Understanding urban teachers' beliefs about African American students has become important because (a) many teachers are reluctant to teach students from other cultures, and (b) most teachers are European American. To construct a psychometrically sound measure of teacher beliefs, the authors investigate the measurement properties of a teacher…

Bayesian estimation of a threshold time (hereafter simply threshold) for the receipt of impulse signals is accomplished given the following: 1) data, consisting of the number of impulses received in a time interval from zero to one and the time of the largest time impulse; 2) a model, consisting of a uniform probability density of impulse time…

This article responds to the other 10 papers in this thematic issue on science and worldviews and it clarifies some of the points in my lead article. The Bayesian framework provides helpful structure for worldview inquiries by recognizing and integrating both public and personal evidence. Drawing upon the other 10 papers, six kinds of potential…

Bipolar disorder is frequently clinically diagnosed in youths who do not actually satisfy Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed., text revision; DSM-IV-TR; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) criteria, yet cases that would satisfy full DSM-IV-TR criteria are often undetected clinically. Evidence-based assessment methods…

Over the past decade, there has been growing interest in real-time assessment of student engagement and motivation during interactions with educational software. Detecting symptoms of disengagement, such as off-task behavior, has shown considerable promise for understanding students' motivational characteristics during learning. In this paper, we…

Learning a phonetic category (or any linguistic category) requires integrating different sources of information. A crucial unsolved problem for phonetic learning is how this integration occurs: how can we update our previous knowledge about a phonetic category as we hear new exemplars of the category? One model of learning is Bayesian Inference,…

Students receive abundant information about their educational performance, but how this information affects future educational-investment decisions is not well understood. Increasingly common sources of information are state-mandated standardized tests. On these tests, students receive a score and a label that summarizes their performance. Using a…

By 7 months of age, infants are able to learn rules based on the abstract relationships between stimuli ( Marcus et al., 1999 ), but they are better able to do so when exposed to speech than to some other classes of stimuli. In the current experiments we ask whether multimodal stimulus information will aid younger infants in identifying abstract…

In longitudinal studies, investigators often measure multiple variables at multiple time points and are interested in investigating individual differences in patterns of change on those variables. Furthermore, in behavioral, social, psychological, and medical research, investigators often deal with latent variables that cannot be observed directly…

Null hypotheses are simple, precise, and theoretically important. Conventional statistical analysis cannot support them; Bayesian analysis can. The challenge in a Bayesian analysis is to formulate a suitably vague alternative, because the vaguer the alternative is (the more it spreads out the unit mass of prior probability), the more the null is…

The article presents a Bayesian model of causal learning that incorporates generic priors--systematic assumptions about abstract properties of a system of cause-effect relations. The proposed generic priors for causal learning favor sparse and strong (SS) causes--causes that are few in number and high in their individual powers to produce or…

The Mathematical Resilience Scale measures students' attitudes toward studying mathematics, using three correlated factors: Value, Struggle, and Growth. The Mathematical Resilience Scale was developed and validated using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses across three samples. Results provide a new approach to gauge the likelihood of…

Walking readers step by step through complex concepts, this book translates missing data techniques into something that applied researchers and graduate students can understand and utilize in their own research. Enders explains the rationale and procedural details for maximum likelihood estimation, Bayesian estimation, multiple imputation, and…

KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) is a national network of public charter schools whose stated mission is to help underserved students enroll in and graduate from college. Prior studies (see Tuttle et al. 2013) have consistently found that attending a KIPP middle school positively affects student achievement, but few have addressed longer-term…

KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) is a national network of public charter schools whose stated mission is to help underserved students enroll in and graduate from college. Prior studies (see Tuttle et al. 2013) have consistently found that attending a KIPP middle school positively affects student achievement, but few have addressed longer-term…