The relationship between risk-taking and creativity is critical to understanding social harmony and innovation. Although some studies have assessed the link between risk-taking and divergent thinking, the association between risk-taking and convergent thinking remains unclear. Two studies were conducted to systemically investigate whether…

There is a gap in the literature regarding the association between critical thinking (CT) skills and student success in chemistry. This study sought to fill this gap by evaluating the association between CT skills and student success in chemistry. The purpose of this study was (a) to determine whether there is a positive correlation between CT…

The large flood of data flowing from observatories presents significant challenges to astronomy and cosmology--challenges that will only be magnified by projects currently under development. Growth in both volume and velocity of astrophysics data is accelerating: whereas the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has produced 60 terabytes of data in the…

The credibility of unsupervised exams, one of the biggest challenges of e-learning, is currently maintained by proctoring. However, little has been done to determine whether expensive and inconvenient proctoring is necessary. The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine whether the use of security mechanisms, based on the taxonomy of…

The idea of variation is a foundation of statistical reasoning, and many curriculum documents, including the "Australian Curriculum", include variation in the learning required for the primary years. In this paper, we consider the design of activities that can exemplify the idea of variation for young students and investigate how…

This dissertation consists of three manuscripts. The manuscripts contribute to a budding "methodological reform" currently taking place in quantitative second-language (L2) research. In the first manuscript, the researcher describes an empirical investigation on the application of two well-known effect size estimators, eta-squared (eta…

Women working in Kenyan universities should be provided with the many benefits of sponsorship, a mentorship function. Mentors should for example give their mentees challenging assignments which prepare them for top leadership positions. But it is possible that women may not be getting this support from their mentors. Therefore, the researcher did…

This study examined the effect of a prior bout of exercise on implicit cognition. Specifically, we examined whether a prior bout of moderate intensity exercise affected performance on a statistical learning task in healthy adults. A total of 42 participants were allocated to one of three conditions--a control group, a group that exercised for…

In this article, we suggest that using R, a statistical software environment, is advantageous for quantitative researchers in applied linguistics. We first provide a brief overview of the reasons why R is popular among researchers in other fields and why we recommend its use for analyses in applied linguistics. In order to illustrate these…

Because the disciplines of mathematics and statistics are naturally intertwined, designing assessment questions that disentangle mathematical and statistical reasoning can be challenging. We explore the writing statistics assessment tasks that take into consideration potential mathematical reasoning they may inadvertently activate.

This study explores the role of a particular social cue--the "sequence" of demonstrated actions and events--in preschooler's categorization. A demonstrator sorted objects that varied on both a surface feature (color) and a nonobvious property (sound made when shaken). Children saw a sequence of actions in which the nonobvious property…

This paper is written to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the Mathematical Association of America. It deals with a short history of different kinds of natural numbers including triangular, square, pentagonal, hexagonal and "k"-gonal numbers, and their simple properties and their geometrical representations. Included are Euclid's…

For the past 4 years, we have been involved in a project that aims to enhance the teaching and learning of experimental analysis and statistics, of environmental and biological sciences students, through computational programming activities (using R code). In this project, through an iterative design, we have developed sequences of R-code-based…

In this article, a new model for test response times is proposed that combines latent class analysis and the proportional hazards model with random effects in a similar vein as the mixture factor model. The model assumes the existence of different latent classes. In each latent class, the response times are distributed according to a…

This study aimed to determine if the Garmin Vector (Schaffhausen, Switzerland) power meter produced acceptable measures when compared with the Schoberer Rad Messetechnik (SRM; Julich, Germany) power meter across a range of high-intensity efforts. Twenty-one well-trained cyclists completed power profiles (seven maximal mean efforts between 5 and…