Purpose: How do children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) extend a noun to the category of objects it labels? Given their tendency to perceive locally, their extensions might be too narrow. Given their social-communicative deficits and a context in which the knowledge of a social-communicative partner promotes narrow extensions, their…

In the past, humanists and scientists have held very different views about the role of collaboration in scholarly research. From the point of view of a Principal Investigator in a scientific laboratory, this article examines the increasingly dominant role of collaboration in scientific research. In contrast to the "consensus research" model of the…

The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to examine how 64 student teachers at one mid-sized rural Midwestern university identified their students' needs and perceived the ways in which they met their students' individual needs. The authors used constant comparison methods and focused coding to examine, verify, and draw…

In a recent paper in the "Journal of Human Resources," Dynarski (2008) used data from the 1 percent 2000 Census Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) files to demonstrate that merit scholarship programs in Georgia and Arkansas increased the stock of college-educated individuals in those states. This paper replicates the results in Dynarski…

Purpose: In this study, the authors compared a multiple-domain strategy for assessing developmental age of young children with developmental disabilities who were at risk for long-term reliance on augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) with a communication-based strategy composed of receptive language and communication indices that may…

The authors review five major findings in reading comprehension and their implications for educational practice. First, research suggests that comprehension skills are separable from decoding processes and important at early ages, suggesting that comprehension skills should be targeted early, even before the child learns to read. Second, there is…

In this paper the authors extend recent work on mediation in a multilevel setting and on causal inference under interference among units to develop a template for the mediation analysis of group randomized educational interventions. The present work will contribute to the literature on interference, in particular on interference in the context of…

This paper argues for a renewed focus on statistical reasoning in the elementary school years, with opportunities for children to engage in data modeling. Data modeling involves investigations of meaningful phenomena, deciding what is worthy of attention, and then progressing to organizing, structuring, visualizing, and representing data. Reported…

This article features a mathematical game called "Mystery Person." The author describes how the Mystery Person game was tried with first-graders [age 6]. The Mystery games involve the generation of key questions, the coordination of information--often very complex information--and the formulation of consequences based on this…

An intensive phonics-based intervention program for nine-year-old Swedish pupils with reading difficulties was performed. Pupils (N = 112) were randomly assigned to either an intervention or a control group. The training was tailored to the Swedish transparent orthography and designed for one-to-one-tutoring during twelve weeks. Previously,…

Recently, researchers have investigated differences in decision making based on description and experience. We address the issue of when experience-based judgments of probability are more accurate than are those based on description. If description is well understood ("transparent") and experience is misleading ("wicked"), it…

A crucial task in social interaction involves understanding subjective mental states. Here we report two experiments with toddlers exploring whether they can use statistical evidence to infer the subjective nature of preferences. We found that 2-year-olds were likely to interpret another person's nonrandom sampling behavior as a cue for a…

The commentaries on my article contain a number of points with which I disagree but also several with which I agree. For example, I continue to believe that the existence of many cases in which between-person variability does not increase with age indicates that greater variance with increased age is not inevitable among healthy individuals up to…

This paper is meant to highlight the occurrence of Simpson's Paradox when using aggregated data obtained from two IEA studies in Israel, while ignoring the effect of a powerful intervening variable in the local context--the ethnicity factor. It will demonstrate faulty conclusions regarding either the absence of relationships between a contextual…

Experimental data are analysed statistically to allow researchers to draw conclusions from a limited set of measurements. The hard fact is that researchers can never be certain that measurements from a sample will exactly reflect the properties of the entire group of possible candidates available to be studied (although using a sample is often the…