Wesley Bonifay

The goal of the proposed project is to develop user-friendly, free, open-source software for estimating the types of Bayesian latent variable models that are often encountered in education: models with multilevel structure, with ordinal variables, and with large sample sizes. This will provide education researchers with tools that allow them to apply state-of-the-art developments quickly and easily in Bayesian statistics to their own datasets. The software will build on the existing R packag...

Measuring Prosocial Behavior in Schools through a Virtual Reality Game: vSchool

A key component of any scientific undertaking is the construction of a model that explains the data. No model is an exact representation of the phenomena under investigation and, especially in the education sciences, useful models are often simplistic approximations of immensely complex processes. Goodness-of-fit (GOF) assessment provides a limited view of a model's usefulness. While GOF addresses the closeness of the model to the observed data, generalizability measures the potential fit of...

The University of California, Los Angeles departments of education and psychology established an interdisciplinary predoctoral training program focused on (a) advanced quantitative methodology for improving education practice and (b) mathematics teaching, learning, and assessment.