Graduate students in political science come to the discipline interested in exploring important political questions, such as "What causes war?" or "What policies promote economic growth?" However, they typically do not arrive prepared to address those questions using quantitative methods. Graduate methods instructors must…

Statistical inference relies heavily on the concept of sampling distributions. However, sampling distributions are difficult to teach. We present a series of short animations that are story-based, with associated assessments. We hope that our contribution can be useful as a tool to teach sampling distributions in the introductory statistics…

Recent research shows that the judged likelihood of properties of modified nouns ("baby ducks have webbed feet") is reduced relative to judgments for unmodified nouns ("ducks have webbed feet"). This modification effect has been taken as evidence both for and against the idea that combined concepts automatically inherit…

Humans have a unique ability to generate novel norms. Faced with the knowledge that there are hungry children in Somalia, we easily and naturally infer that we ought to donate to famine relief charities. Although a contentious and lively issue in metaethics, such inference from "is" to "ought" has not been systematically…

The concept of growth is at the foundation of the policy and practice around systems of educational accountability. It is also at the foundation of what teachers concern themselves with on a daily basis as they help children learn. Yet there is a disconnect between the criterion-referenced intuitions that parents and teachers have for what it…

How likely is the glass to break, given that it is heated? The present study asks questions such as this with or without the premise "if the glass is heated, it breaks." A reduced problem (question without premise) measures the statistical dependency (conditional probability) of an event to occur, given that another has occurred. Such…

Conventional implicatures are omnipresent in daily life communication but experimental research on this topic is sparse, especially research with children. The aim of this study was to investigate if eight- to twelve-year-old children spontaneously make the conventional implicature induced by "but," "so," and…

When fitting hierarchical regression models, maximum likelihood (ML) estimation has computational (and, for some users, philosophical) advantages compared to full Bayesian inference, but when the number of groups is small, estimates of the covariance matrix (S) of group-level varying coefficients are often degenerate. One can do better, even from…

When fitting hierarchical regression models, maximum likelihood (ML) estimation has computational (and, for some users, philosophical) advantages compared to full Bayesian inference, but when the number of groups is small, estimates of the covariance matrix [sigma] of group-level varying coefficients are often degenerate. One can do better, even…

Student modeling can help guide the behavior of a cognitive tutor system and provide insight to researchers on understanding how students learn. In this context, Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT) is one of the most popular knowledge inference models due to its predictive accuracy, interpretability and ability to infer student knowledge. However,…

Stan is a free and open-source C++ program that performs Bayesian inference or optimization for arbitrary user-specified models and can be called from the command line, R, Python, Matlab, or Julia and has great promise for fitting large and complex statistical models in many areas of application. We discuss Stan from users' and developers'…

Depressive symptoms affect around half of students at some point during college. According to the hopelessness theory of depression, making negative inferences about stressful events is a vulnerability for developing depression. Negative and socio-emotional teaching behavior can be stressors that are associated with depression in school students.…

Pathways of relations of language, cognitive, and literacy skills (i.e., working memory, vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, inference, comprehension monitoring, word reading, and listening comprehension) to reading comprehension were examined by comparing four variations of direct and indirect effects model of reading. Results from 350…

This study evaluated three types of bias--total, measurement, and selection bias (SB)--in three sequential mixed-mode designs of the Dutch Crime Victimization Survey: telephone, mail, and web, where nonrespondents were followed up face-to-face (F2F). In the absence of true scores, all biases were estimated as mode effects against two different…

The majority of L2 vocabulary studies concentrate on learning word meaning and provide learners with opportunities for semantic elaboration (i.e., focus on word meaning). However, in initial vocabulary learning, engaging in structural elaboration (i.e., focus on word form) with a view to acquiring L2 word form is equally important. The present…