We exploit a natural experiment to estimate the causal impact of parental education on educational outcomes of their children when they are high school seniors. In 1968, the Taiwanese government extended compulsory education from 6 to 9 years and opened over 150 new junior high schools at a differential rate among regions. We form treatment and…

Contracting out public schools to private institutions is an instrument for reforming public education as it may facilitate academic innovation and improve student academic performance through higher school accountability and autonomy. The degree of autonomy that different providers have may vary substantially depending on the contractual and…

Using detailed individual-level data from public universities in the state of Ohio, I estimate the effect of various institutional expenditures on the probability of graduating from college. Using a competing risks regression framework, I find differential impacts of expenditure categories across student characteristics. I estimate that student…

These Proceedings are a written record of the research presented at the 33rd Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (PME-NA 2011) held in Reno, Nevada, October 20-23, 2011. The theme of the conference is Transformative Mathematics Teaching and Learning. The Proceedings…

Several current international comparative large-scale assessments of educational achievement (ICLSA) make use of "Rasch models", to address functions essential for valid cross-cultural comparisons. From a historical perspective, ICLSA and Georg Rasch's "models for measurement" emerged at about the same time, half a century ago. However, the…

The current study is a longitudinal investigation of unobserved heterogeneity in the developmental trajectories of problem behaviors among children who have experienced maltreatment. The goal of this study is to inform effective intervention plans with respect to behavior problems of maltreated children by examining the different trajectories of…

Harsanyi's utilitarianism is extended here to Savage's framework. We formulate a Pareto condition that implies that both society's utility function and its probability measure are linear combinations of those of the individuals. An indiscriminate Pareto condition has been shown to contradict linear aggregation of beliefs and tastes. We argue that…

This article describes a simple classroom activity that helps students immediately visualize and understand the meaning and mathematical properties of the Poisson distribution.

In this article, we study the Monty Hall three doors problem. A fully general solution and several new approaches are presented, including a Bayesian analysis.

This article shows how the use of factorial moments provides a simple, consistent yet elegant approach to finding the mean and variance of standard discrete probability distributions.

This paper examines a real life question of gamble facing lottery players. Combinatorial dependence plays a central role in shaping the game probabilistic structure, but might not carry the merited weight in punters' considerations.

Several probabilistic models for subset choice have been proposed in the literature, for example, to explain approval voting data. We show that Marley et al.'s latent scale model is subsumed by Falmagne and Regenwetter's size-independent model, in the sense that every choice probability distribution generated by the former can also be explained by…

In the modern world, higher education is transitioning from enrollment mode to recruitment mode. This shift paved the way for institutional research and policy making from historical data perspective. More and more universities in the U.S. are implementing and using enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, which collect vast amounts of data.…

Here is the only reference book you will ever need for teaching primary school mathematics and statistics. It is full of exciting and engaging snapshots of excellent classroom practice relevant to "The New Zealand Curriculum" and national mathematics standards. There are many fascinating examples of investigative learning experiences,…