Education of children with moderate to severe intellectual disabilities requires adequate assessment of their educational needs and potential to learn. Dynamic testing using analogical reasoning tasks may be a promising way to perform such an assessment. However, it remains unclear how dynamic testing with these children may be done in practice.…

In any visual search task in the lab or in the world, observers will make errors. Those errors can be categorized as "deterministic": If you miss this target in this display once, you will definitely miss it again. Alternatively, errors can be "stochastic", occurring randomly with some probability from trial to trial.…

Statistical learning enables humans to involuntarily process and utilize different kinds of patterns from the environment. However, the cognitive mechanisms underlying the simultaneous acquisition of multiple regularities from different perceptual modalities remain unclear. A novel multidimensional serial reaction time task was developed to test…

In this three-study investigation, we applied various approaches to score drawings created in response to both Form A and Form B of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking-Figural (broadly TTCT-F) as well as the Multi-Trial Creative Ideation task (MTCI). We focused on TTCT-F in Study 1, and utilizing a random forest classifier, we achieved 79% and…

Example-generation tasks have been suggested as an effective way to both promote students' learning of mathematics and assess students' understanding of concepts. E-assessment offers the potential to use example-generation tasks with large groups of students, but there has been little research on this approach so far. Across two studies, we…

All communication systems rely on sets of rules that must generally be followed for successful communication to be possible; in the case of human language, these rules are given by the grammar. However, despite these rules, there is considerable variation that has been noted across the grammar. In this dissertation, I explore one understudied…

We empirically examined the effectiveness of how the Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) technique structures task information to help reduce confirmation bias (Study 1) and the portrayal of intelligence analysts as suffering from such bias (Study 2). Study 1 (N = 161) showed that individuals presented with hypotheses in rows and evidence items…

Cyberlearning technologies increasingly seek to offer personalized learning experiences via adaptive systems that customize pedagogy, content, feedback, pace, and tone according to the just-in-time needs of a learner. However, it is historically difficult to: (1) create these smart learning environments; (2) continuously improve them based on…

In the human-to-human Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) test, students' problem-solving process reflects the interdependency among partners. The high interdependency in CPS makes it very sensitive to group composition. For example, the group outcome might be driven by a highly competent group member, so it does not reflect all the individual…

Multidimensional scoring evaluates each constructed-response answer from more than one rating dimension and/or trait such as lexicon, organization, and supporting ideas instead of only one holistic score, to help students distinguish between various dimensions of writing quality. In this work, we present a bilevel learning model for combining two…

The article introduces triangulation to converge evidence from corpus and experimental data, by means of two case studies in second language (L2) learners of Greek. The first case study investigates the acquisition of gender agreement, while the second probes the development of relative clauses. In both studies, findings from the corpus are tested…

A critical part of supporting the development of students' algorithmic thinking is understanding the challenges that emerge when students engage with algorithmatizing tasks--tasks that require the creation of an algorithm. Knowledge of these challenges can serve as a basis upon which educators can build effective strategies for enhancing students'…

The present study examined the role of hedges in a referential communication task. Pairs of participants received an identical set of cards, each card displaying a geometric configuration (a "tangram"). One participant, the director, instructed their partner, the matcher, to reproduce a series of predetermined tangram sequences using…

Neocortical sleep spindles have been shown to occur more frequently following a memory task, suggesting that a method to increase spindle activity could improve memory processing. Stimulation of the neocortex can elicit a slow oscillation (SO) and a spindle, but the feasibility of this method to boost SO and spindles over time has not been tested.…

Children live in a dynamic environment, in which objects continually change locations and move into and out of occlusion. Children must therefore rely on working memory to store information from the environment and to update those stored representations as the environment changes. Previous work suggests that the ability to store information in…