A simulation of the foreign policy decision-making process, as described in this article, can assist an instructor in linking students' abstract understanding of complex political events, circumstances, and decision making to the real-world interplay of the multiple factors involved in decision making. It is this type of active learning that helps…

Computerized adaptive testing (CAT) is a mode of testing which enables more efficient and accurate recovery of one or more latent traits. Traditionally, CAT is built upon Item Response Theory (IRT) models that assume unidimensionality. However, the problem of how to build CAT upon latent class models (LCM) has not been investigated until recently,…

Much recent psychometric literature has focused on cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs), a promising class of instruments used to measure the strengths and weaknesses of examinees. This article introduces a genetic algorithm to perform automated test assembly alongside CDMs. The algorithm is flexible in that it can be applied whether the goal is to…

This paper presents the results of a simulation exercise designed to explore and understand the implications of trying to survive in a marginal and poverty-stricken African community. The aim of the simulation was to create an approximation of a community involved in an income-generating project, akin to a Public Works Programme. This project…

This study implements a scale purification procedure onto the standard MIMIC method for differential item functioning (DIF) detection and assesses its performance through a series of simulations. It is found that the MIMIC method with scale purification (denoted as M-SP) outperforms the standard MIMIC method (denoted as M-ST) in controlling…

In recent years increasing attention has been paid to issues of professionalism in surgery and the content and structure of continuing professional development for surgeons; however, little attention has been paid to interprofessional education (IPE) in surgical training. Imagining the form(s) of IPE and/or continuing interprofessional education…

An adaptive testing method is presented that controls the speededness of a test using predictions of the test takers' response times on the candidate items in the pool. Two different types of predictions are investigated: posterior predictions given the actual response times on the items already administered and posterior predictions that use the…

Three experiments examined whether salient color singleton distractors automatically interfere with the detection singleton form targets in visual search (e.g., J. Theeuwes, 1992), or whether the degree of interference is top-down modulable. In Experiments 1 and 2, observers started with a pure block of trials, which contained either never a…

Trial-to-trial variation in word-pronunciation times exhibits 1/f scaling. One explanation is that human performances are consequent on multiplicative interactions among interdependent processes-interaction dominant dynamics. This article describes simulated distributions of pronunciation times in a further test for multiplicative interactions and…

Simulation is a teaching method that closely replicates reality by integrating all three learning domains: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. Despite the widespread use of simulation in nursing education today, there is a dearth of empirical evidence supporting the use of simulation to teach psychomotor skills. Furthermore, there is no…

For many patients throughout the world, access to healthcare depends on the patients" and healthcare providers' ability to communicate efficiently in each other's language. One way to reduce linguistic barriers to healthcare access is to increase the number of linguistically and culturally competent healthcare professionals. Conspicuously…

Globalization, global citizenship, and political engagement have become such buzzwords and cliches that we often lose the sense of their meaning. Global citizenship in particular is an elusive concept to operationalize. This article proposes to look at three dimensions of global citizenship: legal (rights and obligations), psychological…

Team cognition in experienced command-and-control teams is examined in an UAV (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle) simulation. Five 3-person teams with experience working together in a command-and-control setting were compared to 10 inexperienced teams. Each team participated in five 40-min missions of a simulation in which interdependent team members…

The topic of variable importance in linear regression is reviewed, and a measure first justified theoretically by Pratt (1987) is examined in detail. Asymptotic variance estimates are used to construct individual and simultaneous confidence intervals for these importance measures. A simulation study of their coverage properties is reported, and an…

Students often find the fact that a sample statistic is a random variable very hard to grasp. Even more mysterious is why a sample mean should become ever more Normal as the sample size increases. This simulation tool is meant to illustrate the process, thereby giving students some intuitive grasp of the relationship between a parent population…