A growing body of work suggests that narrative comprehension involves the simulation of the described events and actions (e.g., Barsalou, 2008; Matlock, 2004). Preliterate children's ability to simulate a narrative character's movements is explored here in three studies. Children's simulations of a character's movements were found to be…

In this article we present an exploratory tool for extracting systematic patterns from multivariate data. The technique, hierarchical segmentation (HS), can be used to group multivariate time series into segments with similar discrete-state recurrence patterns and it is not restricted by the stationarity assumption. We use a simulation study to…

The rotor is a device that can be found in many amusement parks. In the literature there are various articles about this topic. The rotor is a hollow cylindrical room, covered inside with canvas and which can be rotated about the central vertical axis. People stand upright, with their backs against the internal face of the device. When it reaches…

In context-aware ubiquitous learning, students are guided to learn in the real world with personalized supports from the learning system. As the learning resources are realistic objects in the real world, certain physical constraints, such as the limitation of stream of people who visit the same learning object, the time for moving from one object…

To understand how learners of respective types respond to marketing games, a joint space generated by canonical correlation analysis is used to recreate Kolb's learning style-type plot and locate business students as points within it according to their learning style types. Two hundred twenty-three undergraduate students played The Marketing Game!…

We apply collaborative filtering (CF) to dichotomously scored student response data (right, wrong, or no interaction), finding optimal parameters for each student and item based on cross-validated prediction accuracy. The approach is naturally suited to comparing different models, both unidimensional and multidimensional in ability, including a…

Cognitive task analysis (CTA) is methodology for eliciting knowledge from subject matter experts. CTA has been used to capture the cognitive processes, decision-making, and judgments that underlie expert behaviors. A review of the literature revealed that CTA has not yet been used to capture the knowledge required to perform ultrasound guided…

Growth models are used extensively in the context of educational accountability to evaluate student-, class-, and school-level growth. However, when error-prone test scores are used as independent variables or right-hand-side controls, the estimation of such growth models can be substantially biased. This article introduces a…

Observed actions are covertly and involuntarily simulated within the observer's motor system. It has been argued that simulation is involved in processing abstract, gestural paintings, as the artist's movements can be simulated by observing static brushstrokes. Though this argument is grounded in theory, empirical research has yet to examine the…

Purpose: The paper aims to explore staff's experience with role-plays using the example of training bank employees in Six Sigma as a major methodology for business process improvement. Design/methodology/approach: The research is based on a case study. A role-play, KreditSim, is used to simulate a loan approval process that has to be improved by…

Regression mixture models, which have only recently begun to be used in applied research, are a new approach for finding differential effects. This approach comes at the cost of the assumption that error terms are normally distributed within classes. This study uses Monte Carlo simulations to explore the effects of relatively minor violations of…

In the presence of test speededness, the parameter estimates of item response theory models can be poorly estimated due to conditional dependencies among items, particularly for end-of-test items (i.e., speeded items). This article conducted a systematic comparison of five-item calibration procedures--a two-parameter logistic (2PL) model, a…

The Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) framework has significant potential for producing models of cognitive tasks that approximate how the brain performs the same tasks. To date, however, there has been relatively little contact between PDP modeling and data from cognitive neuroscience. In an attempt to advance the relationship between…

In professional practice contexts, the technical questions are rarely the ones that prove most difficult. Rather, the real questions that arise from complex and ambiguous contexts, and that require learners, teachers, and leaders to examine deeply held beliefs about selfhood, integrity, ethics, and justice, often prove to be the most challenging.…

This study proposes robust means modeling (RMM) approaches for hypothesis testing of mean differences for between-subjects designs in order to control the biasing effects of nonnormality and variance inequality. Drawing from structural equation modeling (SEM), the RMM approaches make no assumption of variance homogeneity and employ robust…