferred politician or the preferred type of punishment for committing burglary. This new book is a collection of up-to-date studies on modern categorical data analysis methods, emphasizing their application to relevant and interesting data sets.

The third edition of A Primer on Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) guides readers through learning and mastering the techniques of this approach in clear language. Authors Joseph H. Hair, Jr., G. Tomas M. Hult, Christian Ringle, and Marko Sarstedt use their years of conducting and teaching research to communicate the fundamentals of PLS-SEM in straightforward language to explain the details of this method, with limited emphasis on equations and symbols. ...

This book provides accessible treatment to state-of-the-art approaches to analyzing longitudinal studies. Comprehensive coverage of the most popular analysis tools allows readers to pick and choose the techniques that best fit their research. The analyses are illustrated with examples from major longitudinal data sets including practical information about their content and design. Illustrations from popular software packages offer tips on how to interpret the results. Each chapter features...

In textbooks and courses in statistics, substantive and measurement issues are rarely, if at all, considered. Similarly, textbooks and courses in measurement virtually ignore design and analytic questions, and research design textbooks and courses pay little attention to analytic and measurement issues. This fragmentary approach fosters a lack of appreciation of the interrelations and interdependencies among the various aspects of the research endeavor. Pedhazur and Schmelkin's goal is to ...