We investigated how people interpret conditionals and how stable their interpretation is over a long series of trials. Participants were shown the colored patterns on each side of a 6-sided die and were asked how sure they were that a conditional holds of the side landing upward when the die is randomly thrown. Participants were presented with 71…

This study advances our understanding of the relationships among the different elements of a teacher evaluation model and its usefulness in predicting student learning. Important questions arise about teacher evaluation systems, including (a) the magnitude of correlations among the sources of evidence used for identifying teacher effectiveness and…

One of the most commonly cited reasons students choose to study abroad is to experience a new culture. However, most students and, perhaps, most people do not fully recognize what culture is and the span of its influences. The pervasiveness and seeming incomprehensiveness of cultural differences often surprise and unsettle the traveler, and his or…

Researchers focused upon the work-dropping out connection tend to show a U-shaped relationship between the likelihood of dropping out and the number of hours worked outside school, with a higher exit rate for both non-working students and for students whose working hours pass a critical threshold. Yet the data typically used by these researchers…

Organizational and applied sciences have long struggled with improving causal inference in quasi-experiments. We introduce organizational researchers to propensity scoring, a statistical technique that has become popular in other applied sciences as a means for improving internal validity. Propensity scoring statistically models how individuals in…

The purpose of the study is to present the views of the teachers of Primary Science and Technology course about computer assisted instruction. Qualitative research was used in the study. In qualitative researches, the sampling group is small in order to examine the sampling in-depth. Semi-structured interviews were used in the study as data…

This article analyzes the use of research evidence in school-board deliberations in three school districts in Wisconsin. In these settings, the circulation, meaning, and function of research depended importantly on the interests and backgrounds of advocates, the composition of audiences, and the values and contexts of decision-making. Board…

Discussions of the foundations of perceptual inference have often centered on 2 governing principles, the likelihood principle and the simplicity principle. Historically, these principles have usually been seen as opposed, but contemporary statistical (e.g., Bayesian) theory tends to see them as consistent, because for a variety of reasons simpler…

This study determines whether breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge are related to L2 ease and success in lexical inferencing. To this end, two tests measuring vocabulary breadth and depth were administered to 50 participants. Two weeks later, all participants received an inferencing task and rated the degree of perceived ease in inferencing…

Learning progressions, or representations of how student ideas develop in a domain, hold promise as tools to support teachers' formative assessment practices. The ideas represented in a learning progression might help teachers to identify and make inferences about evidence collected of student thinking, necessary precursors to modifying…

The purpose of this study was to validate inferences about scores of one task designed to measure subject matter knowledge and three tasks designed to measure aspects of pedagogical content knowledge. Evidence for the validity of inferences was based on two expectations. First, if tasks were sensitive to expertise, we would find group differences.…

Validity is a central principle of assessment relating to the appropriateness of the uses and interpretations of test results. Usually, one of the inferences that we wish to make is that the score reflects the extent of a student's learning in a given domain. Thus, it is important to establish that the assessment tasks elicit performances that…

This paper describes an illuminative small-scale study that piloted an initial survey instrument intended to investigate correspondences between 47 undergraduate Education final year students' use of information and communications technology (ICT), including the Internet, and--within the context of their adoption of tactics intended to impress…

Previous studies of different methods of testing mediation models have consistently found two anomalous results. The first result is elevated Type I error rates for the bias-corrected and accelerated bias-corrected bootstrap tests not found in nonresampling tests or in resampling tests that did not include a bias correction. This is of special…

The present study constitutes an investigation of tobacco consumption, related attitudes and individual differences in smoking or non-smoking behaviors in a sample of adolescents of different ages in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. We investigated three school-age groups (7th-grade, 9th-grade, and the second-year of high school) for…