One of the most prominent social influences on human decision making is conformity, which is even more prominent when the perceptual information is ambiguous. The Bayes optimal solution to this problem entails weighting the relative reliability of cognitive information and perceptual signals in constructing the percept from self-sourced/endogenous…

This note demonstrates that the widely used Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) need not be generally viewed as a routinely dependable index for model selection when the bifactor and second-order factor models are examined as rival means for data description and explanation. To this end, we use an empirically relevant setting with…

In many large-scale testing programs, examinees are frequently categorized into different performance levels. These classifications are then used to make high-stakes decisions about examinees in contexts such as in licensure, certification, and educational assessments. Numerous approaches to estimating the consistency and accuracy of this…

During the pandemic, the economic way of thinking was extraordinarily useful, leading to a quick consensus among economists of widely differing political persuasions on many issues of pandemic policy. Yet speaking to politicians, bureaucrats, and the public revealed many ways in which the economic way of thinking was foreign and sometimes…

Student outcomes are of great importance in higher education institutions. Accreditation bodies focus on them as an indicator to measure the performance and effectiveness of the institution. Forecasting students' academic performance is crucial for every educational establishment seeking to enhance performance and perseverance of its students and…

Multimodal learning analytics (MMLA) research has shown the feasibility of building automated models of collaboration quality using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques (e.g., supervised machine learning (ML)), thus enabling the development of monitoring and guiding tools for computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). However, the…

Recent controversies have highlighted the importance of local school district governance, but little empirical evidence exists evaluating the quality of district policy makers or policies. In this paper, we take a novel approach to assessing school district decision making. We posit a model of rational decision making under uncertainty that…

Recent controversies have highlighted the importance of local school district governance, but little empirical evidence exists evaluating the quality of district policy makers or policies. In this paper, we take a novel approach to assessing school district decision making. We posit a model of rational decision making under uncertainty that…

In relational event networks, the tendency for actors to interact with each other depends greatly on the past interactions between the actors in a social network. Both the volume of past interactions and the time that has elapsed since the past interactions affect the actors' decision-making to interact with other actors in the network. Recently…