Predictors of early word reading are well established. However, it is unclear if these predictors hold for readers across a range of word reading abilities. This study used quantile regression to investigate predictive relationships at different points in the distribution of word reading. Quantile regression analyses used preschool and…

Emotional and behavioral difficulties in children with autism often present problems for families seeking appropriate treatment interventions. Using data from the 2011 Survey of Pathways to Diagnosis and Services, ordinal logistic regression models were used to examine the association between parental perceptions about autism and their reports of…

In confirmatory factor analysis quite similar models of measurement serve the detection of the difficulty factor and the factor due to the item-position effect. The item-position effect refers to the increasing dependency among the responses to successively presented items of a test whereas the difficulty factor is ascribed to the wide range of…

Background: Many Canadian schools offer breakfast programs; however, students' engagement in these programs is low, while breakfast skipping is highly prevalent among youth. This study examined whether the availability of breakfast programs supports adolescents' regular breakfast eating, and identified characteristics of breakfast skippers who are…

Background: Since 2012, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has implemented "Tips From Former Smokers" ("Tips"), the first federally funded tobacco education campaign in the United States. To date, there are no evaluations of its long-term impact. Aims: To assess the impact of varied doses of the…

We appeal to critical race theory and intersectionality to examine achievement gaps at a large public university in the American southwest from 2000 to 2015. Using white, high-income women as our reference group, we report linear combinations of marginal effects for six-year graduation rates and developmental course taking across 20 distinct…

The current study of US intercollegiate athletes (n = 1066) involved in multiple sports investigated relationships among moral (moral reasoning maturity, moral value evaluation [MVE], and moral identity), contesting (partnership and war orientations) and behavioral (prosocial and antisocial) variables in sport. Among other relationships, results…

Social learning has been shown to be an evolutionarily adaptive strategy, but it can be implemented via many different cognitive mechanisms. The adaptive advantage of social learning depends crucially on the ability of each learner to obtain relevant and accurate information from informants. The source of informants' knowledge is a particularly…

Humans excel in categorization. Yet from a computational standpoint, learning a novel probabilistic classification task involves severe computational challenges. The present paper investigates one way to address these challenges: assuming class-conditional independence of features. This feature independence assumption simplifies the inference…

Development and refinement of self-report measures generally involves selecting a subset of indicators from a larger set. Despite the importance of this task, methods applied to accomplish this are often idiosyncratic and ad hoc, or based on incomplete statistical criteria. We describe a structural equation modeling (SEM)-based technique, based on…

A course community (CC) was formed to facilitate the implementation of active-learning materials in the Introductory Statistics course at a large southeastern U.S. university. Instructors met every two weeks for the semester before and the semester of the implementation. The CC helped instructors improve their content knowledge and pedagogical…

Knowing where north is provides a navigator with invaluable information for learning and recalling a space, particularly in places with limited navigational cues, like complex indoor environments. Although north is effectively used by orienteers, pilots, and military personnel, very little is known about whether nonexpert populations can or will…

Institutions of higher education invest a lot of resources into supporting and retaining students, and most colleges and universities offer systems of support for students who struggle academically in the form of support programs for students on academic probation. This study aimed to determine the demographic factors that potentially contribute…

Interest in Bayesian analysis of item response theory (IRT) models has grown tremendously due to the appeal of the paradigm among psychometricians, advantages of these methods when analyzing complex models, and availability of general-purpose software. Possible models include models which reflect multidimensionality due to designed test structure,…

Background: Effective online communication about the environmental risk factors of breast cancer is essential because of the multitude of environmental exposures and debate regarding the conclusiveness of scientific evidence. Purpose: The aim of this study was "to assess the content, readability, and cultural sensitivity" of online…