Treatment effect estimates from a "regression discontinuity design" (RDD) have high internal validity. However, the arguments that support the design apply to a subpopulation that is narrower and usually different from the population of substantive interest in evaluation research. The disconnect between RDD population and the…

This study investigated 5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's comprehension of "wh"-questions, universal statements and free choice inferences. Previous research has found that Mandarin-speaking children assign a universal interpretation to sentences with a wh-word (e.g., "shei" 'who') followed by the adverbial quantifier…

The ability to generate novel hypotheses is an important problem-solving capacity of humans. This ability is vital for making sense of the complex and unfamiliar world we live in. Often, this capacity is characterized as an inference to the best explanation--selecting the "best" explanation from a given set of candidate hypotheses.…

Knowledge representations that result from practicing problem solving can be expected to differ from knowledge representations that emerge from explicit verbalizing of principles and rules. We examined the degree to which the two types of learning improve problem-solving knowledge and verbal explanation knowledge in classroom instruction. We…

The current study aimed to investigate the relation between conditional reasoning, which is a common type of logical reasoning, and children's mathematical problem solving. A sample of 124 fourth graders was tested for their conditional reasoning skills and their mathematical problem solving skills, as well as a list of control variables (e.g.,…

Older interlocutors are more likely than younger ones to make pragmatic inferences, that is, inferences that go beyond the linguistically encoded meaning of a sentence. Here we ask whether pragmatic development is associated with increased activity in brain structures associated with inference-making or in those associated with Theory of Mind. We…

The learning-style theory of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) (Qian, Lipkin, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 5:77, 2011) states that ASD individuals differ from neurotypics in the way they learn and store information about the environment and its structure. ASD would rather adopt a "lookup-table" strategy (LUT: memorizing each…

This study investigated student teachers' (N = 82) learning of action-oriented knowledge (AOK), triggering incidents in teaching practice, and the relationships between these two. Student teacher's action-oriented knowledge is understood as core capability for the practice of teaching, and learning of action-oriented knowledge needs to be…

Students' on-task engagement during adaptive learning activities has a significant effect on their performance, and at the same time, how these activities influence students' behavior is reflected in their effort exertion. Capturing and explaining effortful (or effortless) behavior and aligning it with learning performance within contemporary…

Due to the character of programming languages, reading ability may have more impact on learning to program than on learning in other subjects. This paper describes an exploratory study of the relationship between reading skills, as perceived through eye tracking, and the ability to program. An empirical investigation into this relationship…

Across languages, children produce locative "back" earlier and more frequently than "front," but the reasons for this asymmetry are unclear. On a "semantic misanalysis" explanation, early meanings for "front" and "back" are nonadult (nongeometric), and rely on notions of visibility and occlusion…

Drawing valid inferences from modern measurement models is contingent upon a good fit of the data to the model. Violations of model-data fit have numerous consequences, limiting the usefulness and applicability of the model. As Bayesian estimation is becoming more common, understanding the Bayesian approaches for evaluating model-data fit models…

Understanding large-scale patterns in student course enrollment is a problem of great interest to university administrators and educational researchers. Yet important decisions are often made without a good quantitative framework of the process underlying student choices. We propose a probabilistic approach to modelling course enrollment…

Growth mixture modeling is generally used for two purposes: (1) to identify mixtures of normal subgroups and (2) to approximate oddly shaped distributions by a mixture of normal components. Often in applied research this methodology is applied to both of these situations indistinctly: using the same fit statistics and likelihood ratio tests. This…

In many ways, evaluating informants based on their features is a problem of induction: Children rely on the assumption that observable informant characteristics (e.g., traits, behaviors, social categories) will predict unobservable characteristics (e.g., future behavior, knowledge states, intentions). Yet to make sensible inferences, children must…