Longitudinal studies provide important sources of
information when investigating how differences in various
national and regional school policies, practices and
compositional characteristics relate to differences in student
achievement over a period of time. Therefore, it is not
surprising that the use of growth modeling techniques in
educational fields has rapidly increased. Recent years have
produced a vast range of applications of structural equation
modeling based (SEM) latent growth modeling (LGM) in
applied longitudinal data analysis (Curran & Hussong, 2002;