Adult literacy skills are critical assets of individuals as well as societies in terms of economic (e.g., human capital) and social well-being. Thus, it is important to monitor the long-term trends and sources of skill gain/loss. Yet, temporal sources of adult literacy skill variation are understudied. The current study analyzed three comparable,…

The 'Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies' (PIAAC), developed and managed by the OECD, is an important source of knowledge about adult skills as well as an intervention in the field of education policy. One level of the intervention is the presence of PIAAC results in public media and debate. This article presents a…

The purpose of this occasional paper is to compare point estimates and trends included in the Monitoring the Future (MTF) Panel Study annual report: "National Data on Substance Use among Adults Ages 19 to 60, 1976-2021" prepared using historical post-stratification weights, with the same point estimates and trends obtained when using MTF…

Background: Knowledge, attitude, and practice of healthy lifestyles are crucial for the prevention of hypertension. While the use of the mass media as health information sources persists, their use for hypertension prevention interventions among high-risk individuals is arguably low. Purpose: To examine the effect of radio drama intervention on…

Career pattern is a useful methodological resource to generate portraits of career constructions. This article has two interconnected objectives. Through a literature review, it first aimed to synthesise the main contemporary career patterns. And second, using a qualitative approach, it sought to build contemporary narrative patterns of career…

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are ushering in a large and rapid technological transformation. Understanding how AI capabilities relate to human skills and how they develop over time is crucial for understanding this process. In 2016, the OECD assessed AI capabilities with the OECD's Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). The present report…

This research investigated how word production is influenced by six feature-based semantic variables (number of semantic features, intercorrelational density, number of near semantic neighbors, semantic similarity, typicality, and distinctiveness). We simultaneously investigated effects of the six semantic variables on spoken picture naming in a…

People navigate in various types of spaces, including indoor and outdoor environments. These differ in availability of navigational cues, such as distal landmarks, clear boundaries, and regular grid structures. Does learning the layout of different types of environments rely on the same or diverse cognitive abilities? Do separate measures of…

Perspective-taking plays an important role in daily life, allowing consideration of other people's perspectives and viewpoints. This study used a large sample of 265 community-based participants (aged 20-86 years) to examine changes in perspective-taking abilities--a component of "Theory of Mind"--across adulthood, and how these changes…

In order processing, consecutive sequences (e.g., 1-2-3) are generally processed faster than nonconsecutive sequences (e.g., 1-3-5) (also referred to as the reverse distance effect). A common explanation for this effect is that order processing operates via a memory-based associative mechanism whereby consecutive sequences are processed faster…

Aligned with the 2021 AERA conference theme, which asks us as citizen-scholars to use educational research to address complex social and educational problems, the objective of this study is to provide the first nationally-representative, empirical evidence on the relationships among literacy, literacy skill use, and these information-seeking…

The accurate detection of children's truthful and dishonest reports is essential as children can serve as important providers of information. Research using automated facial coding and machine learning found that children who were asked to lie about an event were more likely to look surprised when hearing the first question during an interview…

This study examined whether autistic people with siblings score higher on measures of empathy than those without siblings. Cohorts of autistic children (n = 939; mean age = 7.35 years (SD = 2.15)) and autistic adults (n = 736; mean age = 37 years (SD = 12.39)) from the Cambridge Autism Research Database (CARD) were each divided into two groups:…

Causal asymmetry is a situation where the causal factors under study are more suitable for explaining the outcome than its absence (or vice versa); they do not explain both equally well. In such a situation, presence of a cause leads to presence of the effect, but absence of the cause may not lead to absence of the effect. A conceptual discussion…

This study proposes a Bayesian method for diagnostic classification models (DCMs) for a partially known Q-matrix setting between exploratory and confirmatory DCMs. This Q-matrix setting is practical and useful because test experts have pre-knowledge of the Q-matrix but cannot readily specify it completely. The proposed method employs priors for…