As online learning platforms and computerized testing become more common, an increasing amount of data are collected about users. These data include, but are not limited to, response time, keystroke logs, and raw text. The desire to observe these features of the response process reflect an underlying interest in the cognitive processes and…

There are no absolute standards regarding what teaching evaluation ratings are satisfactory. It is also problematic to compare teaching evaluation ratings with the average or with a cutoff number to determine whether they are adequate. In this paper, we use average and standard deviation charts (X[overbar]-S charts), which are based on the theory…

The first-semester introductory organic chemistry laboratory has been adapted to include mini postlab assignments that students must complete correctly, through as many attempts as prove to be necessary. The use of multiple drafts of writing assignments is a standard approach to improving writing, so the system was designed to require drafts for…

National Geography Standard 1 requires that students learn:"How to use maps and other geographic representations, geospatial technologies, and spatial thinking to understand and communicate information" (Heffron and Downs 2012). These concepts have real-world applicability. For example, elevation contour maps are common in many…

As literature has reported, it is usual that university students in statistics courses, and even statistics teachers, interpret the confidence level associated with a confidence interval as the probability that the parameter value will be between the lower and upper interval limits. To confront this misconception, class activities have been…

A news story claiming that the cream filling of a popular "double" cream sandwich cookie is not really "double" went viral in fall 2013. A high school mathematics teacher posted a blog entry describing how he and his students measured 20 cookies, analyzed the data, and concluded that the double cream cookies had only 1.86 times…

When good model-data fit is observed, the Many-Facet Rasch (MFR) model acts as a linking and equating model that can be used to estimate student achievement, item difficulties, and rater severity on the same linear continuum. Given sufficient connectivity among the facets, the MFR model provides estimates of student achievement that are equated to…

Quantitative reasoning is a key intellectual skill, applicable across disciplines and best taught in the context of authentic, relevant problems. Here, I describe and assess a laboratory exercise that has students calculate their "carbon footprint" and evaluate the impacts of various behavior choices on that footprint. Students gather…

The use of confidence intervals (CIs) as an addition or as an alternative to null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) has been promoted as a means to make researchers more aware of the uncertainty that is inherent in statistical inference. Little is known, however, about whether presenting results via CIs affects how readers judge the…

Studies report that students often fail to consider familiar aspects of reality in solving mathematical word problems. This study explored how different features of mathematical problems influence the way that undergraduate students employ realistic considerations in mathematical problem solving. Incorporating familiar contents in the word…

In this note we develop a framework that makes explicit the inherent dynamic structure of certain mathematical definitions by means of the four facets of context-entity-process-object. These facets and their interrelations are then used to capture and interpret specific aspects of student constructions of the concept of solution to first order…

In this article, the authors present the results of a research study in which they used two national datasets to construct and examine a model that estimates relative faculty instructional costs for specific undergraduate degree programs and also identifies differences in these costs by region and institutional type. They conducted this research…

Using data from the U.S. Decennial Census and the National Longitudinal Surveys, we find little evidence of differences in the return to schooling across racial and ethnic groups, even with attempts to control for ability and measurement error biases. While our point estimates are relatively similar across racial and ethnic groups, our conclusion…