A lavaan Compendium for Structural Equation Modeling in Educational Research

Suzanne Jak and Terrence D. Jorgensen

Last updated 18 November 2024

Preface

This compendium began as a collection of documents used a teaching materials, to supplement software-agnostic textbooks about structural equation modeling (SEM). Materials were originally developed for a University of Amsterdam course (search here for a description of the course “structural equation modelling in educational research”) taught by Frans Oort and Suzanne Jak using the OpenMx package, and later adapted for the lavaan by Suzanne Jak, Mathilde Verdam, and Terrence D. Jorgensen. The latest version of the materials were compiled into the current compendium by Suzanne Jak and Terrence D. Jorgensen using RMarkdown, and assisted by Lennert J. Groot to compile the separate chapters into a bookdown project hosted on GitHub.

Copyright

Unless otherwise noted, this book is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License also known as a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. This means you are free to

• Share (copy and redistribute) the material in any medium or format
• Adapt (remix, transform, and build upon) the material

as long as any derivative materials are also distributed using a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. Under this license, anyone who redistributes this textbook can do so for free on the condition they properly attribute the book as follows:

• Jak, S., & Jorgensen, T. D. (2023). A lavaan Compendium for Structural Equation Modeling in Educational Research. https://tdjorgensen.github.io/SEM-in-Ed-compendium/

Acknowledgments

We thank Lennert J. Groot for compiling the chapters into the initial bookdown project, now maintained by Terrence D. Jorgensen. This was facilitated by a Grassroots grant (project Unstatic: Towards an adaptive online learning environment for statistics education), funded by the University of Amsterdam in academic year 2021–2022.