We present a lottery project for lower level mathematics courses that demonstrates financial decision making in a context familiar to students. Students use elementary principals of probability and financial mathematics to compare the expected values of buying Powerball lottery tickets to some basic savings plans. Then, they compare the expected…

The authors investigated whether memory for object locations in pictures could be exploited to address known difficulties of designing query languages for picture databases. M. W. Lansdale's (1998) model of location memory was adapted to 4 experiments observing memory for everyday pictures. These experiments showed that location memory is…

Item-exposure control in computerized adaptive testing is implemented by imposing item-ineligibility constraints on the assembly process of the shadow tests. The method resembles Sympson and Hetter's (1985) method of item-exposure control in that the decisions to impose the constraints are probabilistic. The method does not, however, require…

It is well known that the two-sample Student t test fails to maintain its significance level when the variances of treatment groups are unequal, and, at the same time, sample sizes are unequal. However, introductory textbooks in psychology and education often maintain that the test is robust to variance heterogeneity when sample sizes are equal.…

In this paper, we consider some combinatorial and statistical aspects of the popular "Powerball" lottery game. It is not difficult for students in an introductory statistics course to compute the probabilities of winning various prizes, including the "jackpot" in the Powerball game. Assuming a unique jackpot winner, it is not difficult to find the…

Students in statistics service courses are frequently exposed to dogmatic approaches for evaluating the role of randomization in statistical designs, and inferential data analysis in experimental, observational and survey studies. In order to provide an overview for understanding the inference process, in this work some key statistical concepts in…

Item families, which are groups of related items, are becoming increasingly popular in complex educational assessments. For example, in automatic item generation (AIG) systems, a test may consist of multiple items generated from each of a number of item models. Item calibration or scoring for such an assessment requires fitting models that can…

This article describes the variety of strategies that can be used to determine the probability that a player wins a tennis game, given a probability of 60 percent that he or she wins each point. The article suggests strategies for using the problem in 9-12 classrooms.

The Peer-Assisted Learning (PAL) program at the University of Minnesota has drawn from the best practices of Supplemental Instruction, Peer-Led Team Learning, Structured Learning Assistance, the Emerging Scholars Program, and other successful postsecondary peer cooperative learning models to establish guiding principles for structuring learning…

Commuting or re-location costs could be an in important influence on students' university choices and might even deter some from going to university. The barriers presented by these costs may be high for lower-income students, and students for whom there are cultural incentives to remain in or close to the parental home. If this is the case, then…

The major objectives of the study "Influence of Institutional Climate Perception on the Professional Aspirations of Teacher Educators" are: (1) To estimate the relationship between professional aspirations and institutional climate perception for the total sample and relevant sub samples; and (2) To test whether the comparable…

This report documents the results of a survey of 1,137 active-duty military families, including activated Reservists, regarding child care use. These survey data were analyzed to estimate the relationship between individual family characteristics and installation characteristics and the probability that the family uses any nonparental child care,…

Can children reason the Bayesian way? We argue that the answer to this question depends on how numbers are represented, because a representation can do part of the computation. We test, for the first time, whether Bayesian reasoning can be elicited in children by means of natural frequencies. We show that when information was presented to fourth,…

In this study, the authors used multivariate statistical analysis to examine the impact of cost on the likelihood that a person will both enroll in and complete a Master of Business Administration (MBA) program. They considered both the "explicit" cost of paying tuition and the "implicit" cost, or opportunity cost, of earnings foregone while in…

Computerized adaptive tests (CATs) are individualized tests that, from a measurement point of view, are optimal for each individual, possibly under some practical conditions. In the present study, it is shown that maximum information item selection in CATs using an item bank that is calibrated with the one- or the two-parameter logistic model…