In this article, the change in examinee effort during an assessment, which we will refer to as persistence, is modeled as an effect of item position. A multilevel extension is proposed to analyze hierarchically structured data and decompose the individual differences in persistence. Data from the 2009 Program of International Student Achievement…

The main aim of this paper is to develop an amalgamated conceptual model of technology acceptance that explains how individual, social, cultural and organizational factors affect the students' acceptance and usage behaviour of the Web-based learning systems. More specifically, the proposed model extends the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to…

Errors bear the potential to improve knowledge acquisition, provided that learners are able to deal with them in an adaptive and reflexive manner. However, learners experience a host of different--often impeding or maladaptive--emotional and motivational states in the face of academic errors. Research has made few attempts to develop a theory that…

Research in Educational Data Mining could benefit from greater efforts to ensure that models yield reliable, valid, and interpretable parameter estimates. These efforts have especially been lacking for individualized student-parameter models. We collected two datasets from a sizable student population with excellent "depth" -- that is,…

Current theories concerning individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) suggest that WMC reflects the ability to control the focus of attention and resist interference and distraction. The current set of experiments tested whether susceptibility to distraction is partially responsible for the established relationship between…

This article addresses specific issues within arts-integration experiences in schools. Focusing on the relationship between positive emotions, learning, and the Arts, the article discusses empirical data that has been drawn from a research study, Making the Ordinary Extraordinary: Adopting Artfulness in Danish Schools. When schools integrate the…

There are marked individual differences in the formation of cognitive maps both in the real world and in virtual environments (VE; e.g., Blajenkova, Motes, & Kozhevnikov, 2005; Chai & Jacobs, 2010; Ishikawa & Montello, 2006; Wen, Ishikawa, & Sato, 2011). These differences, however, are poorly understood and can be difficult to…

Socioeconomic status (SES) is an important environmental predictor of language and cognitive development, but the causal pathways by which it operates are unclear. We used a computational model of development to explore the adequacy of manipulations of environmental information to simulate SES effects in English past-tense acquisition, in a data…

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate ways to model nonlinear growth using three testing occasions. We demonstrate our growth models in the context of curriculum-based measurement using the fall, winter, and spring passage reading fluency benchmark assessments. We present a brief technical overview that includes the limitations of a growth…

In theoretical cognitive science, there is a tension between highly structured models whose parameters have a direct psychological interpretation and highly complex, general-purpose models whose parameters and representations are difficult to interpret. The former typically provide more insight into cognition but the latter often perform better.…

Prospective memory--remembering to retrieve and execute future goals--is essential to daily life. Prospective remembering is often achieved through effortful monitoring; however, potential individual differences in monitoring patterns have not been characterized. We propose 3 candidate models to characterize the individual differences present in…

Inductive generalization, where people go beyond the data provided, is a basic cognitive capability, and it underpins theoretical accounts of learning, categorization, and decision making. To complete the inductive leap needed for generalization, people must make a key "sampling" assumption about how the available data were generated.…

In the behavioral sciences, a popular approach to describe and predict behavior is cognitive modeling with adjustable parameters (i.e., which can be fitted to data). Modeling with adjustable parameters allows, among other things, measuring differences between people. At the same time, parameter estimation also bears the risk of overfitting. Are…

In a longitudinal study, we investigate the moderating role of intelligence on the effects of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards and intrinsic and extrinsic satisfactions on global job satisfaction. The results support our hypotheses that: (1) intrinsic rewards and intrinsic satisfaction are more strongly related to global job satisfaction among…

Some individual difference factors are more strongly correlated with performance on postreading questions when the text is not available than when it is. The present study explores if similar interactions occur with bridging skill, which refers to a reader's propensity to establish connections between explicit text during reading. Undergraduates…