Students often see college courses as the presentation of disconnected facts, especially in the life sciences. Student-created Structure Mechanism/Relationship Function (SMRF) models were analyzed to understand students' abilities to make connections between genotype, phenotype, and evolution. Students were divided into two sections; one section…

The "k"-means clustering method, while widely embraced in college student typology research, is often misunderstood and misapplied. Many researchers regard "k"-means as a near-universal solution for uncovering homogeneous student groups, believing its success hinges primarily on the selection of an appropriate "k."…

Studies have shown that students have different help-seeking behavior patterns and tendencies and furthermore, that students with certain help-seeking behavior patterns and tendencies may have poor performance (i.e., at-risk students). This study applied an educational data mining approach, including clustering and classification, to analyze…

Requiring students to create weed collections is a common technique for teaching weed identification. Data compiled over 18 years from students' weed collections in a college-level course included over 350 species of plants. Almost half of the specimens belonged to the Asteraceae or Poaceae. The 30 most frequently collected species accounted for…

Introduction: The aim of this study is to identify which parenting styles are associated with optimal outcomes for in the psychological wellbeing of university students in Extremadura. The participants were 400 students from Extremadura, aged between 18 and 30, 80% of whom were women and 20% men. Parenting styles were divided into three categories…

Courses: Communication Theory; Research Methods; Mass Communication Theory. Objectives: This activity introduces students to the socially constructed nature of theorizing through having a few students sort a bag of random items in ways of their choice. The class then discusses the categories of sorted items in terms of their properties as theories…

False alarming, or detecting an error when there is not one, is a pervasive problem across numerous industries. The present study investigated the role of elaboration, or additional information about non-error differences in complex visual displays, for mitigating false error responding. In Experiment 1, learners studied errors and non-error…

In scholarly research, racial categories are typically taken for granted. However, race categories vary over time and geography and reflect the social beliefs of the people who use them. Informed by quantitative critical race theory analysis, we interrogate how race categories align (or not) with 24,000 U.S. higher education students' responses to…

We investigated the effect of careless or insufficient effort (C/IE) responses in a study using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. A factor mixture model was used to identify latent classes based on the pattern of responses with biases and examine the effect of C/IE responses on the fit of the theoretical model.

Manual exploratory behaviors during object interaction that form the basis of tool use behavior, are mostly qualitatively characterized in terms of their frequency and duration of occurrence. To fully understand their functional and clinical significance, quantitative movement characterization is needed alongside their qualitative analysis.…

Research on study sequences has not considered the cross-classification of to-be-learned categories. In two experiments, we utilized cross-classified exemplars, which simultaneously belonged to categories of two orthogonal dimensions. Experiment 1 addressed the question of how interleaving one category dimension while simultaneous blocking another…

In rule-based (RB) category-learning tasks, the optimal strategy is a simple explicit rule, whereas in information-integration (II) tasks, the optimal strategy is impossible to describe verbally. This study investigates the effects of two different category properties on learning difficulty in category learning tasks--namely, linear separability…

In this study, we introduced a cross-classified multidimensional nominal response model (CC-MNRM) to account for various response styles (RS) in the presence of cross-classified data. The proposed model allows slopes to vary across items and can explore impacts of observed covariates on latent constructs. We applied a recently developed variant of…

In classification learning of artificial stimuli, participants learn the perfectly diagnostic dimension better than the partially diagnostic dimensions. Also, there is a strong preference for a unidimensional categorization based on the perfectly diagnostic dimension. In a different experimental procedure, called array-based classification task,…

Background: The debate on using concrete versus abstract materials in learning mathematics has been longstanding. For decades, research has focused on the physical characteristics of materials when defining them as concrete or abstract. Aims: This study extends the field by proposing a two-dimensional classification, which defines materials as…