Involuntary musical imagery (INMI; more commonly known as "earworms" or having a song "stuck in your head") is a common musical phenomenon and one of the most salient examples of spontaneous cognition. Despite the ubiquitous nature of INMI in the general population, functional roles of INMI remain to be fully established and…

Viewed through a social justice lens, preschool expulsion is an educational equity issue. This study focused on prior expulsion from preschool and child-care in a longitudinal study of 203 autistic children, ages 4 to 7. By parent report, 16%--one out of six autistic children--had been expelled from a preschool or child-care setting prior to…

Improving graduation rates is one of the biggest missions in many universities across the country and it is surely the case on the campus of this institution. The work here presents a statistical tool box to use early academic performance as a predictor for graduation with logistic regression and machine learning techniques. The methods described…

This memo adds to the growing literature on the transition to college for young people in foster care, focusing specifically on issues of preparedness to enter higher education. First, the authors assess the extent to which youths' perceptions of their own educational preparedness and their child welfare workers' perceptions of their educational…

Oral reading fluency (ORF) has been widely used as a measure of students' overall reading competency. However, accuracy, or words correct per minute (wcpm), derived from ORF testing may not reveal all aspects of a student's reading abilities. The present study investigated the oral reading miscue patterns of students with and without learning…

Finishing high school and attaining a college degree have become increasingly important to finding stable employment and earning a living wage. By age 19, most youth in the US have earned a high school credential and many have entered college. However, the educational attainment of young people who were in foster care as adolescents lags behind…

The Pittsburgh Promise is a scholarship program that provides $5,000 per year toward college tuition for public high school graduates in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania who earned a 2.5 GPA and a 90% attendance record. This study used a difference-in-difference design to assess whether the introduction of the Promise scholarship program directly…

We present a data set consisting of user profile data for 59,946 San Francisco OkCupid users (a free online dating website) from June 2012. The data set includes typical user information, lifestyle variables, and text responses to 10 essay questions. We present four example analyses suitable for use in undergraduate introductory probability and…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of Achieve3000, a differentiated online literacy curriculum, on students' scores on the California State Test (CST). In the 2011-12 school year, 1,957 students in Chula Vista began using Achieve3000's solutions in 3rd through 8th grade. Using a form of propensity score matching called Inverse…

The results of this study determined that community college students who transfer to for-profit institutions are indeed different from students who follow traditional routes defined as public and non-profit institutions. This study compares the demographic characteristics, academic experiences, and socioeconomic factors of California community…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the invariance of predictive relations across early-adolescent sex and ethnic groups regarding parenting factors and externalizing and internalizing problems and victimization. Data (n = 598; 54% female) from a triethnic (Hispanic, non-Hispanic white, and non-Hispanic black) probability sample of fifth…

A logit model predicting student outcomes for a gateway course, Math for Liberal Arts, was successfully developed which fits the data well. Two variables, ACT math score and high school GPA, were found to be significant predictors of achieving a C or better in Math for Liberal Arts. A practical implication of the study suggests that with just two…

The CSU (California State University) Chancellor's Office received a grant from the Lumina Foundation to engage in a year of planning activities to increase productivity within the CSU system. The grant is part of the Making Opportunity Affordable (MOA) initiative of the Lumina Foundation that is aimed at improving higher education productivity…