This study explores the attitudes of mathematics pre-service teachers, based on their initial exposure to a model-eliciting challenge. The new Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement determines that mathematics students should be able to identify, investigate and solve problems via modelling. The unpreparedness of mathematics teachers in…

In this study, we test an information-processing model (IPM) of problem solving in science education, namely the working memory overload model, by applying catastrophe theory. Changes in students' achievement were modeled as discontinuities within a cusp catastrophe model, where working memory capacity was implemented as asymmetry and the degree…

The concept under investigation was the reliability of estimates of mean scores of groups under various assumptions of multiple-matrix sampling when reliabilities are computed according to procedures based on generalizability theory. Four different cases were compared with respect to the generalizability coefficients depending upon whether pupils…

The applicability of the Rasch model to data from a typical personality test, the High School Personality Questionnaire (HSPQ), was studied. The data were gathered on Junior High and High School students in the Louisville Public Schools (Kentucky). Item easinesses and person abilities were estimated and compared by age group, within each age…

This paper introduces anthropologists to simultaneous equation models and to a powerful technique for estimating such models. Characteristically a simultaneous equations model consists of more than one equation and allows for interaction and joint determinancies between some of the variables. Basically these models apply to situations in which one…