Informal statistical inference has now been researched at all levels of schooling and initial tertiary study. Work in informal statistical inference is least understood in the early years, where children have had little if any exposure to data handling. A qualitative study in Australia was carried out through a series of teaching experiments with…

The present study examined individual differences in the processing of different forms of figurative language. Sixty participants read sarcastic, metaphorical, and literal sentences embedded in story contexts while their eye movements were recorded, and responded to a text memory and an inference question after each story. Individual differences…

This study attempts to make inferences about the mechanisms that drive network change over time. It adopts simulation investigation for empirical network analysis to examine the patterns and evolution of relationships formed in the context of a massive open online course (MOOC) discussion forum. Four network effects--"homophily,"…

The Modeling Instruction (MI) approach to introductory physics manifests significant increases in student conceptual understanding and attitudes toward physics. In light of these findings, we investigated changes in student self-efficacy while considering the construct's contribution to the career-decision making process. Students in the Fall 2014…

The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to ascertain the perceptions of second- through fourth-grade teachers' knowledge of inference, strategies used by teachers for developing inference, and the instructional tools that teachers use to teach their students to make inferences. The participants in this study were eight…

In 2003 Paula Montgomery, founding editor of School Library Media Activities Monthly and former branch chief of school media services for the Maryland State Department of Education, published a guide to teaching information inquiry. Her staff also illustrated the elements of information inquiry as a recursive cycle with interaction among the…

A promising "underlying bivariate normal" approach was proposed by Jöreskog and Moustaki for use in the factor analysis of ordinal data. This was a limited information approach that involved the maximization of a composite likelihood function. Its advantage over full-information maximum likelihood was that very much less computation was…

How does perceptual learning take place early in life? Traditionally, researchers have focused on how infants make use of information within displays to organize it, but recently, increasing attention has been paid to the question of how infants perceive objects differently depending upon their recent interactions with the objects. This experiment…

In a seminal 1977 article, Rumelhart argued that perception required the simultaneous use of multiple sources of information, allowing perceivers to optimally interpret sensory information at many levels of representation in real time as information arrives. Building on Rumelhart's arguments, we present the Interactive Activation…

Randomized experiments are often seen as the "gold standard" for causal research. Despite the fact that experiments use random assignment to treatment conditions, units are seldom selected into the experiment using probability sampling. Very little research on experimental design has focused on how to make generalizations to well-defined…

Drawing from the work of "cultural memory" and "racial formation theory" (Omi and Winant 1994) we explore the ascension of Barack Obama as an illustration of how "race" is understood and remembered. This article focuses on the public media discourse of the 2012 Obama re-election to illustrate how the narrative morphed…

Measures of classroom and school environments are central to policy efforts that assess school and teacher quality. These measures are often formed by aggregating individual survey responses to form group-level measures, and assume an invariant measurement model holds across the individual and group levels. This article explores the tenability of…

In this thesis, I focus on scalar implicatures, presuppositions and their connections. In chapter 2, I propose a scalar implicature-based account of neg-raising inferences, standardly analyzed as a presuppositional phenomenon (Gajewski 2005, 2007). I show that an approach based on scalar implicatures can straightforwardly account for the…

Kane's argument-based framework is summarized and examined. He implicitly appeals to the backgrounded concepts of fairness and justice. From there it is a short distance to grounding the whole system in the mundane notion of truth. In fact, valid argument systems must depend on representations that are "true" by virtue of agreement with purported…

This theoretical paper relates recent interest in informal statistical inference (ISI) to the semantic theory termed inferentialism, a significant development in contemporary philosophy, which places inference at the heart of human knowing. This theory assists epistemological reflection on challenges in statistics education encountered when…