Traditional information systems return answers after a user submits a complete query. Users often feel "left in the dark" when they have limited knowledge about the underlying data, and have to use a try-and-see approach for finding information. The trend of supporting autocomplete in these systems is a first step towards solving this problem. A…

Talented students compete fiercely for seats at Boston and New York exam schools. These schools are characterized by high levels of peer achievement and a demanding curriculum tailored to each district's highest achievers. While exam school students clearly do very well in school, the question of whether an exam school education adds value…

Latent interaction models and mixture models have received considerable attention in social science research recently, but little is known about how to handle if unobserved population heterogeneity exists in the endogenous latent variables of the nonlinear structural equation models. The current study estimates a mixture of latent interaction…

Cognitive diagnostic assessment (CDA) is a new theoretical framework for psychological and educational testing that is designed to provide detailed information about examinees' strengths and weaknesses in specific knowledge structures and processing skills. During the last three decades, more than a dozen psychometric models have been developed…

One debate that periodically arises in mathematics education is the issue of how to teach calculation more effectively. "Modern" approaches seem to initially favour mental calculation, informal methods, and the development of understanding before introducing written forms, while traditionalists tend to champion particular algorithms. The debate is…

ABILHAND is, in its original version, a 46-item, 4-level questionnaire. It measures the difficulty perceived by patients with rheumatoid arthritis as they do various daily manual tasks. ABILHAND was originally built through Rasch analysis. In a later study, it was simplified to a generic 23-item, three-level questionnaire, showing both…

"Classroom number talks," five- to fifteen-minute conversations around purposefully crafted computation problems, are a productive tool that can be incorporated into classroom instruction to combine the essential processes and habits of mind of doing math. During number talks, students are asked to communicate their thinking when presenting and…

This article applies the education cost function methodology in order to estimate additional costs associated with black student concentration and with alternative, race-neutral measures of urban poverty. Recent research highlights the continued importance of the role of race in educational outcomes, and how the intersection of peer group effects…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether patterns of strategy use in second, third and fourth grade children's arithmetic supported Steffe's model of numerical development. In addition to student-generated strategies, we looked at commonly taught algorithms not considered in Steffe's model to determine whether these algorithms reflected…

Temporal patterning in blood glucose (BG) consistent with fractals--how BG follows a repetitive pattern through resolutions of time--was used to examine 2 different samples of adolescents with Type 1 diabetes (10-14 years). Sample 1 contained 10 adolescents with longtime series for accurate estimations of long-term dependencies associated with…

In this article, we consider estimation of parameters of random effects models from samples collected via complex multistage designs. Incorporation of sampling weights is one way to reduce estimation bias due to unequal probabilities of selection. Several weighting methods have been proposed in the literature for estimating the parameters of…

The generalized graded unfolding model (GGUM) has been recently developed to describe item responses to Likert items (agree-disagree) in attitude measurement. In this study, the authors (a) developed two item selection methods in computerized classification testing under the GGUM, the current estimate/ability confidence interval method and the cut…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of using the concrete-representational-abstract (CRA) teaching sequence with integrated strategy instruction for developing addition with regrouping competence among students with learning difficulties in mathematics. A total of 16 lessons were provided to 24 students during a six-week…

This article focuses on the relation between student population characteristics and average test scores per school in the final grade of primary education from a dynamic perspective. Aggregated data of over 5,000 Dutch primary schools covering a 6-year period were used to study the relation between changes in school populations and shifts in mean…

The central goal of this study was to characterize the mental models of acids and acid strength expressed by advanced college chemistry students when engaged in prediction, explanation, and justification tasks that asked them to rank chemical compounds based on their relative acid strength. For that purpose we completed a qualitative research…