This software review discusses the capabilities of Stata to conduct item response theory modeling. The commands needed for fitting the popular one-, two-, and three-parameter logistic models are initially discussed. The procedure for testing the discrimination parameter equality in the one-parameter model is then outlined. The commands for fitting…

College calculus plays an important role in STEM students' degree and career aspirations. One of the key factors considered in assessing a student's ability to be successful in calculus is their proficiency in topics from prior mathematics courses such as algebra and precalculus. This study set out to examine the impact of students' precalculus…

Employing nested sequences of models is a common practice when exploring the extent to which one set of variables mediates the impact of another set. Such an analysis in the context of logistic regression models confronts two challenges: (1) direct comparisons of coefficients across models are generally biased due to the changes in scale that…

Over the past decade or so, developments in language comprehension research in the domain of cognitive aging have converged on support for resilience in older adults with regard to situation model updating when reading texts. Several studies have shown that even though age-related declines in language comprehension appear at the level of the…

Myriad research in a variety of contexts shows spatial skills benefit students; however, they are not given enough attention in classroom instruction. In this review we systematically explore geoscience education literature focusing on spatial interventions to answer research questions on trends in spatial skills and other characteristics. We…

Information manipulation and cognitive load imposition make the production of deceptive narratives difficult. But little is known about the production of deception, and how its mechanisms may help distinguish truthful from deceitful narratives. This study focuses on the measurement of keystroke dynamics while typing truthful and deceptive…

Previous studies have shown that multiple reference frames are available and compete for selection during the use of spatial terms such as "above." However, the mechanisms that underlie the selection process are poorly understood. In the current paper we present two experiments and a comparison of three computational models of selection…

When comparing social science phenomena through a time perspective, absolute and relative difference (RD) are the two typical presentation formats used to communicate interpretations to the audience, while time distance (TD) is the least frequently used of such formats. This article argues that the chosen presentation format is extremely important…

The present study compares the fit of two- and three-parameter logistic (2PL and 3PL) models of item response theory in the performance of preschool children on the Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices. The test of Raven is widely used for evaluating nonverbal intelligence of factor g. Studies comparing models with real data are scarce on the…

The present research examined the joint effects of social, dimensional, and temporal comparisons on students' academic self-concepts and parents' beliefs about their children's competencies during students' transition phase from elementary school to junior high school. To this end, we tested the newly developed 2I/E model using longitudinal data…

Given the significant role that academic self-concept plays in students' learning, understanding the psychological processes involved in its formation continues to be an important focus of enquiry. There is strong empirical support for two major models of academic self-concept (ASC) formation: the big-fish-little-pond (BFLP) model and the…

Despite the importance of rehearsal to most models of verbal working memory, its role has been recently called into question. Much prior work in support of rehearsal models has centered on the experimental effects of word-length, phonological-similarity, and irrelevant sound on serial order recall performance and the interaction of all three with…

Dimensional comparisons are comparisons of one's accomplishments between two domains (e.g., comparisons between math and verbal achievements) that affect our self-perceptions in the domains compared with each other. In particular, dimensional comparisons explain the seemingly paradoxical finding, described in the internal/external frame of…

Contemporary architecture teaching in Colombia still resembles the traditional master-apprentice model, which is also common in many parts of the world. The model of regular curricular focus on classroom-based modules where theory and practice are predominantly disengaged, leaving the students to make their connections. Students that learnt with…

Linguistic alignment--the contingent reuse of our interlocutors' language at all levels of linguistic structure--pervades human dialogue. Here, we design unique measures to capture the degree of linguistic alignment between interlocutors' linguistic representations at three levels of structure: lexical, syntactic, and semantic. We track these…