When we read, errors in oculomotor programming can cause the eyes to land and fixate on different words from what the mind intended. Previous work suggests that these "mislocated fixations" form 10-30% of first-pass fixations in reading eye movement data, which presents theoretical and analytic issues for eyetracking-while-reading…

Educators use various statistical techniques to explain relationships between latent and observable variables. One way to model these relationships is to use Bayesian networks as a scoring model. However, adjusting the conditional probability tables (CPT-parameters) to fit a set of observations is still a challenge when using Bayesian networks. A…

Community college transfer students often experience "transfer shock" at receiving four-year institutions, which includes a variety of academic, social, and institutional challenges associated with the first-year transfer experience. Research has demonstrated that first-year program interventions can facilitate the transition of…

Prior research has considered the sequential order of function words, after the contextual words of the text have been removed, as a stylistic indicator of authorship. This research describes an effort to enhance authorship attribution accuracy based on this same information source with alternate classifiers, alternate n-gram construction methods,…

This research examines issues regarding model estimation and robustness in the use of Bayesian Inference Networks (BINs) for measuring Learning Progressions (LPs). It provides background information on LPs and how they might be used in practice. Two simulation studies are performed, along with real data examples. The first study examines the case…

Background: The Emergency Severity Index (ESI) is an emergency department (ED) triage classification system based on estimated patient-specific resource utilization. Rules for a computerized clinical decision support (CDS) system based on a patient's chief complaint were developed and tested using a stochastic model for predicting ESI scores.…

Recent advances in technology have led to an explosion in data collection over time rather than in a single snapshot. For example, microarray technology allows us to measure gene expression levels in different conditions over time. Such temporal data grants the opportunity for data miners to develop algorithms to address domain-related problems,…

In the modern world information has become the new power. An increasing amount of efforts are being made to gather data, resources being allocated, time being invested and tools being developed. Data collection is no longer a myth; however, it remains a great challenge to create value out of the enormous data that is being collected. Data modeling…

The goal of this work is to provide instructors with detailed information about their classes at each assignment during the term. The information is both on an individual level and at the aggregate level. We used the large number of grades, which are available online these days, along with data-mining techniques to build our models. This enabled…

Online discussion forums have become popular in recent times. They provide a platform for people from different parts of the world sharing a common interest to come together and topics of mutual interest and seek solutions to their problems. There are hundreds of thousands of internet forums containing tens of millions of discussion threads and…

This study leveraged the complementary nature of confirmatory factor (CFA), item response theory (IRT), and latent class (LCA) analyses to strengthen the rigor and sophistication of evaluation of two new measures of the Air Force Academy's "leader of character" definition--the Character Mosaic Virtues (CMV) and the Leadership Mosaic…

With the advent of the Web, the notion of "information retrieval" has acquired a completely new connotation and currently encompasses several disciplines ranging from traditional forms of text and data retrieval in unstructured and structured repositories to retrieval of static and dynamic information from the contents of the surface and deep Web.…

Latent interaction models and mixture models have received considerable attention in social science research recently, but little is known about how to handle if unobserved population heterogeneity exists in the endogenous latent variables of the nonlinear structural equation models. The current study estimates a mixture of latent interaction…

A major problem facing educators in the United States is how to determine when the nation's five million English language learners (ELL) are ready to exit language-learning programs, i.e. to be "reclassified" as fluent English proficient (R-FEP) and placed in mainstream classrooms without additional language support. No Child Left Behind…

Classification testing has been widely used to make categorical decisions by determining whether an examinee has a certain degree of ability required by established standards. As computer technologies have developed, classification testing has become more computerized. Several approaches have been proposed and investigated in the context of…