A consistent body of research shows that large classes have been perceived by teachers as an obstacle to deliver quality teaching. This large-scale study sought to investigate further those differential effects by asking 1,119 teachers from 321 K-12 schools in New South Wales (Australia) their perceptions of ideal class size for a variety of…

Generalized fiducial inference is a powerful tool for many difficult problems. Based on an extension of R. A. Fisher's work, we used generalized fiducial inference for two extreme value problems and a multiple comparison procedure. The first extreme value problem is dealing with the generalized Pareto distribution. The generalized Pareto…

Following a positively quantified statement such as, "A "few" of the children sang the chorus," a plural pronoun is likely to refer to the set of children who sang (the reference set). Negative natural language quantifiers (NLQs) such as "few" or "not many," on the other hand, are more likely to be followed…

Background: Two kinds of research logic prevail in scientific research: deductive research logic and inductive research logic. However, both fail in the field of evaluation, especially evaluation conducted in unfamiliar environments. Purpose: In this article I wish to suggest the application of a research logic--"abduction"--"the logic of…

Scalar inferences are commonly generated when a speaker uses a weaker expression rather than a stronger alternative, e.g., "John ate some of the apples" implies that he did not eat them all. This article describes a visual-world study investigating how and when perceivers compute these inferences. Participants followed spoken instructions…

According to Adams's Thesis, the acceptability of an indicative conditional sentence goes by the conditional probability of its consequent given its antecedent. We test, for the first time, whether this thesis is descriptively correct and show that it is not; in particular, we show that it yields the wrong predictions for people's judgments of the…

When evaluating the moral character of others, people show a strong bias to more heavily weigh behaviors at the end of an individual's life, even if those behaviors arise in light of an overwhelmingly longer duration of contradictory behavior. Across four experiments, we find that this "end-of-life" bias uniquely applies to intentional changes in…

We often need to infer unknown properties of objects from observable ones, just like detectives must infer guilt from observable clues and behavior. But how do inferential processes change with age? We examined young and older adults' reliance on rule-based and similarity-based processes in an inference task that can be considered either a…

Many literacy teachers are creating contexts for students to learn and use a range of reading comprehension strategies. As useful as reading strategy instruction is, relatively little has been documented on the ways in which reading strategies can become tools for critical literacy. In this paper, the author illustrates how a reading strategy can…

In order to be adaptive, cognition requires knowledge about the statistical structure of the environment. We show that decision performance and the selection between cue-based and exemplar-based inference mechanisms can depend critically on how this knowledge is acquired. Two types of learning tasks are distinguished: "learning by comparison", by…

The role of cognitive vulnerability in the development of depressive symptoms in youth might depend on age and gender. The current study examined cognitive vulnerability models in relationship to depressive symptoms from a developmental perspective. For that purpose, 805 youth (aged 10-18, 59.9% female) completed self-report measures.…

Background: Handwriting legibility systematically biases evaluations in that highly legible handwriting results in more positive evaluations than less legible handwriting. Because performance assessments in educational contexts are not only based on computerized or multiple choice tests but often include the evaluation of handwritten work samples,…

Statisticians have shown the theoretical extent of parameter distortion when the classroom level is ignored in multilevel analyses of schooling. This article illustrates the practical consequences of omitting the classroom for inferences drawn about the extent and mechanisms of schooling effects, using the relationship between reading achievement,…

Category-based induction requires selective use of different relations to guide inferences; this article examines the development of inferences based on ecological relations among living things. Three hundred and forty-six 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old children from rural, suburban, and urban communities projected novel "diseases" or "insides" from one…

There is a general consensus among second-language (L2) researchers today that lexical inferencing (LIF) is among the most common techniques that L2 learners use to generate meaning for unknown words they encounter in context. Indeed, claims about the salience and pervasiveness of LIF for L2 learners rely heavily upon data obtained via concurrent…