Educational resources can be easily found on the Web. Most search engines base their algorithms on a resource's text or popularity, requiring teachers to navigate the results until they find an appropriate resource. This makes searching for resources a tedious and cumbersome task. Specialized repositories contain resources that are annotated with…

Big data analytics are prevalent in fields like business, engineering, public health, and the physical sciences, but social scientists are slower than their peers in other fields in adopting this new methodology. One major reason for this is that traditional statistical procedures are typically not suitable for the analysis of large and complex…

We introduce a model which combines principles from psychometric and connectionist paradigms to allow direct Q-matrix refinement via backpropagation. We call this model dAFM, based on augmentation of the original Additive Factors Model (AFM), whose calculations and constraints we show can be exactly replicated within the framework of neural…

This article examines the qualitative and quantitative differences between course-based service learning programs and non-course-based service programs at the post-secondary level. A review of the research to date reveals greater benefits for students who participate in course-based community service compared to participation in non-course-based…

Response-time models are of increasing interest in educational and psychological testing. This article focuses on the lognormal model for response times, which is one of the most popular response-time models, and suggests a simple person-fit statistic for the model. The distribution of the statistic under the null hypothesis of no misfit is proved…

In using the Rasch model to improve the quality of an instrument, analysis purports to determine if the sample collaborates well with the items in the instrument such that the results are measuring a single underlying variable. The relevant properties of Rasch analysis are reliability and validity which are key indicators of the quality of a…

A wide variety of chemical concepts and principles can be taught and demonstrated with LEGO bricks. They are an excellent teaching tool for reinforcing theoretical and abstract chemical concepts and for conveying structure--function relationships. They are ideal for conceptual learning or problem-based learning and a great way of stimulating…

A common motivation for adding control variables to statistical models is to reduce the potential for spurious findings when analyzing non-experimental data and to thereby allow for more reliable causal inferences. However, as I show here, unless "all" potential confounding factors are included in an analysis (which is unlikely to be…

The disapplication of level descriptions in the 2014 National Curriculum has spurred many history departments to rethink their approach not only to assessment but to their models of progression. In this article Rachael Cook builds on the recent work of history teachers such as Ford (TH157), Hawkey et al (TH161), Luff (TH164) and Arscott and Hinks…

Courses: Communication Technology, Communication Theory, History of Communication, Media and Society. Objectives: Students will develop an understanding of the two principal theories of technology and culture: technological determinism and the social construction of technology.

Courses: Interpersonal Communication, Relational Communication Objective: This article teaches students to explain and evaluate Knapp's Relational Staircase Model through the creation of personalized greeting cards for each relational stage. The in-class activity encourages students to be creative and succinct in capturing the essence of an…

The Australian mezzo-soprano Ada Beatrice Bloxham (1865-1956) was the inaugural winner (in 1883) of the Clarke Scholarship for a promising musician resident in the Colony of Victoria to study at the Royal College of Music in London. She was the first Australian to enrol at the Royal College of Music and to graduate as an Associate of the College…

Metrics including Cohen's kappa, precision, recall, and F[subscript 1] are common measures of performance for models of discrete student states, such as a student's affect or behaviour. This study examined discrete model metrics for previously published student model examples to identify situations where metrics provided differing perspectives on…

The latest version of the connectionist dual process model of reading (CDP++.parser) was tested on a set of nonwords, many of which were orthographically strange (e.g., PSIZ). A grapheme-by-grapheme read-out strategy was used because the normal strategy produced many poor responses. The new strategy allowed the model to produce results similar to…

Several attempts have been made previously to provide a biological grounding for cognitive architectures by relating their components to the computations of specific brain circuits. Often, the architecture's action selection system is identified with the basal ganglia. However, this identification overlooks one of the most important features of…