This article is devoted to practical aspects of teaching and learning of probability at university. It presents the difficulties and attitudes of first-year university science and engineering students towards using paradoxes and counterexamples as a pedagogical strategy in teaching and learning of probability. It also presents a student's point of…

The article presents the consideration of grading scales used for education outcomes in different countries, describes likeness and differences of applied grading scales. Application of the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) grading scale is investigated according of the analysis of scientific literature as well as cases of…

Student pathways through the American higher education system are complex and entail more than the choice between continuation and dropout. The four-year college system requires students seeking a bachelor's degree to pass through a series of transitions that are marked by the achievement of credit thresholds in each year of study. At those…

The SEED schools, which combine a "No Excuses'' charter model with a five-day-a-week boarding program, are America's only urban public boarding schools for the poor. We provide the first causal estimate of the impact of attending SEED schools on academic achievement, with the goal of understanding whether changing a student's environment through…

The purpose of this study is through Monte Carlo simulation to compare several propensity score methods in approximating factorial experimental design and identify best approaches in reducing bias and mean square error of parameter estimates of the main and interaction effects of two factors. Previous studies focused more on unbiased estimates of…

With the advent of the Web, the notion of "information retrieval" has acquired a completely new connotation and currently encompasses several disciplines ranging from traditional forms of text and data retrieval in unstructured and structured repositories to retrieval of static and dynamic information from the contents of the surface and deep Web.…

Learning about statistics is a lot like learning about science: the learning is more meaningful if you can actively explore. This seventh installment of "Explorations in Statistics" explores regression, a technique that estimates the nature of the relationship between two things for which we may only surmise a mechanistic or predictive…

Here, we present complex resonance states (or Siegert states) that describe the tunnelling decay of a trapped quantum particle from an intuitive point of view that naturally leads to the easily applicable Siegert approximation method. This can be used for analytical and numerical calculations of complex resonances of both the linear and nonlinear…

Previous research has cast doubt on the efficacy of utilizing external representations as an aid to solving word problems. The present study replicates previous findings that concrete representations hinder college students' ability to solve probability word problems, and extends those findings to apply to a multimedia instructional context. Our…

The Bunkum Awards are a sort of beauty contest for ugly people. Bestowed by the National Education Policy Center housed at the University of Colorado at Boulder, they reward the most "nonsensical, confusing, and disingenuous" studies of education published each year. Contestants are drawn from reports critiqued by the Think Tank Review…

Mediation analysis uses measures of hypothesized mediating variables to test theory for how a treatment achieves effects on outcomes and to improve subsequent treatments by identifying the most efficient treatment components. Most current mediation analysis methods rely on untested distributional and functional form assumptions for valid…

We examine whether women's rising labor force participation led to increased intergenerational transmission of occupation from fathers to daughters. We develop a model where fathers invest in human capital that is specific to their own occupations. Our model generates an empirical test where we compare the trends in the probabilities that women…

A previous study reported that, similar to young and adult skilled readers, Italian developmental dyslexics read pseudowords made up of a root and a derivational suffix faster and more accurately than simple pseudowords. Unlike skilled readers, only dyslexic and reading-matched younger children benefited from morphological structure in reading…

This study uses the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescents (Add Health) data, a nationally representative sample of adolescents, to disentangle the relationship between child maltreatment and violent delinquency. Also examined are potential moderating effects of gender, socioeconomic status (SES), and religiosity on the association between…

Diagnosis of misconceptions or "bugs" in procedural skills is difficult because of their unstable nature. This study addresses this problem by proposing and evaluating a probability-based approach to the diagnosis of bugs in children's multicolumn subtraction performance using Bayesian networks. This approach assumes a causal network relating…