The transition from eighth grade to high school results in a substantial drop in course performance for many students. These declines in performance lead students to fall off-track for obtaining high school and college degrees. By using data on students' middle grade performance, high school staff can set goals for their students to help them meet…

This paper uses the credits-attempted perspective--in the context of how many credits a student attempts in their first year of college--and reports on several related projects all intended to evaluate potential interventions to raise academic momentum among first-year community college students. The presentation contrasts non-experimental…

This article presents a problem set which includes a selection of probability problems. Probability theory started essentially as an empirical science and developed on the mathematical side later. The problems featured in this article demonstrate diversity of ideas and different concepts of probability, in particular, they refer to Laplace and…

Preference for working on variable schedules and temporal discrimination were simultaneously examined in two experiments using a discrete-trial, concurrent-chains arrangement with fixed interval (FI) and random interval (RI) terminal links. The random schedule was generated by first sampling a probability distribution after the programmed delay to…

Among 180 Turkish university students, the probability of suicide was strongly predicted by both hopelessness and deficiencies in problem solving. In addition, for women, unhealthy attachment styles (preoccupied and dismissing) also predicted suicidality. The clinical implications of these findings are that psychotherapists should focus on helping…

If questioned about their beliefs, psychometricians in one camp would argue the firm conviction that the Rasch model is mathematically elegant and intuitive as well as plausible for practitioners, pointing out the advantages of a simple model that "counts" every item in the same way. Psychometricians of another camp would argue that the three…

Government policies that promote Year 12 completion are based on a recognition that, on average, the completion of senior secondary schooling leads to better labour market outcomes. Completing senior secondary schooling is not, however, for everyone, particularly not for those who are less academically inclined or who are unsuited to the…

The documentary film "The Lottery" focuses on the battle between advocates for a New York City charter school provider, Harlem Success Academy Charter Schools (HSA), and those presented as charter school opponents. It uses the struggle of four students who hope to get into a charter school as a vehicle to examine how difficult it is for…

This presentation focuses on the quasi-experimental methods used to select comparison schools for an evaluation of a federal investing in innovation (i3) validation grant. The Northeast Tennessee College and Career Ready Consortium (NETCO) consists of 29 high schools participating in a five-year program to expand students' access to rigorous…

There have been many discussions of how Type I errors should be controlled when many hypotheses are tested (e.g., all possible comparisons of means, correlations, proportions, the coefficients in hierarchical models, etc.). By and large, researchers have adopted familywise (FWER) control, though this practice certainly is not universal. Familywise…

Today's students demand that their lessons be real, interesting, relevant, and manageable. Mathematics is one subject that eludes many students partly because its traditional presentation lacks those elements that encourage students to learn. Easy accessibility through electronic media has exposed people all over the world to a variety of sports…

In this article, we address the apparent discrepancy between causal Bayes net theories of cognition, which posit that judgments of uncertainty are generated from causal beliefs in a way that respects the norms of probability, and evidence that probability judgments based on causal beliefs are systematically in error. One purported source of bias…

The item-specific proportion congruency (ISPC) effect is the finding of attenuated interference for mostly incongruent as compared to mostly congruent items. A debate in the Stroop literature concerns the mechanisms underlying this effect. Noting a confound between proportion congruency and contingency, Schmidt and Besner (2008) suggested that…

A new process model of the interplay between memory and judgment processes was recently suggested, assuming that retrieval fluency--that is, the speed with which objects are recognized--will determine inferences concerning such objects in a single-cue fashion. This aspect of the fluency heuristic, an extension of the recognition heuristic, has…

Mediation is usually assessed by a regression-based or structural equation modeling (SEM) approach that we refer to as the classical approach. This approach relies on the assumption that there are no confounders that influence both the mediator, "M", and the outcome, "Y". This assumption holds if individuals are randomly…