Knowledge tracing (KT) for evaluating students' knowledge is an essential task in personalized education. More and more researchers have devoted themselves to solving KT tasks, e.g., deep knowledge tracing (DKT), which can capture more sophisticated representations of student knowledge. Nonetheless, these techniques ignore the reconstruction of…

There has been much discussion in educational policy on the apparent educational benefits for disadvantaged young people of engaging in schools' extra-curricular activities (ECAs). The evidence suggests strong associations between ECAs and improved educational attainments. Arguments made about the causal processes and underpinning associations…

This paper critiques the so-called "Green Revolution" as a political myth of averted famine. A "political myth," among other functions, reflects a narrative structure that characterizes understandings of causality between policy action and outcome. As such, the details of a particular political myth elevate certain policy…

Background: Observation Studies, Unmeasured Confounding, and Sensitivity Analysis: An important part of educational research is identifying important, potentially causal, factors that influence children's learning from observational studies. However, it is well-known that discovering such factors from observational studies can be biased due to…

A systematic review was conducted on the role of substance use initiation in subsequent use and substance-related problems among adolescents. Specifically, we examine previous studies to identify whether age of onset predicts subsequent levels of misuse; we also posit reasons for this association that have been suggested within the literature. In…

Discounting is a phenomenon in causal reasoning in which the presence of one cause casts doubt on another. We provide a survey of the descriptive and formal models that attempt to explain the discounting process and summarize what current models do not account for and where room for improvement exists. We propose a levels-of-analysis framework…

How do people assign responsibility to individuals in a group context? Participants played a repeated trial experimental game with three computer players, in which they counted triangles presented in complex diagrams. Three between-subject conditions differed in how the group outcome was computed from the individual players' answers. After each…

A fundamental issue for theories of human induction is to specify constraints on potential inferences. For inferences based on shared category membership, an analogy, and/or a relational schema, it appears that the basic goal of induction is to make accurate and goal-relevant inferences that are sensitive to uncertainty. People can use source…

"Temporal predictability" refers to the regularity or consistency of the time interval separating events. When encountering repeated instances of causes and effects, we also experience multiple cause-effect temporal intervals. Where this interval is constant it becomes possible to predict when the effect will follow from the cause. In…

We describe the development and psychometric characteristics of a new version of the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ; Seligman, Abramson, Semmell, & Von Baeyer, 1979)--a version called the Attributional Style Questionnaire for Adolescents (ASQ-A)--using 3 samples (Ns = 547, 438, and 240) of Spanish secondary school students. In Study 1,…

The present study investigated whether kindergarten teachers' causal attributions would predict children's reading-related task motivation and performance, or whether it is rather children's motivation and performance that contribute to teachers' causal attributions. To investigate this, 69 children (five to six years old at baseline) and their…

This article considers how people judge the identity of objects (e.g., how people decide that a description of an object at one time, t-sub-0, belongs to the same object as a description of it at another time, t-sub-1). The authors propose a causal continuer model for these judgments, based on an earlier theory by Nozick (1981). According to this…

Theory-testing can only inform scientific inquiry when the prediction of test outcome is based upon the current theory (theory-prediction consistency). This investigation explores children's theory-prediction consistency in a computer-mediated task in which multiple opportunities were provided to predict outcomes and review theories. An initial…

The present study investigated the extent to which parents' causal attributions predict the accuracy of, and bias in, their children's self-concept of maths ability. Participants were 207 children and their 182 mothers and 167 fathers, who were assessed during the children's first and second primary school years. The results showed that the more…

The authors measured the influence of overt calibration practice, achievement level, and explanatory style on calibration accuracy and exam performance. Students (N = 356) were randomly assigned to either an overt practice or no-practice condition. Students in the overt practice condition made predictions and postdictions about their performance…