In this article, the authors demonstrate how they modified a well-known game to use it as an educational simulation to help students understand difficult material, specifically critical theory. The goals for the simulation focus on improving the comprehension levels of critical theory for students in a course on the Sociology of Deviance, although…

Vocational education and training (VET) concerns the cultivation and development of specific skills and competencies, in addition to broad underpinning knowledge relating to paid employment. VET assessment is, therefore, designed to determine the extent to which a trainee has effectively acquired the knowledge, skills, and competencies required by…

Contemporary instructional approaches expect students to be active producers of knowledge. This leads to the need for creation of instructional tools and tasks that can offer students opportunities for active learning. This study examines the effect of a computational experiment as an instructional tool-for Grade 12 students, using a computer…

Does using a computer game improve students' motivation to learn classroom material? The current study examined students' motivation to learn history concepts while playing a commercial, off-the-shelf computer game, Civilization III. The study examined the effect of using conceptual scaffolds to accompany game play. Students from three ninth-grade…

The System Dynamics approach can be seen as a new way of understanding dynamical phenonema (natural, physical, biological, etc.) that occur in our daily lives taking into consideration not only single pairs of cause-effect variables, but the functioning of the system as a whole. This approach also provides the students with a new understanding in…

Three statistical testing procedures well-known in the maximum likelihood approach are the Wald, likelihood ratio (LR), and score tests. Although well-known, the application of these three testing procedures in the logistic regression method to investigate differential item function (DIF) has not been rigorously made yet. Employing a variety of…

While deliberating and making decisions, participants in urban development processes need easy access to the pertinent content scattered among different plans. A Planning Markup Language (PML) has been proposed to represent the underlying structure of plans in an XML-compliant way. However, PML currently covers only textual information and lacks…

Cartesian tensor bases have been widely used to model spherical functions. In medical imaging, tensors of various orders can approximate the diffusivity function at each voxel of a diffusion-weighted MRI data set. This approximation produces tensor-valued datasets that contain information about the underlying local structure of the scanned tissue.…

In this report, researchers examined whether individualized multimedia-based instruction would influence the development of rifle marksmanship skills in novice shooters with little or no prior rifle marksmanship experience. Forty-eight novice shooters used an M4 rifle training simulator system to shoot at an 8-inch target at a simulated distance…

Multilevel data often exist in educational studies. The focus of this study is to consider differential item functioning (DIF) for dichotomous items from a multilevel perspective. One of the most often used methods for detecting DIF in dichotomously scored items is the Mantel-Haenszel log odds-ratio. However, the Mantel-Haenszel reduces the…

By simulating the dynamics of a bidimensional array of springs and masses, the propagation of conveniently generated waves is visualized. The simulation is exclusively based on Newton's second law and was made to provide insight into the physics of wave propagation. By controlling parameters such as the magnitude of the mass and the elastic…

In this paper, the authors focus their attention on the way magnetic circuits and permanent magnets are usually treated in most textbooks and electrical engineering courses. This paper demonstrates how this important topic is too often presented simplistically. This simplistic treatment does not allow the students to develop a complete…

Test administrators often face the challenge of detecting differential item functioning (DIF) with samples of size smaller than that recommended by experts. A Bayesian approach can incorporate, in the form of a prior distribution, existing information on the inference problem at hand, which yields more stable estimation, especially for small…

Two experiments were conducted to identify the conditions likely to produce resurgence among adult human participants. The preparation was a simulated caregiving context, wherein a recorded infant cry sounded and was terminated contingent upon targeted caregiving responses. Results of Experiment 1 demonstrated resurgence with human participants in…

For valid decision making, it is essential to both the person being measured and the person or organization that is having the person measured that the observed scores adequately represent the underlying trait. This study deals with person-fit analysis of polytomous item scores to detect unusual patterns of sum scores on subsets of items. This…