This project attempts to improve electronic portfolio software through the creation of a design model using ownership, ease of use, and social learning variables to predict user adoption. The pilot software attempts to encourage student learning by enhancing peer interaction. The software was used by two groups of students. The first group used it…

Designing didactic objects involves imagining how students can conceive of specific mathematical topics and then imagining what types of classroom discussions could support these mental constructions. This study investigated whether it was possible to design Java applets that might serve as didactic objects to support online learning where…

The current research article is based on a simple and practical way of employing the computational power of widely available, versatile software MS Excel 2007 to perform interactive computer simulations for undergraduate/graduate students in biology, biochemistry, biophysics, microbiology, medicine in college and university classroom setting. To…

Biosimulation models are valuable, versatile tools used for hypothesis generation and testing, codification of biological theory, education, and patient-specific modeling. Driven by recent advances in computational power and the accumulation of systems-level experimental data, modelers today are creating models with an unprecedented level of…

This dissertation deals with a multiterminal source model for secret key generation by multiple network terminals with prior and privileged access to a set of correlated signals complemented by public discussion among themselves. Emphasis is placed on a characterization of secret key capacity, i.e., the largest rate of an achievable secret key,…

The Service Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm, defines services as software artifacts whose implementations are separated from their specifications. Application developers rely on services to simplify the design, reduce the development time and cost. Within the SOC paradigm, different Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) have been developed.…

Most students now have access to devices such as digital cameras and mobile phones that are capable of taking short video clips outdoors. Such clips can be used with powerful ICT tools, such as Tracker, Excel and TI-Nspire, to extract time and coordinate data about a moving object, to produce scattergrams and to fit models. In this article we…

Most treatments of indirect effects and mediation in the statistical methods literature and the corresponding methods used by behavioral scientists have assumed linear relationships between variables in the causal system. Here we describe and extend a method first introduced by Stolzenberg (1980) for estimating indirect effects in models of…

Longitudinal data describe developmental patterns and enable predictions of individual changes beyond sampled time points. Major methodological issues in longitudinal data include modeling random effects, subject effects, growth curve parameters, and autoregressive residuals. This study embedded the longitudinal model within a multigroup…

The present study presents the formulation of graded response models in the multilevel framework (as nonlinear mixed models) and demonstrates their use in estimating item parameters and investigating the group-level effects for specific covariates using Bayesian estimation. The graded response multilevel model (GRMM) combines the formulation of…

Recently, there has been growing emphasis on supporting robust learning within intelligent tutoring systems, assessed by measures such as transfer to related skills, preparation for future learning, and longer term retention. It has been shown that different pedagogical strategies promote robust learning to different degrees. However, the student…

Empirical research has provided evidence supporting the validation and prediction of 4 major sources of self-efficacy: enactive performance accomplishments, vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, and emotional states. Other research studies have also attested to the importance and potency of self-efficacy in academic learning and achievement.…

This paper describes a novel method to create a quantitative model of an educational content domain of related practice item-types using learning curves. By using a pairwise test to search for the relationships between learning curves for these item-types, we show how the test results in a set of pairwise transfer relationships that can be…

During conversation, women tend to nod their heads more frequently and more vigorously than men. An individual speaking with a woman tends to nod his or her head more than when speaking with a man. Is this due to social expectation or due to coupled motion dynamics between the speakers? We present a novel methodology that allows us to randomly…

To ascertain best practices for schools implementing or sustaining instructional school gardens by interviewing key members in 10 schools with exemplary instructional school gardens programs in California. Practices of schools with exemplary instructional school gardens programs were analyzed by constant comparative analysis using qualitative data…