Social scientists are frequently interested in identifying latent subgroups within the population, based on a set of observed variables. One of the more common tools for this purpose is latent class analysis (LCA), which models a scenario involving k finite and mutually exclusive classes within the population. An alternative approach to this…

We systematically compared beliefs about animal (e.g., "lion"), artifactual (e.g., "hammer"), and institutional (e.g., "police officer") categories, aiming to identify whether people draw different inferences about which categories are subjective and which are socially constituted. We conducted two studies with 270…

Few studies have analyzed students' teamwork (pairwork) habits in programming projects due to the challenges and high cost of analyzing complex, long-term collaborative processes. In this work, we analyze student teamwork data collected from the GitHub platform with the goal of identifying specific pair teamwork styles. This analysis builds on an…

Children develop rich concepts of social categories throughout early and middle childhood. Whereas we know much about the development and consequences of many social categories individually, we know less about the development of representations at the intersection of multiple categories--for instance, how children think about race and gender…

Questions on voluntary association memberships have been used extensively in social scientific research for decades. Researchers generally assume that these respondent self-reports are accurate, but their measurement has never been assessed. Respondent characteristics are known to influence the accuracy of other self-report variables such as…

Learning about one's own cultures as well as other cultures is a central aspect of the cognitive dimension of intercultural understanding, focusing the individual on cultural group affiliations, belonging and questions of 'who one is'. Using a social identity lens, with a particular focus on self-categorisation theory to explore how individuals…

Having an agreed-upon definition of character education would be useful for both researchers and practitioners in the field. However, even experts in character education disagree on how they would define it. We attempted to achieve greater conceptual clarity on this issue through a prototype analysis in which the features perceived as most central…

The 'digital imperative' of contemporary education practice is without contention; however, much learning technology research has focused on pragmatic issues such as learning design, often founded on uncritically accepted claims about 'digital natives'. This focus has come at the expense of learning theory. Alongside the scholarly voices calling…

Global contexts of accountability have placed unprecedented pressure on school leaders to improve the performance of their schools. Despite recognition that leaders' influence is mediated by school culture, few studies offer systematic examinations of culture-in-action in schools. The concept of culture remains nebulous and is frequently glossed…

The purpose of this study is to analyze critically the two main categories of teachers' unions as progressive and aggressive teachers' unions and their positive and negative effects on students' achievements at secondary school level. The researcher therefore determined to find out the exact role of teachers' unions. All secondary school teachers…

Although children can use social categories to intelligently select informants, children's preference for in-group informants has not been consistently demonstrated across age and context. This research clarifies the extent to which children use social categories to guide learning by presenting participants with a live or video-recorded…

Abstract The purpose of this study is to investigate the extent that there is a typology of high schools based on their orientation toward science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), as well as the extent to which school-level demographic variables and student high school outcomes are associated with subgroup membership in the…

The aim of this study was to explore the variation in student behavior across the ED, LD, and OHI disability categories and to examine demographic, behavioral, and academic factors that may place students at risk for negative outcomes. This study used teachers' rating of students' in-class behavior to identify latent classes of students in the ED,…

Five experiments provide evidence for a class of "dual character concepts." Dual character concepts characterize their members in terms of both (a) a set of concrete features and (b) the abstract values that these features serve to realize. As such, these concepts provide two bases for evaluating category members and two different criteria for…

While an abundance of literature addresses undergraduate students' lack of success in engineering programs, fewer studies examine the persistence of minority females, especially of Latinas. This study employed a qualitative method of inquiry to gain insight into the reasons why Latina undergraduate engineering majors sought membership in student…