The main objective of the paper is to investigate the determinant factors affecting the academic performance of regular undergraduate students of Arba Minch university (AMU) chamo campus students. To meet the objective, the Pearson product moment correlation statistical tool and econometrics data analysis (OLS regression) method were used with the…

The usage of data mining has dramatically increased over the past few years and the education sector is leveraging this field in order to analyze and gain intuitive knowledge in terms of the vast accumulated data within its confines. The primary objective of this study is to compare the results of different classification techniques such as Naïve…

Item response models typically assume that the item characteristic (step) curves follow a logistic or normal cumulative distribution function, which are strictly monotone functions of person test ability. Such assumptions can be overly-restrictive for real item response data. We propose a simple and more flexible Bayesian nonparametric IRT model…

An online study was conducted to ascertain the potential of two independent variables, teaching self-efficacy and critical thinking skill (via a self-efficacy survey and a critical thinking appraisal) to predict four aspects of professional engagement (via a teaching career aspirations survey) among 95 self-selected early-career K-12 teachers. A…

Educators are tasked with continually updating course objectives, content, assignments, and assessment to meet model curriculum guidelines. IS2020 proposes program level outcomes for required and elective areas. Two elective areas in IS2020 are Data and Business Analytics and Data and Information Visualization. IS2020 details 14 program level…

The purpose of this meta-analytic review is to investigate the relation between statistical learning (SL) and language-related outcomes, and between SL and reading-related outcomes. A comprehensive search of peer-reviewed published research resulted in 42 articles with 53 independent samples and 201 reported effect sizes (Pearson's r). Results of…

In today's age of information, the use of data is very powerful in making informed decisions. Data analytics is a field that is interested in identifying and interpreting trends and patterns within big data to make data-driven decisions. We focus on informal statistical inference and data modeling as a means of developing students' data analytics…

Survival is difficult to estimate when observation periods of individuals differ in length. Students imagine sailing the Titanic and then recording whether they "live" or "die." A clever algorithm is performed which results in the Kaplan-Meier estimate of survival.

Research on human causal induction has shown that people have general prior assumptions about causal strength and about how causes interact with the background. We propose that these prior assumptions about the parameters of causal systems do not only manifest themselves in estimations of causal strength or the selection of causes but also when…

Baseball's flirtation with technology began in 2005 when PITCHf/x® by Sportvision started to be installed in major league ballparks. Every stadium had the system operational by 2007. Since then, the trajectories of over six million pitches have been measured to within about half an inch using three 60-Hz video cameras to track the position of the…

A key property of relational representations is their "generativity": From partial descriptions of relations between entities, additional inferences can be drawn about other entities. A major theoretical challenge is to demonstrate how the capacity to make generative inferences could arise as a result of learning relations from…

The concept of intrinsic complexity explains why different problems of the same type, tackled by the same problem solver, can require different times to solve and yield solutions of different quality. This paper proposes a general four-step approach that can be used to establish a model for the intrinsic complexity of a problem class in terms of…

P values have been critiqued on several grounds but remain entrenched as the dominant inferential method in the empirical sciences. In this article, we elaborate on the fact that in many statistical models, the one-sided "P" value has a direct Bayesian interpretation as the approximate posterior mass for values lower than zero. The…

The data revolution has given citizens access to enormous large-scale open databases. In order to take into account the full complexity of data, we have to change the way we think in terms of the nature of data and its availability, the ways in which it is displayed and used, and the skills that are required for its interpretation. Substantial…

Danny Kaplan is DeWitt Wallace Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Macalester College. He received Macalester's Excellence in teaching Award in 2006 and the CAUSE/USCOTS Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017. This interview took place via email on March 4-June 17, 2017. Topics covered in the interview include: (1) the current state of…