Students' views about science were correlated with their approaches to lab practice. Three distinct cases are discussed in detail: empiricist-oriented, rationalist-oriented, and constructivist-oriented students. A coherent epistemological theory was constructed for each case, by considering the different degrees of certainty and confidence each…

In current curriculum materials for middle school students in the US, data and chance are considered as separate topics. They are then ideally brought together in the minds of high school or university students when they learn about statistical inference. In recent studies we have been attempting to build connections between data and chance in the…

Three studies examined the effects of context on decisions about the reality status of novel entities. In Experiment 1 (144, 3- to 5-year-olds), participants less often claimed that novel entities were real when they were introduced in a fantastical than in a scientific context. Experiment 2 (61, 4- to 5-year-olds) revealed that defining novel…

The five articles in this special issue are a blend of experimental and correlational approaches that exemplify advances in contemporary approaches to assessment of reading comprehension. They illustrate how inferences about reading comprehension are determined in part by the material presented for comprehending and the format that is used for…

The assumption that people possess a repertoire of strategies to solve the inference problems they face has been raised repeatedly. However, a computational model specifying how people select strategies from their repertoire is still lacking. The proposed strategy selection learning (SSL) theory predicts a strategy selection process on the basis…

In Study 1, 10-, 13-, and 16-year-olds were assigned to conditions in which they were instructed to think logically and provided alternative antecedents to the consequents of conditional statements. Providing alternatives improved reasoning on two uncertain logical forms, but decreased logical responding on two certain forms; logic instructions…

This study examined 4- and 5-year-olds' ability to spontaneously use the relative duration and frequency of another's object-directed gaze for inferring that person's preference. In Experiment 1, analysis revealed a strong age effect for judgment accuracy, which could not be accounted for by cue-monitoring proficiency. Reducing the saliency of the…

The purpose of this article is to comment on the prior article entitled "Examining Instruction, Achievement and Equity with NAEP mathematics data," by Sarah Theule Lubienski. That article claims that a prior article by the author suffered from three weaknesses: (1) An attempt to justify No Child Left Behind (NCLB); (2) drawing causal…

Many states have adopted test-based accountability systems before the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 became law. NCLB has added a new dimension to test-based educational accountability systems. Features of state and NCLB accountability are discussed with an emphasis on questions of the validity of inferences that are made about school…

In 3 experiments, affirmative and hypothetical probes were presented after narrative texts containing conditional arguments. According to the data, readers represented modus ponens deductions as certain, except when it was only a weakly necessary cause of a given effect. They represented any logically invalid inferences resulting from affirming…

Previous research has suggested that preschoolers possess a cognitive system that allows them to construct an abstract, coherent representation of causal relations among events. Such a system lets children reason retrospectively when they observe ambiguous data in a rational manner (e.g., D. M. Sobel, J. B. Tenenbaum, & A. Gopnik, 2004).…

D. B. Rubin's model for causal inference in experiments and observational studies is enlarged to analyze the problem of "causes causing causes" and is compared to path analysis and recursive structural equations models. A special quasiexperimental design, the encouragement design, is used to give concreteness to the discussion by…

This paper investigates methods that avoid using multiple groups to represent the missing data patterns in covariance structure modeling, attempting instead to do a single-group analysis where the only action the analyst has to take is to indicate that data is missing. A new covariance structure approach developed by B. Muthen and G. Arminger is…

L-scaling is introduced as a technique for determining the weights in weighted averages or scaled scores for T joint observations on K variables. The technique is so named because of its formal resemblance to the Leontief matrix of mathematical economics. L-scaling is compared to several widely-used procedures for data reduction, and the…

Begging the question, or the "petitio" fallacy, is problematic for logicians because rules of logic dictate that if an argument of a particular form begs the question at issue, any other argument of the same form also begs the question; yet such questions can appear satisfactory in other contexts. The fallacy benefits from considering…