The current experiment examined the potential effects of the method of propositional manipulation (MPM) as a lecturing method on motivation to learn and conceptual understanding of statistics. MPM aims to help students develop conceptual understanding by guiding them into self-explanation at two different stages: First, at the stage of…

Within the theoretical framework of social representations theory, a substantial body of literature has advocated and shown that, as interpretative systems and forms of knowledge concurring in the construction of a social reality, social representations are guides for action, influencing behaviours and social relations. Based on this assumption,…

An important aspect of PBL problems is the affordances that they hold for engaging students in discussion of important content knowledge. In this paper, I argue that one can analyze a problem in terms of a deep problem space and a broader learning space to identify the conceptual ideas for potential engagement. The problem space refers to the…

The purpose of this study was to investigate "fat talk" conversations about weight and body dissatisfaction within college dancers. Participants were 116 female undergraduates who were dancers/dance majors ("n"?=?20), dancers/nondance majors ("n"?=?32), and nondancers ("n"?=?63). Participants responded to…

This paper reports on the results of a study carried out with 105 children, aged between three and four years in three nursery units in London and Surrey, UK. The aim of this study was to explore the level of association which young children have between various musical instruments, musical styles and a particular gender. However, we also aimed to…

Three field studies tested the hypothesis that anticipating a graded test as opposed to a pass-fail test enhances metacognitive monitoring. Participants were teacher candidates who completed a mid-term and a final test in psychology courses. Each participant chose whether the result of the final test should be evaluated with one of five grades or…

A sample of 191 married students from 23 Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs-accredited programs participated in a survey designed to examine factors that affect the marital satisfaction of counseling graduate students. Results indicated that attachment anxiety, attachment avoidance, and dyadic coping accounted…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the question of whether the interaction effects of hypervideo navigation variables (navigation control and navigation links) would affect college students' self-regulated learning just after their learning from instructional hypervideo programs. Navigation control (free navigation or free navigation with…

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is known to be critically involved in strategy switching, attentional set shifting, and inhibition of prepotent responses. A central feature of this kind of behavioral flexibility is the ability to resolve conflicting response tendencies, suggesting a general role of the PFC in resolving interference. If so, the PFC…

Although advances have improved our ability to describe the measurement precision of a test, it often remains challenging to summarize how well a test is performing overall. Reliability, for example, provides an overall summary of measurement precision, but it is sample-specific and might not reflect the potential usefulness of a test if the…

This study examined the relationships between adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism, anxious and avoidant adult attachment styles, depression, hopelessness, and life satisfaction among a sample of 180 undergraduate students. Maladaptive perfectionism mediated the relationship between both forms of adult attachment and depression, hopelessness,…

Striking differences between physics and biology have important implications for interdisciplinary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. The author is a physicist with interdisciplinary connections. The research group in which he works, the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics at the University of Texas at Austin, is…

The present study examined the link between brain hemisphericity and dyslexia in secondary school students, using the Preference Test (PT), a widely used self-report index of preferred hemisphere thinking styles. The hypothesis was that differences would be revealed between the dyslexic group and their peers in hemispheric preference. A total of…

We represent events as composed of participants. In "Joan was eating lasagna in the lecture hall," for example, this eating event is "partitioned" into participants, including at least Joan, the lasagna, and the lecture hall. In this dissertation, I address two questions about events and the participants that populate them:…

This dissertation is composed of three distinct chapters, each of which addresses issues of estimating treatment effects. The first chapter empirically tests the Value-Added (VA) model using school lotteries. The second chapter, co-authored with Michael Wood, considers properties of inverse probability weighting (IPW) in simple treatment effect…