The purpose of the current study was to examine how maternal reading strategies and book type would impact on toddlers' responsiveness as they became familiar with three books. Eleven mothers and their 2- to 3-year-olds were recorded reading the same set of three different books (i.e. word book, narrative book and no narrative book) on four…

The purpose of the study reported here was to explore the relationship between the type of high school attended (magnet versus comprehensive) and the likelihood of graduates having completed an advanced course, after accounting for students' prior achievement. In addition, the study examined the relationship between students' prior achievement and…

College decisions are often the result of a variety of influences related to student background characteristics, academic characteristics, college preferences and college aspirations. College counselors recommend that students choose a variety of schools, especially schools where the general student body matches the academic achievement of…

Eight pigeons responded in a three-component concurrent-chains procedure, with either independent or dependent initial links. Relative probability and immediacy of reinforcement in the terminal links were both varied, and outcomes on individual trials (reinforcement or nonreinforcement) were either signaled or unsignaled. Terminal-link fixed-time…

Quite a number of interesting problems in probability feature an event with probability equal to 1/e. This article discusses three such problems and attempts to explain why this probability occurs with such frequency.

The St. Petersburg game is a probabilistic thought experiment. It describes a game which seems to have infinite expected value, but which no reasonable person could be expected to pay much to play. Previous empirical work has centered around trying to find the most likely payoff that would result from playing the game n times. In this paper, we…

This paper examines the modification of nominal compounds by attributive adjectives in English. It draws on a distinction between compound-external (i.e. syntactic) and compound-internal (i.e. morphological) modification. An analysis is presented of more than 1000 pertinent cases, which are roughly equally divided into two-, three- and four-noun…

We study the identification and consistency of Bayesian semiparametric IRT-type models, where the uncertainty on the abilities' distribution is modeled using a prior distribution on the space of probability measures. We show that for the semiparametric Rasch Poisson counts model, simple restrictions ensure the identification of a general…

This study examined the practical problem of covariate selection in propensity scores (PSs) given a predetermined set of covariates. Because the bias reduction capacity of a confounding covariate is proportional to the concurrent relationships it has with the outcome and treatment, particular focus is set on how we might approximate…

The use of propensity scores in psychological and educational research has been steadily increasing in the last 2 to 3 years. However, there are some common misconceptions about the use of different estimation techniques and conditioning choices in the context of propensity score analysis. In addition, reporting practices for propensity score…

Are words stored as morphologically structured representations? If so, when during word recognition are morphological pieces accessed? Recent masked priming studies support models that assume early decomposition of (potentially) morphologically complex words. The electrophysiological evidence, however, is inconsistent. We combined masked…

This study investigated how population parameters representing heterogeneity of variance, skewness, kurtosis, bimodality, and outlier-proneness, drawn from normal and eleven non-normal distributions, also characterized the ranks corresponding to independent samples of scores. When the parameters of population distributions from which samples were…

Honors directors and deans know or presume that retention and graduation rates of honors students substantially exceed those of non-honors students. In our research, we have attempted to better determine what portion of this success is attributable to the academic and other benefits of honors programs as opposed to the background characteristics…

The facilitative effect of retrieval practice, or testing, on the probability of later retrieval has been the focus of much recent empirical research. A lesser known benefit of retrieval practice is that it may also enhance the ability of a learner to benefit from a subsequent restudy opportunity. This facilitative effect of retrieval practice on…

One of the distinctions between classical test theory and item response theory is that the former focuses on sum scores and their relationship to true scores, whereas the latter concerns item responses and their relationship to latent scores. Although item response theory is often viewed as the richer of the two theories, sum scores are still…