According to the recent Nation's Report Card, 12th-graders failed to produce gains on the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) despite earning better grades on average. One possible explanation is that 12th-graders were not motivated taking the NAEP, which is a low-stakes test. We develop three Bayesian IRT mixture models to…

The stochastic simulation of chemical reactions, specifically, a simple reversible chemical reaction obeying the first-order, i.e., linear, rate law, has been presented by Martinez-Urreaga and his collaborators in this journal. The current contribution is intended to complement and augment their work in two aspects. First, the simple reversible…

This article reviews current methods for evaluating models in the cognitive sciences, including theoretically based approaches, such as Bayes factors and minimum description length measures; simulation approaches, including model mimicry evaluations; and practical approaches, such as validation and generalization measures. This article argues…

People tend to perceive ongoing continuous activity as series of discrete events. This partitioning of continuous activity may occur, in part, because events correspond to dynamic patterns that have recurred across different contexts. Recurring patterns may lead to reliable sequential dependencies in observers' experiences, which then can be used…

This study aims to be a contribution to a theoretical model that explains the effectiveness of the learning and decision-making processes by means of a feedback and mental models perspective. With appropriate mental models, managers should be able to improve their capacity to deal with dynamically complex contexts, in order to achieve long-term…

Georgia Educational Models (GEM) will proceed to utilize computers and simulation to their fullest cost effectiveness potential simultaneously in operation and in research, while avoiding both the restrictions and duplications which come from doctrinaire insistence on maintaining an artificial separation between management and research uses of…

Two approaches are described with their philosophic implications: building a model as preliminary to simulation game design, and discovering a model after the game has been developed. A third alternative presented attempts to span the chasm created by the first two and integrate both design processes. (VT)

An outline of a basic debriefing structure which the author considers applicable to most simulation games in the classroom. (AK)

Extended conventional two-group differential item function (DIF) analysis for dichotomous items to factorial DIF analysis for polytomous items where multiple grouping factors with multiple groups in each are analyzed jointly. Simulation studies and analysis of a real data set with 1,924 subjects show the parameters of the proposed modeling can be…

Provides a framework for viewing local dependency within dichotomous and polytomous items that are clustered by design and presents a testing procedure that allows researchers to identify individual item pairs that exhibit local dependency while controlling for a false positive rate. Simulation results indicate that the proposed method is…

Conducted a simulation study to determine how well two models for local item dependency, the constant order interaction and the dimension-dependent interaction models, could be distinguished. Results suggest that when there is good reason to suspect a dimension-dependent interaction, it is possible to detect it if the sample size is at least 500.…

At the level of clinical speech/language evaluation, the repetition type of conduction aphasia is characterized by repetition difficulties concomitant with reduced short-term memory capacities, in the presence of fluent spontaneous speech as well as unimpaired naming and reading abilities. It is still unsettled which dysfunctions of the…

Tutors have only limited time to support students. In this paper, we discuss a model that addresses the question of how to help students answer content-related questions. A small group of students is created, which consists of the student who asked the question and peers who should be able to answer it. Criteria used to compose the group are the…