Information changes as it is passed from person to person, with this process of cultural transmission allowing the minds of individuals to shape the information that they transmit. We present mathematical models of cultural transmission which predict that the amount of information passed from person to person should affect the rate at which that…

This final report of a National Institute of Education project explores Bayesian statistical analysis as a paradigm for educational impact studies, particularly studies on the education of the disadvantaged. The position of the report is that much of what is wrong with educational research can be attributed to the use of an inappropriate model for…

A variety of locally dependent models are introduced having individual difference parameters that may be interpreted as reflecting effective learning abilities. One version is a univariate extension of the Rasch model with a Markov property: the probability that a given individual will pass an item depends on previous items only through the…