Latent class analysis (LCA) refers to techniques for identifying groups in data based on a parametric model. Examples include mixture models, LCA with ordinal indicators, and latent class growth analysis. Despite its popularity, there is limited guidance with respect to decisions that must be made when conducting and reporting LCA. Moreover, there…

Computational chemistry instructional activities are often based around students running chemical simulations via a graphical user interface (GUI). GUI-based activities offer many advantages, as they enable students to run chemical simulations with a few mouse clicks. Although these activities are excellent for introducing students to the…

While computational chemistry continues to play a growing role in chemical research, issues with access and the timing of when these tools are introduced to chemistry students remain as barriers to wider interest and use. The accessibility of free software for chemical modeling has increased in recent years, promoting the inclusion of…

Mitochondrial beta-oxidation is one of the most common modes of fatty acids' oxidation in most organisms, particularly mammals. Biochemistry undergraduate curriculum often contains the description of the process, with emphasis on ATP calculations for various types of fatty acids. During our decade long teaching experience in biochemistry, we…

It is recommended that teacher-scholars of data science adopt reproducible workflows in their research as scholars and teach reproducible workflows to their students. In this article, we propose a third dimension to reproducibility practices and recommend that regardless of whether they teach reproducibility in their courses or not, data science…

Teaching and learning are increasingly taking advantage of the rapid growth in Internet resources, open content, mobile technologies and social media platforms. However, due to the generally unstructured nature and overwhelming quantity of learning content, effective learning remains challenging. In an effort to close this gap, the authors…

Although there are over 320,000 health and fitness apps available on major app stores, there is scant evidence that they actually promote a healthier lifestyle, assist users in exercising, or promote weight loss. This article presents a lesson plan using an Arduino for integrating computational thinking and game design with middle school students…

Item Response Theory (IRT) is a ubiquitous model for understanding humans based on their responses to questions, used in fields as diverse as education, medicine and psychology. Large modern datasets offer opportunities to capture more nuances in human behavior, potentially improving test scoring and better informing public policy. Yet larger…

Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is a common technique utilized in the development of assessment instruments. The key question when performing this procedure is how to best estimate the number of factors to retain. This is especially important as under- or over-extraction may lead to erroneous conclusions. Although recent advancements have been…

Openness has a long genealogy in education. Whether through the use of post, radio, television and digital technologies, extending learning opportunities to more and a wider range of people has been a significant aspect of educational history. Transcending barriers to learning has been promoted as the means of opening educational opportunities in…

The broad application domain of the work presented in this thesis is pattern classification with a focus on gesture recognition and 3D hand pose estimation. One of the main contributions of the proposed thesis is a novel method for 3D hand pose estimation using RGB-D. Hand pose estimation is formulated as a database retrieval problem. The proposed…

This paper presents a piece of educational software covering a comprehensive number of topics of chemical kinetics, which is available free of charge in Portuguese and English. The software was developed to support chemistry educators and students in the teaching-learning process of chemical kinetics by using animations, calculations, and…

One option for Extension professionals wishing to use free statistical software is to use online calculators, which are useful for common, simple analyses. A second option is to use a free computing environment capable of performing statistical analyses, like R-project. R-project is free, cross-platform, powerful, and respected, but may be…

In recent years the use of the latent curve model (LCM) among researchers in social sciences has increased noticeably, probably thanks to contemporary software developments and the availability of specialized literature. Extensions of the LCM, like the the latent change score model (LCSM), have also increased in popularity. At the same time, the R…

We introduce a new open source (free) software package that provides a simple, highly interactive interface for carrying out certain mathematical tasks that are commonly encountered in physics. These tasks include plotting and animating functions, solving systems of coupled algebraic equations, and basic calculus (differentiating and integrating…