Many youth experience mental health problems. Schools are an ideal setting to identify, prevent, and intervene in these problems. The purpose of this study was to investigate patterns of student social, emotional, and behavioral risk over time among a community sample of 3rd through 12th grade students and the association of these risk patterns…

In standard statistical data analysis, the effects of intervention or prevention efforts are evaluated in terms of variable relations. Results from application of regression-type methods suggest whether, overall, intervention is successful. In this article, we propose using configural frequency analysis (CFA) either in tandem with regression-type…

Consistency of learning behaviors is known to play an important role in learners' engagement in a course and impact their learning outcomes. Despite significant advances in the area of learning analytics (LA) in measuring various self-regulated learning behaviors, using LA to measure consistency of online course engagement patterns remains largely…

The ability to automatically assess the quality of paraphrases can be very useful for facilitating literacy skills and providing timely feedback to learners. Our aim is twofold: a) to automatically evaluate the quality of paraphrases across four dimensions: lexical similarity, syntactic similarity, semantic similarity and paraphrase quality, and…

We report findings from a multistate survey of 720 faculty and staff from 25 elementary schools in five districts across three states and geographic regions participating in an IES Network grant examining integrated tiered systems. In this preregistered study, we replicated and extended previous inquiry examining educators' views of (1)…

Over 60 years of research reveal that informants who observe youth in clinically relevant contexts (e.g., home, school)--typically parents, teachers, and youth clients themselves--often hold discrepant views about that client's needs for mental health services (i.e., "informant discrepancies"). The last 10 years of research reveal that…

Psychology research often focuses on interactions, and this has deep implications for inference from non-representative samples. For the goal of estimating average treatment effects, we propose to fit a model allowing treatment to interact with background variables and then average over the distribution of these variables in the population. This…

It is not always clear how to adjust for control data in causal inference, balancing the goals of reducing bias and variance. We show how, in a setting with repeated experiments, Bayesian hierarchical modeling yields an adaptive procedure that uses the data to determine how much adjustment to perform. The result is a novel analysis with increased…

Interest in the study of gene-environment interaction has recently grown due to the sudden availability of molecular genetic data--in particular, polygenic scores--in many long-running longitudinal studies. Identifying and estimating statistical interactions comes with several analytic and inferential challenges; these challenges are heightened…

Despite broad applications of growth curve models, few studies have dealt with a practical issue -- nonnormality of data. Previous studies have used Student's "t" distributions to remedy the nonnormal problems. In this study, robust distributional growth curve models are proposed from a semiparametric Bayesian perspective, in which…

Beginning teachers enter a profession that places particularly challenging demands on novice practitioners. The New Teacher Center's (NTC) induction model provides intensive, instructionally focused coaching to teachers during their first two years in the classroom, in-depth training for induction mentors, a suite of tools to guide coaching…

Previous studies offer mixed evidence regarding whether a unified model of reading comprehension predictors applies to Dual Language Learners (DLLs) and English Speakers (ESs), or whether distinctive models across language groups are empirically supported. The present study adds another dimension to this body of work by examining multiple reading…

The assessment of psychosocial strengths in children and adolescents has predominately focused on the measurement of single traits and constructs, such as grit (Christopoulou, Lakioti, Pezirkianidis, Karakasidou, & Stalikas, 2018), optimism (Oberle, Guhn, Gadermann, Thomson, & Schonert-Reichl, 2018), hope (Pedrotti, 2018), and gratitude…

A key writing skill is the capability to clearly convey desired meaning using available linguistic knowledge. Consequently, writers must select from a large array of idioms, vocabulary terms that are semantically equivalent, and discourse features that simultaneously reflect content and allow readers to grasp meaning. In many cases, a simplified…

Open-ended comprehension questions are a common type of assessment used to evaluate how well students understand one of multiple documents. Our aim is to use natural language processing (NLP) to infer the level and type of inferencing within readers' answers to comprehension questions using linguistic and semantic features within their responses.…