Throughout the general chemistry lab curriculum, a common shortcoming is the way in which students measure, record, and manipulate quantitative data. From initial measurements with different digital and analog instruments to proper conversions, calculations, and comparisons, students are often expected to be experts before they have been taught…

Developing a better understanding of the measurement process and measurement uncertainty is one of the main goals of university physics laboratory courses. This study investigated the influence of graphical representation of data on student understanding and interpreting of measurement results. A sample of 101 undergraduate students (48 first year…

The purpose of this study is to investigate and conceptualize the ranks of importance of social cognitive variables on university students' computer programming performances. Spatial ability, working memory, self-efficacy, gender, prior knowledge and the universities students attend were taken as variables to be analyzed. The study has been…

Some statisticians have pointed out that the field of statistics essentially exists to study the variability seen in everyday life. Because variability is so foundational, the "Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education" (GAISE 2007), published by the American Statistical Association (ASA), recommend that teachers…

Recent studies on a computationally hard visual optimization problem, the Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP), indicate that humans are capable of finding close to optimal solutions in near-linear time. The current study is a preliminary step in investigating human performance on another hard problem, the Minimum Vertex Cover Problem, in which…

As is the case for any statistical model, a multidimensional latent growth model comes with certain requirements with respect to the data collection design. In order to measure growth, repeated measurements of the same set of individuals are required. Furthermore, the data collection design should be specified such that no individual is given the…