Explicit information-seeking actions are needed to evaluate alternative actions in problem-solving tasks. Information-seeking costs are often traded off against the utility of information. We present three experiments that show how subjects adapt to the cost and information structures of environments in a map-navigation task. We found that…

Researchers often have one or more theories or expectations with respect to the outcome of their empirical research. When researchers talk about the expected relations between variables if a certain theory is correct, their statements are often in terms of one or more parameters expected to be larger or smaller than one or more other parameters.…

In this article, the author comments on an article by Dunn, Kadane, and Garrow, "Comparing Harm Done by Mobility and Class Absence: Missing Students and Missing Data." He believes the research reported in that article should serve as a model for future applications of Bayesian methods in important educational research problems. The author lauds…

A Bayesian approach is developed for analyzing nonlinear structural equation models with nonignorable missing data. The nonignorable missingness mechanism is specified by a logistic regression model. A hybrid algorithm that combines the Gibbs sampler and the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm is used to produce the joint Bayesian estimates of…

The 10th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2017) is held under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society at the Optics Velley Kingdom Plaza Hotel, Wuhan, Hubei Province, in China. This years conference features two invited talks by: Dr. Jie Tang, Associate Professor with the Department of Computer…

The Secondary School Curriculum and Staffing Survey (SSCSS) has been carried out every four to six years since 1965. The 2007 survey was carried out by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), on behalf of the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF). The aim of this survey was to create a picture of the secondary…

We consider group decision-making on an optimal stopping problem, for which large and stable individual differences have previously been established. In the problem, people are presented with a sequence of five random numbers between 0 and 100, one at a time, and are required to choose the maximum of the sequence, without being allowed to return…

In 1993, The Charles F. Kettering Foundation published "College Students Talk Politics," a national study conducted by the Harwood Group and based on focus groups on ten American campuses. The study found, among other things, that students considered politics "irrelevant" to their lives and saw little purpose in ever actively participating in the…

This study extended Schilling's (2001) study by investigating program commitment among a larger (N = 12), older (M = 16.7 years), and more experienced (M = 5.96 years) sample of participants in the Project Effort Youth Leader Corps. Individual interviews elicited a greater number and specificity of themes. Program-related barriers included…

In a previous article published in the "Journal of College Reading and Learning," we presented the results of a self-study of our commitment as faculty and staff members to providing a multicultural learning experience for our students. This follow-up article provides the findings of a study conducted during spring semester 2004 to explore student…

In the context of current efforts to increase student performance and to close the significant gaps in performance among student subgroups, school researchers and practitioners are paying increasing attention to schools as learning organizations. Unfortunately, the concept of the learning organization is generally vague, and school personnel have…

Probability-based inference in complex networks of interdependent variables is an active topic in statistical research, spurred by such diverse applications as forecasting, pedigree analysis, troubleshooting, and medical diagnosis. This paper concerns the role of Bayesian inference networks for updating student models in intelligent tutoring…

Expected a posteriori has a number of advantages over maximum likelihood estimation or maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation methods. These include ability estimates (thetas) for all response patterns, less regression towards the mean than MAP ability estimates, and a lower average squared error. R. D. Bock and R. J. Mislevy (1982) state that the…

In a variable-length adaptive test with a stopping rule that relied on the asymptotic standard error of measurement of the examinee's estimated true score, M. S. Stocking (1987) discovered that it was sufficient to know the examinee's true score and the number of items administered to predict with some accuracy whether an examinee's true score was…

Hierarchical Bayes procedures for the two-parameter logistic item response model were compared for estimating item parameters. Simulated data sets were analyzed using two different Bayes estimation procedures, the two-stage hierarchical Bayes estimation (HB2) and the marginal Bayesian with known hyperparameters (MB), and marginal maximum…