Zhiyong Zhang

The purpose of this grant is to combine structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques and data science methods to model network and text data. Network and text data are increasingly collected in many fields of research, business, and government. For example, to study student behaviors, it is important to understand the context of behaviors because students are not independent entities but are typically connected with one another, which naturally leads to the collection and analysis of networ...

The increasing complexity of education research poses great challenges on existing techniques used to estimate statistical power. For example, education research often involves longitudinal and multilevel designs as well as advanced techniques such as structural equation and multilevel models. Furthermore, practical data in education are often not normally distributed and are incomplete. Without careful consideration of the complexity of study designs and the impact of non-normal data and mi...

Longitudinal research can provide valuable insights into change and causal relationships, which are inherently linked to policy and decision making for children and young adults. To draw reliable conclusions with high external validity, education researchers often collect and analyze large-scale longitudinal datasets with complex structures. Amidst various emerging analytical challenges associated with complex longitudinal data, Bayesian methods are demonstrating promise in addressing them. ...