There has been an emphasis in some science courses to focus more on teaching conceptual knowledge. Though certain innovations have been successful in increasing student conceptual knowledge, performance on quantitative problem-solving tasks often remains unaffected. Research also shows that students tend to maintain conceptual and quantitative…

Musso et al. (2013) predict students' academic achievement with high accuracy one year in advance from cognitive and demographic variables, using artificial neural networks (ANNs). They conclude that ANNs have high potential for theoretical and practical improvements in learning sciences. ANNs are powerful statistical modelling tools but they can…

Two predictive models are developed in this article: the first is designed to predict people' attitudes to alcoholic drinks, while the second sets out to predict the use of alcohol in relation to selected individual values. University students (N = 1,500) were recruited through stratified sampling based on sex and academic discipline. The…

Objective: To examine the relationship between mindfulness and alcohol problems in college students, as well as the role of stress as a mediator in this relationship. Participants: Participants were 310 students from a small, private college in the Northeast. Methods: Students completed self-report measures, including the Perceived Stress Scale,…

Although career success is an issue of global concern, few studies have examined the antecedents of career success across cultures. In this study we test whether the relationship between individuals' self-enhancement values (achievement and power) and hierarchical status differs across 29 countries and whether this variation depends on countries'…

This paper deals with the analysis of cricket match results from the ICC World Cup 2011. We believe that such data provide good material for interesting classroom exercises. (Contains 7 tables and 1 figure.)

The present study examined the relevance of teachers' individual goal orientations for the attendance of further training and sick leave in the teaching profession. Regression analysis indicated a positive effect of learning goal orientation (i.e., the desire to improve one's teaching skills and knowledge) along with a negative effect of work…

Bayesian estimation for 2 groups provides complete distributions of credible values for the effect size, group means and their difference, standard deviations and their difference, and the normality of the data. The method handles outliers. The decision rule can accept the null value (unlike traditional "t" tests) when certainty in the estimate is…

We study people's abilities to transfer object category knowledge across visual and haptic domains. If a person learns to categorize objects based on inputs from one sensory modality, can the person categorize these same objects when the objects are perceived through another modality? Can the person categorize novel objects from the same…

When remembering a real-world scene, people encode both detailed information about specific objects and higher order information like the overall gist of the scene. However, formal models of change detection, like those used to estimate visual working memory capacity, assume observers encode only a simple memory representation that includes no…

Test developers often need to create unidimensional scales from multidimensional data. For item analysis, "marginal trace lines" capture the relation with the general dimension while accounting for nuisance dimensions and may prove to be a useful technique for creating short-form tests. This article describes the computations needed to obtain…

In this paper, we describe the integration and evaluation of an existing generic Bayesian student model (GBSM) into an existing computerized testing system within the Mathematics Education Project (PmatE--Projecto Matematica Ensino) of the University of Aveiro. This generic Bayesian student model had been previously evaluated with simulated…

In educational research, outcome measures are often estimated across separate studies or across schools, districts, or other subgroups to assess the overall causal effect of an active treatment versus a control treatment. Students may be partitioned into such strata or blocks by experimental design, or separated into studies within a…

The purpose of this study was to explore the use of robust variance estimation for combining commonly specified multiple regression models and for combining sample-dependent focal slope estimates from diversely specified models. The proposed estimator obviates traditionally required information about the covariance structure of the dependent…

Despite wide applications of both mediation models and missing data techniques, formal discussion of mediation analysis with missing data is still rare. We introduce and compare four approaches to dealing with missing data in mediation analysis including list wise deletion, pairwise deletion, multiple imputation (MI), and a two-stage maximum…