Alpha-particle sources are widely used in industrial and medical applications. Such applications include smoke detectors, static charge eliminators, and radiation therapy. This paper is concerned with the detection of alpha particles. A number of techniques are known for the detection of alpha particles. Those techniques include the Geiger-Müller…

Social robots have the potential to play a vital role in education. Student technology acceptance may be considered as a driver for their successful integration in educational processes. Based on the ICAP (Interactive, Constructive, Active, Passive) framework and research on social robot roles, we have developed eight vignettes describing…

Randomized A/B tests allow causal estimation without confounding but are often under-powered. This paper uses a new dataset, including over 250 randomized comparisons conducted in an online learning platform, to illustrate a method combining data from A/B tests with log data from users who were not in the experiment. Inference remains exact and…

Since the phenomenal success of deep neural networks (DNNs) on image classification, the research community have been developing wider and deeper networks with complex components for a variety of visual understanding tasks. While such "heavy" models achieve excellent performance, they pose two main challenges: (1) the training requires a…

Multidimensional Item Response Theory (MIRT) is widely used in educational and psychological assessment and evaluation. With the increasing size of modern assessment data, many existing estimation methods become computationally demanding and hence they are not scalable to big data, especially for the multidimensional three-parameter and…

A wide range of machine-learning-based approaches have been developed in the past decade, increasing our ability to accurately model nonlinear and nonadditive response surfaces. This has improved performance for inferential tasks such as estimating average treatment effects in situations where standard parametric models may not fit the data well.…

Exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) allows for the estimation of all cross-loadings, which leads to the number of parameters estimated substantially greater than that in conventional SEM. This study examined the sensitivity of fit measures (CFI, RMSEA, AIC, BIC, SaBIC, LRT) to measurement noninvariance in ESEM. Results suggested that…

This study presents the development of a student-centric framework for utilizing virtual reality (VR) technologies in education, specifically focusing on enhancing computational thinking skills. While numerous frameworks exist in this domain, they often lack consideration of student preferences, which are integral for fostering learner autonomy.…

Physics problem-solving ability is among the crucial skills physics students require as it enhances their conceptual understanding and develops their abilities for real-world problem-solving. This study employed a descriptive design to investigate the physics problem-solving skills of Senior-Five physics students from Rwandan secondary schools.…

Counting is foundational to success with mathematics. In this synthesis, we analyzed 17 studies about counting-focused interventions for preschool and kindergarten students with mathematics difficulty or at-risk of mathematics difficulty. All interventions addressed several components of counting, including stable order, one-to-one correspondence,…

The increasing amount of research on the effects of digital technology-based learning on elementary school students' computational thinking ability served as the motivation for this study, which sought to clarify the ambiguous difference in effect size between the variables of digital technology-based learning and computational thinking ability.…

Task-relevant actions can facilitate mathematical thinking, even for complex topics, such as mathematical proof. We investigated whether such cognitive benefits also occur for action predictions. The action-cognition transduction (ACT) model posits a reciprocal relationship between movements and reasoning. Movements--imagined as well as real ones…

Teachers and teacher educators have been sharing strategies and resources for implementing mathematics routines in National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) journals for years. A less commonly shared mathematics routine, especially with young learners, is "Clothesline Math" (Shore, 2017, 2018). In this routine, teachers create…

To promote computational thinking in mathematics education, Scratch is used to foster students' computational thinking and mathematical understanding. However, students face challenges in block-based programming environments, such as having low motivation, high anxiety, and cognitive loads. This study combined the pedagogical values of Geogebra…

Regular expressions (REs) are often taught to undergraduate computer science majors in the Formal Languages and Automata (FLA) course; they are widely used to implement different software functionalities such as search mechanisms and data validation in diverse fields. Despite their importance, the difficulty of REs has been asserted many times in…