"Second Life" (SL) is currently the most mature and popular multi-user virtual world platform being used in education. Through an in-depth examination of SL, this article explores its potential and the barriers that multi-user virtual environments present to educators wanting to use immersive 3-D spaces in their teaching. The context is set by…

Reading literacy has been a major problem for American students for the past several years. Educators have struggled to find a solution to this problem that will help students while at the same time maintain their interest in the subject matter. Educational video games and other e-learning technologies have made their way into classrooms and homes…

In contrast to Shultz and Takane [Shultz, T.R., & Takane, Y. (2007). Rule following and rule use in the balance-scale task. "Cognition", in press, doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2006.12.004.] we do not accept that the traditional Rule Assessment Method (RAM) of scoring responses on the balance scale task has advantages over latent class analysis (LCA):…

An attempt to model the physical process of annealing lead to the development of a type of combinatorial optimization algorithm that takes on the problem of getting trapped in a local minimum. The author presents a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that illustrates how this works.

The Enskog factor [chi] plays a central role in the theory of dense gases, quantifying how the finite size of molecules causes many physical quantities, such as the equation of state, the mean free path, and the diffusion coefficient, to deviate from those of an ideal gas. We suggest an intuitive but rigorous derivation of this fact by showing how…

With the ongoing global pressure to cut costs and focus on quality, many companies have been implementing "lean manufacturing" concepts to survive in the competitive marketplace. Thus it is imperative that engineering and business graduates are equipped with the lean principles, and are ready to take ownership of lean initiatives as they enter the…

The authors describe an in-class exercise in which students participate in an auction to buy US Airways. The exercise is based on events of late 1995, in which neither United nor American Airlines decided to bid for US Airways. Two teams of students participate in an English auction. Students learn that the equilibrium of the sequential game is…

Almost all introductory and intermediate level statistics textbooks include the topic of confidence interval for the population mean. Almost all these texts introduce the median as a robust measure of central tendency. Only a few of these books, however, cover inference on the population median and in particular confidence interval for the median.…

Two experiments examined children's metacognitive monitoring of recognition judgments within an eyewitness identification paradigm. A confidence-accuracy (CA) calibration approach was used to examine patterns of calibration, over-/underconfidence, and resolution. In Experiment 1, children (n=619, mean age=11 years 10 months) and adults (n=600)…

This article explores how the future of mobile learning games lies in the blurring of the line between fun and learning, between in-school and out-of-school. Accomplishing this requires new paradigms as well as new technologies. Mobile learning games can be the conduits between the world of school and the world of life, and make them both more fun…

Contrary to common belief, several studies have found no relationship between video gaming and obesity or physical inactivity. In fact, video gaming is an untapped resource for enhancing young people's motivation and ability to participate in sports and other movement-based activities. Many popular video games offer sophisticated and engaging…

The authors report a new theory of false memory building upon existing associative memory models and implemented in fSAM, the first fully specified quantitative model of false recall. Participants frequently intrude unstudied critical words while recalling lists comprising their strongest semantic associates but infrequently produce other…

This study explores the effects of ignoring item interaction on item parameter estimation and the efficiency of using the local dependence index Q[subscript 3] and the SAS NLMIXED procedure to detect item interaction under the three-parameter logistic model and the generalized partial credit model. Through simulations, it was found that ignoring…

This edited volume provides an overview of the latest advancements in adaptive training technology. Intelligent tutoring has been deployed for well-defined and relatively static educational domains such as algebra and geometry. However, this adaptive approach to computer-based training has yet to come into wider usage for domains that are less…

Higher education in the U.S. has traditionally prepared students for work and social success, but with families, work, and society itself undergoing revolutionary change, is this preparation sufficient to develop the 21st-century workforce? This book explores how evolving family structures, new ways of balancing work and personal lives, and rapid…