In 2006, the BBVA Foundation in Mexico designed a scholarship and mentoring program that targeted vulnerable lower secondary education students in municipalities with high-intensity migration rates. We follow applicants who started lower secondary education in 2009 to estimate the impact of the Program on the probability of graduating from the…

This three-study dissertation investigated how socioeconomic factors and policies are associated with educational outcomes for undocumented youth and, in one of the papers, to what extent education and employment outcomes intersect. Guided by the specific questions of each study, the three papers take different theoretical and methodological…

I conduct a statewide experiment in Michigan with nearly 50,000 high-achieving high school seniors. Treated students are mailed a letter encouraging them to consider college and providing them with the web address of a college information website. I find that very high-achieving, low-income students, and very high-achieving, minority students are…

While recent studies suggest children can use cross-situational information to learn words, these studies involved minimal referential ambiguity, and the cross-situational evidence overwhelmingly favored a single referent for each word. Here we asked whether 2-5-year-olds could identify a noun's referent when the scene and cross-situational…

Calculating Laplace transforms from the definition often requires tedious integrations. This paper provides an integration-free technique for calculating Laplace transforms of many familiar functions. It also shows how the technique can be applied to probability theory.

This article deals with a model for describing a sequence of events, for example, education is typically attained by a set of transitions from one level of education to the next. In particular, this article tries to reconcile measures describing the effect of a variable on each of these transitions, with measures describing the effect of this…

Recent concerns about a shortage of capacity for statistical and numerical analysis skills among social science students and researchers have prompted a range of initiatives aiming to improve teaching in this area. However, these projects have rarely re-evaluated the content of what is taught to students and have instead focussed primarily on…

Intelligent tutoring systems adapt the curriculum to the needs of the individual student. Therefore, an accurate representation and prediction of student knowledge is essential. Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT) is a popular approach for student modeling. The structure of BKT models, however, makes it impossible to represent the hierarchy and…

We used event-related potentials (ERP) to investigate whether Spanish-English bilinguals preactivate form and meaning of predictable words. Participants read high-cloze sentence contexts (e.g., "The student is going to the library to borrow a..."), followed by the predictable word ("book"), a word that was form-related…

Background: The strength of the relationship between epilepsy and regression in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been much discussed but is currently unclear. Methods: The authors conducted 2 meta-analyses of published studies to determine if children with ASD who experience regression (ASD-R) epilepsy are more likely to have epilepsy or…

Public pension systems in many U.S. states face large funding short-falls, and policymakers have considered moving toward defined contribution (DC) pension structures in the interest of reducing the likelihood of future shortfalls. Concerns exist, however, that such changes might increase levels of employee turnover. The empirical evidence on the…

Updated research is required on the geographies of the cultural issues that shape international students' experiences. The growing number of students traveling to different countries implies a need to cater to cultures and values from different parts of the world. Apart from cultural and geographical aspects, there is scarce knowledge about…

As traditional teaching methods may fail to serve children with special needs, special education (SE) services aim to compensate for the shortcomings of conventional schooling. However, despite of numerous studies on the effectiveness of SE services, the influence of potential selection bias remains a real challenge, and only a few studies have…

In this interview, we discuss my early uses of meta-analytic procedures, first to combine "p"-values and then to combine effect sizes as well. My interest in quantifying the magnitude and the statistical significance of the effect of interpersonal expectations probably grew out of the following: (1) a long-held interest in the concept of…

This paper presents a comparison of three approaches to the teaching of probability to demonstrate how the truth table of elementary mathematical logic can be used to teach the calculations of conditional probabilities. Students are typically introduced to the topic of conditional probabilities--especially the ones that involve Bayes' rule--with…