A rich tradition in developmental psychology explores physical reasoning in infancy. However, no research to date has investigated whether infants can reason about physical objects that behave probabilistically, rather than deterministically. Physical events are often quite variable, in that similar-looking objects can be placed in similar…

Plagiarism appears to be a common problem among college students, yet there is little evidence on the effectiveness of interventions designed to minimize plagiarism. This study presents the results of a field experiment that evaluated the effects of a web-based educational tutorial in reducing plagiarism. We found that assignment to the treatment…

Recent developments in cognitive psychology suggest models for knowledge and learning that often fall outside the realm of standard test theory. This paper concerns probability-based inference in terms of such models. The essential idea is to define a space of "student models"--simplified characterizations of students' knowledge, skill,…

Educational assessment concerns inference about students' knowledge, skills, and accomplishments. Because data are never so comprehensive and unequivocal as to ensure certitude, test theory evolved in part to address questions of weight, coverage, and import of data. The resulting concepts and techniques can be viewed as applications of more…

Educational assessment concerns inference about student knowledge, skills, and accomplishments. Test theory has evolved in part to address questions of weight, coverage, and import of data. Resulting concepts and techniques can be viewed as applications of more general principles for inference in the presence of uncertainty. (SLD)