To improve the quality in teaching and learning, opportunities need to be provided where practitioners and researchers meet and share visions, disseminate findings, co-construct ideas, and set research agendas together. Visiting a conference is one well-known and established way to do this. But are they effective? A survey was conducted among the…

The author presents five classroom activities that involve students in the settlement at Jamestown. Activity 1 simulates the problems encountered on the "Godspeed," a fifty-two-foot foot boat with fifty-two passengers traveling across the Atlantic in 1607 for three slow months. In Activity 2, students plot their route, ocean currents,…

In a randomized experiment (n = 515), a computerized and a computerized adaptive test (CAT) are compared. The item pool consists of 24 polytomous motivation items. Although items are carefully selected, calibration data show that Samejima's graded response model did not fit the data optimally. A simulation study is done to assess possible…

Both virtual and physical manipulatives are reported as effective learning tools when used with different groups of students in a variety of contexts to learn mathematical content. The use of multiple representations and the flexibility to translate among those representational forms facilitates students' learning and has the potential to deepen…

An Internet-based e-learning system offers many benefits over traditional learning environments. It provides a time, class size, and geographical location independent learning platform to students in addition to being able to consolidate e-learning content from a vast amount of Internet Web sites and deliver it to students. However, as the…

During periods of high unemployment, many workers exhaust their unemployment insurance (UI) benefits before regaining employment. To help alleviate this problem, Congress created the extended benefits (EB) program, expanding the number of weeks of benefits available to UI recipients in high unemployment states. The EB program operates by…

After the first observation of life under the microscope, it took two centuries of research before the "cell theory" was established. Luckily, today's teachers can take advantage of computer technology and speed up the discovery process in their classrooms. This article describes how computer-based instructional programs can be used to engage…

The likelihood ratio test statistic G[squared](dif) is widely used for comparing the fit of nested models in categorical data analysis. In large samples, this statistic is distributed as a chi-square with degrees of freedom equal to the difference in degrees of freedom between the tested models, but only if the least restrictive model is correctly…

Using evidence from eye-tracking studies, Van Gompel, Pickering, Pearson, and Liversedge (2005) have argued against currently implemented constraint-based models of syntactic ambiguity resolution. The case against these competition models is based on a mismatch between reported patterns of reading data and the putative predictions of the models.…

If one rolls a coin across a chessboard and it comes to rest on the board, what is the probability that it covers some corner of one of the grid squares? The online magazine "Plus" (2004) posed this problem for students to solve. It is a useful problem for several reasons: it introduces the idea of probability in a continuous sample space, it has…

P. A. Frazier, A. P. Tix, and K. E. Barron (2004) highlighted a normal theory method popularized by R. M. Baron and D. A. Kenny (1986) for testing the statistical significance of indirect effects (i.e., mediator variables) in multiple regression contexts. However, simulation studies suggest that this method lacks statistical power relative to some…

How can cognitive load in visual displays of computer simulations be optimized? Middle-school chemistry students (N = 257) learned with a simulation of the ideal gas law. Visual complexity was manipulated by separating the display of the simulations in two screens (low complexity) or presenting all information on one screen (high complexity). The…

This study examined 2 leader functions likely to be instrumental in synchronizing large systems of teams (i.e., multiteam systems [MTSs]). Leader strategizing and coordinating were manipulated through training, and effects on functional leadership, interteam coordination, and MTS performance were examined. Three hundred eighty-four undergraduate…

Unlike their monotone counterparts, nonparametric unfolding response models, which assume the item response function is unimodal, have seen little attention in the psychometric literature. This paper studies the nonparametric behavior of unfolding models by building on the work of Post (1992). The paper provides rigorous justification for a class…

In the context of item response theory, it is not uncommon that person-by-item data are correlated beyond the correlation that is captured by the model--in other words, there is extra binomial variation. Heterogeneity of the parameters can explain this variation. There is a need for proper statistical methods to indicate possible extra…