Social responsibility has been linked to the moral development of students, but little prior research has examined how personal and situational variables influence students' willingness to show care and concern for social issues that reflect higher levels of moral development. We theorised and tested the hypotheses that females would endorse…

A classic TV commercial once asked, "How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pop?" The narrator claims, "The world may never know" (Tootsie Roll 2012), but an Internet search returns a multitude of answers, some of which include rigorous systematic approaches by academics to address the…

This article reports on a classroom teaching experiment that engaged a group of high school students in designing sampling simulations within a computer microworld. The simulation-design activities aimed to foster students' abilities to conceive of contextual situations as stochastic experiments, and to engage them with the logic of hypothesis…

Guided by the interpersonal theory of suicide, this study examines the associations between gun carrying, bullying, and suicidal behaviors among high school students. Arizona Youth Risk Behavior Surveys were completed by 2,677 students in 2011; 9.0% reported suicide attempt in the past year, 5.5% carried a gun in the past 30 days, 8.5% were…

Recently, the authors have been exploring the use of propensity score methods for developing evidence of program impact. Specifically, they have been developing evidence (after one year of implementation) of the effects of the Math Science Partnership in New York City ("MSPinNYC2") on high school students' achievement--both in terms of…

This study examines the relationship between self-regulated learning (SRL), parent education, and the need to enroll in postsecondary remedial education courses, using first year college student data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS: 2002). This observational study was conducted…

Using data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, a nationally representative sample of US high school students, I investigate how features of secondary schools influence the likelihood of Latino students completing high school. To do so, I introduce the concept of school incorporation, which includes school policies, school receptivity…

In Volume 23(2) of the "Australian Senior Mathematics Journal," Boncek and Harden present an exercise in fitting a Markov chain model to rainfall data for Darwin Airport (Boncek & Harden, 2009). Days are subdivided into those with precipitation and precipitation-free days. The author abbreviates these labels to wet days and dry days.…

This activity introduces students to the need for and rationale of hypothesis testing, using a basketball scenario familiar to even the most casual of fans.

In this paper, I use a nationally representative sample of American high school seniors in 1992 to examine change and stability in the employment patterns of youth as they make the transition from high school to college. Students with weak attachments to the labor force in high school tend to remain unemployed during the first year of college.…

This article describes an activity that involves the use of simulation for decision-making. It is useful for demonstrating concepts in probability and statistics. (Contains 4 figures and 2 tables.)