This rejoinder discusses the general comments on how to use Bayesian structural equation modeling (BSEM) wisely and how to get more people better trained in using Bayesian methods. Responses to specific comments cover how to handle sign switching, nonconvergence and nonidentification, and prior choices in latent variable models. Two new…

The validity of family background variables instrumenting education in income regressions has been much criticized. In this paper, we use data from the 2004 German Socio-Economic Panel and Bayesian analysis to analyze to what degree violations of the strict validity assumption affect the estimation results. We show that, in case of moderate direct…

This article examines the difference in victims' reporting behavior regarding crimes committed by males and by females. The authors expect that victims of female offenders are less likely to report to the police than victims of male offenders because of differences in the victim-offender relationship as well as in the victim's sex. With recent…

At the beginning of preschool (M = 46 months of age), 197 (94 boys) children were administered tasks that assessed a suite of nonsymbolic and symbolic quantitative competencies as well as their executive functions, verbal and nonverbal intelligence, preliteracy skills, and their parents' education level. The children's mathematics achievement was…

Evidence evaluation is a crucial process in many human activities, spanning from medical diagnosis to impression formation. The present experiments investigated which, if any, normative model best conforms to people's intuition about the value of the obtained evidence. Psychologists, epistemologists, and philosophers of science have proposed…

A simulation study was conducted to explore the performance of the linear logistic test model (LLTM) when the relationships between items and cognitive components were misspecified. Factors manipulated included percent of misspecification (0%, 1%, 5%, 10%, and 15%), form of misspecification (under-specification, balanced misspecification, and…

This study introduces a student model and control algorithm, optimizing mathematics learning in children. The adaptive system is integrated into a computer-based training system for enhancing numerical cognition aimed at children with developmental dyscalculia or difficulties in learning mathematics. The student model consists of a dynamic…

Language is rife with ambiguity. Do children and adults meet this challenge in similar ways? Recent work suggests that while adults resolve syntactic ambiguities by integrating a variety of cues, children are less sensitive to top-down evidence. We test whether this top-down insensitivity is specific to syntax or a general feature of children's…

Learning and executive functions such as task-switching share common neural substrates, notably prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia. Understanding how they interact requires studying how cognitive control facilitates learning but also how learning provides the (potentially hidden) structure, such as abstract rules or task-sets, needed for…

General diagnostic models (GDMs) and Bayesian networks are mathematical frameworks that cover a wide variety of psychometric models. Both extend latent class models, and while GDMs also extend item response theory (IRT) models, Bayesian networks can be parameterized using discretized IRT. The purpose of this study is to examine similarities and…

Extreme response set, the tendency to prefer the lowest or highest response option when confronted with a Likert-type response scale, can lead to misfit of item response models such as the generalized partial credit model. Recently, a series of intrinsically multidimensional item response models have been hypothesized, wherein tendency toward…

Correlation is often present among observations in a distributed system. This thesis deals with various design issues when correlated data are observed at distributed terminals, including: communicating correlated sources over interference channels, characterizing the common information among dependent random variables, and testing the presence of…

Structural equation models have wide applications. One of the most important issues in analyzing structural equation models is model comparison. This article proposes a Bayesian model comparison statistic, namely the "L[subscript nu]"-measure for both semiparametric and parametric structural equation models. For illustration purposes, we consider…

This article examines the effects of clustering in latent class analysis. A comprehensive simulation study is conducted, which begins by specifying a true multilevel latent class model with varying within- and between-cluster sample sizes, varying latent class proportions, and varying intraclass correlations. These models are then estimated under…

This article describes a preliminary investigation of an empirical Bayes (EB) procedure for using collateral information to improve equating of scores on test forms taken by small numbers of examinees. Resampling studies were done on two different forms of the same test. In each study, EB and non-EB versions of two equating methods--chained linear…