Knowing what kinds of patterns are easy for children to recognize early in their kindergarten year, and what kinds are difficult, can be a useful guide for patterning instruction. Hence, the ability of children to recognize complex patterns early in their kindergarten year was assessed in two experiments. One experiment showed that the children…

We consider the proposition that reasoners represent causal conditionals such as "if John studies hard, he will do well in the test" as a causal model in which the antecedent ("John studies hard") is a potential cause of the consequent ("John does well in the test"). Some studies suggest that reasoners ignore…

Early Career Teacher (ECT) turnover is a critical issue; the teacher turnover rate is significantly higher among ECTs as compared with experienced teachers, and they are more likely to fill vacancies in hard-to-staff schools. This study examines how principal leadership might affect ECT turnover by using a large-scale, nationally representative…

The United States has one of the lowest election turnout rates in the developed world. Consequently, social scientists are perpetually seeking to expand upon their knowledge of what factors are associated with voting, or the lack thereof. Commonly identified factors including age, income, race, and educational attainment have been studied…

The Remote Associates Test is a well-established measure, frequently used to assess individuals' creative abilities, as a function of the ability to elicit remote associates. The nature of the involved associative processes is still poorly understood. This hampers a deeper understanding of the creative process, rendering it difficult to determine…

One common phenomenon in Angoff standard setting is that panelists regress their ratings in toward the middle of the probability scale. This study describes two indices based on taking ratios of standard deviations that can be utilized with a scatterplot of item ratings versus expected probabilities of success to identify whether ratings are…

There is much debate about the place of probability in an introductory statistics course. While students may or may not use probability distributions in their post-collegiate lives, they will likely be faced with day-to-day decisions that require a probabilistic assessment of risk and reward. This paper describes an innovative way to teach…

Young children often deny that improbable events are possible. We examined whether children aged 5-7 (N = 300) might have more success in recognizing that these events are possible if they considered whether the events could happen in a distant country. Children heard about improbable and impossible events (Experiments 1A, 1B, and 2) and about…

We describe how we used puppets as tools to draw 9 to 10-year-old students into conversations about probability. Puppets supported classroom discourse by putting forth probabilistic arguments for critique, introducing extreme and unusual examples of concepts, and introducing an element of surprise.

The analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) is a useful statistical procedure that incorporates covariate features into the adjustment of treatment effects. The consequences of omitted prognostic covariates on the statistical inferences of ANCOVA are well documented in the literature. However, the corresponding influence on sample-size calculations for…

Unusual response similarity among test takers may occur in testing data and be an indicator of potential test fraud (e.g., examinees copy responses from other examinees, send text messages or pre-arranged signals among themselves for the correct response, item pre-knowledge). One index to measure the degree of similarity between two response…

Peer assessment is a promising solution for scaling up the grading of a large number of submissions. The reliability of evaluations is one of the critical issues in peer assessment; several probabilistic models have been proposed for obtaining reliable grades from peers. Peer correction is a similar framework, in which students are instructed to…

This dissertation is concerned with how world knowledge (plausibility) affects reading beyond how predictable what comes next is. Previous studies have explained the effect of plausibility in terms of probability, either because plausibility is the conditional probability of a role filler given what precedes or because plausibility affects reading…

This study employed design-based logistic regression to examine the extent to which attending a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) magnet high school, school demographics, and student-level factors explain a student's intent to declare a STEM major in the first semester of college. The results show only student-level factors…

Utilizing course grade data from 22 four-year higher education institutions, this study highlights the trends in first-year grade point average (FYGPA) between the 2017-2018 and 2021-2022 academic years, the period immediately before and after the pandemic disrupted both K12 and higher education. Results showed that while FYGPAs generally…