Objective: Women who report greater chronic dieting consume more alcohol, drink more frequently, and experience greater problems than women who report less chronic dieting. Alcohol may also temporarily disrupt a woman's dietary rules, leading to increased caloric intake and subsequent restriction. This study examined whether alcohol use mediated…

Learners make a number of decisions when attempting to study efficiently: they must choose which information to study, for how long to study it, and whether to restudy it later. The current experiments examine whether documented impairments to self-regulated learning when studying information sequentially, as opposed to simultaneously, extend to…

For Latina/o undergraduates, ethnic identity is an important construct linked to self-esteem and educational attainment. Internalized and perceived racism have been hypothesized to hinder ethnic identity development in Latina/o undergraduates. To assess if internalized and perceived racism were inversely related to ethnic identity, the author…

Reader expectations form across hierarchical scales of discourse (e.g., from coarse to fine: genre, narrative, syntax). Cross-scale interactivity produces word reading times (RTs) with multifractal structure. After introducing multifractals, we test two hypotheses regarding their relevance to reader expectations: (1) multifractal evidence of…

Attentional control of referential information is an important contributor to the structure of discourse. We investigated how attention and memory interplay during visually situated sentence production. We manipulated speakers' attention to the agent or the patient of a described event by means of a referential or a dot visual cue. We also…

In spite of considerable evidence of the effectiveness of active learning and other contemporary teaching methods, barriers to adoption of those methods, such as possible student resistance, continue to exist. This study addresses student resistance by analyzing data from 1,051 students who completed our Student Response to Instructional Practices…

Paid employment is one of the most common extracurricular activities among full-time undergraduates, and an array of studies has attempted to measure its impact. Methodological concerns with the extant literature, however, make it difficult to draw reliable conclusions. Furthermore, the research on working college students has little to say about…

Some individual difference factors are more strongly correlated with performance on postreading questions when the text is not available than when it is. The present study explores if similar interactions occur with bridging skill, which refers to a reader's propensity to establish connections between explicit text during reading. Undergraduates…

Student affairs practitioners and scholars are paying greater attention to issues of religion and spirituality on college campuses. The present study explores the link between campus religious/worldview climate and overall student engagement within a longitudinal sample of 14,517 undergraduates at 134 colleges. When controlling for various student…

Despite the increasing number of studies examining the correlates of interest and boredom, surprisingly little research has focused on within-person fluctuations in these emotions, making it difficult to describe their situational nature. To address this gap in the literature, this study conducted repeated measurements (12 times) on a sample of…

Learning objects (LOs) are important online resources for both learners and instructors and usage for LOs is growing. Automatic LO tracking collects large amounts of metadata about individual students as well as data aggregated across courses, learning objects, and other demographic characteristics (e.g. gender). The challenge becomes identifying…

National efforts to transform undergraduate biology education call for research experiences to be an integral component of learning for all students. Course-based undergraduate research experiences, or CUREs, have been championed for engaging students in research at a scale that is not possible through apprenticeships in faculty research…

Given the growth of the PLUS loan program and its increasing importance in facilitating college access for many students, makes it critical to better understand the relationship between this form of federal financial aid and student outcomes. Using data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS: 12), conducted by the U.S. Department…

Empirical studies of personality traits in creative writers have demonstrated mixed findings, perhaps due to issues of sampling, measurement, and the reporting of statistical information. The goal of this study is to quantify the personality structure of aspiring creative writers according to a modern hierarchal model of trait personality. A…

To what extent do more creative people process emotional information differently than less creative people? This study examined the role of emotion processing in creativity and its implications for the creativity-psychopathology association. A total of 117 participants performed a memory recognition task for negative, positive, and neutral words;…