A very low-cost, easy-to-make stopwatch is presented to support various experiments in mechanics. The high-resolution stopwatch is based on two photodetectors connected directly to the microphone input of a sound card. Dedicated free open-source software has been developed and made available to download. The efficiency is demonstrated by a free…

Computerized adaptive testing (CAT) is an active current research field in psychometrics and educational measurement. However, there is very little software available to handle such adaptive tasks. The R package "catR" was developed to perform adaptive testing with as much flexibility as possible, in an attempt to provide a developmental and…

Polynomial loglinear models for one-, two-, and higher-way contingency tables have important applications to measurement and assessment. They are essentially regarded as a smoothing technique, which is commonly referred to as loglinear smoothing. A SAS IML (SAS Institute, 2002a) macro was created to implement loglinear smoothing according to…

Mantel-Haenszel (MH) methods constitute one of the most popular nonparametric differential item functioning (DIF) detection procedures. GMHDIF has been developed to provide an easy-to-use program for conducting DIF analyses. Some of the advantages of this program are that (a) it performs two-stage DIF analyses in multiple groups simultaneously;…

The authors describe how Southern Utah University has integrated the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Voluntary Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program as an experiential servicelearning activity for over a decade and a half. First, we describe the value of experiential servicelearning. Second, we detail the program, its oversight, its student…

In the United States and much of the world, the current framework of intellectual property laws revolves around protecting others from tampering with an author's work. The copyright holder decides who can use it, who can change it, and who can share. There is a growing school of thought, though, that holds that intellectual creations should be…

Introduced to study components of ionized gas, the mass spectrometer has evolved into a highly accurate device now used in many undergraduate and research laboratories. Unfortunately, despite their importance in the formation of future scientists, mass spectrometers remain beyond the financial reach of many high schools and colleges. As a result,…

Photographs used to be, for the most part, very trustworthy evidence of the visual truth. With the current ready availability of affordable digital photography and image-altering software, that is no longer the case. To be fully technologically literate, today's students should know something about the history of photo manipulation and the current…

Most software development is carried out by teams of software engineers working collaboratively to achieve the desired goal. Consequently software development education not only needs to develop a student's ability to write programs that can be easily comprehended by others and be able to comprehend programs written by others, but also the ability…

Fermat's principle is considered as a unifying concept. It is usually presented erroneously as a "least time principle". In this paper we present some software that shows cases of maxima and minima and the application of Fermat's principle to the problem of focusing in lenses. (Contains 12 figures.)

This paper provides an overview and task analysis for creating a continuous ABC data- collection application using Xcode on a Mac computer. Behavior analysts can program an ABC data collection system, complete with a customized list of target clients, antecedents, behaviors, and consequences to be recorded, and have the data automatically sent to…

Kids love augmented reality (AR) simulations because they are like real-life video games. AR simulations allow students to learn content while collaborating face to face and interacting with a multimedia-enhanced version of the world around them. Although the technology may seem advanced, AR software makes it easy to develop content-based…

In this article, we outline a course wherein the instructors teach students how to conduct rigorous qualitative research. We discuss the four major distinct, but overlapping, phases of the course: conceptual/theoretical, technical, applied, and emergent scholar. Students write several qualitative reports, called qualitative notebooks, which…

PowerPoint[R] presentations in academia have a reputation for being less than engaging in this era of learner-centered teaching. The Net Generation also presents a formidable challenge to using PowerPoint[R]. Although the research on the basic elements is rather sparse, the multimedia elements of movement, music, and videos have a stronger…

Many school counsellors have identified "cyber-bullying" among adolescent girls as a growing concern. In order to respond to this issue, this article begins with a new model of cyber-communications from the unique perspective of adolescent girls. Next, it explores the limitations of responding to this model, based on current understandings of…