Conventional advice discourages controlling for postoutcome variables in regression analysis. By contrast, we show that controlling for commonly available postoutcome (i.e., future) values of the treatment variable can help detect, reduce, and even remove omitted variable bias (unobserved confounding). The premise is that the same unobserved…

Transdisciplinary research (TR) is a growing field in a myriad of subject domains ranging from sustainability to education. The idea is to solve complex problems through the collaborative participation of academic actors, community stakeholders, governments, and other leaders to jointly define the problem and find solutions. To accomplish such…

Data-driven methods have been a successful approach to generating hints for programming problems. However, the majority of previous studies are focused on procedural hints that aim at moving students to the next closest state to the solution. In this paper, I propose a data-driven method to generate remedy hints for BOTS, a game that teaches…

Background: In science education today, there is an emerging focus on what is happening in situ, making use of an array of analytical traditions. Common practice is to use one specific analytical framing within a research project, but there are projects that make use of multiple analytical framings to further the understanding of the same data,…

Although traditional methods to collect similarity data (for multidimensional scaling [MDS]) are robust, they share a key shortcoming. Specifically, the possible pairwise comparisons in any set of objects grow rapidly as a function of set size. This leads to lengthy experimental protocols, or procedures that involve scaling stimulus subsets. We…

Social Q&A allows people to ask and answer questions for each other and to solve problems in everyday life collaboratively. The purpose of the current study is to understand the motivations and strategies of answerers in social Q&A. Thus, three research questions were investigated: (1) Why do answerers participate and contribute in social Q&A? (2)…

Microarray is a high throughput technology to measure the gene expression. Analysis of microarray data brings many interesting and challenging problems. This thesis consists three studies related to microarray data. First, we propose a Bayesian model for microarray data and use Bayes Factors to identify differentially expressed genes. Second, we…

We are currently at an exciting juncture in developing effective means for assessing so-called 21st-century skills in an innovative yet reliable fashion. One of these avenues leads through the world of "epistemic games" (Shaffer, 2006a), which are games designed to give learners the rich experience of professional practica within a discipline.…

This article discusses large-scale assessment of change in student achievement and takes the study by Hickendorff, Heiser, Van Putten, and Verhelst (2009) as an example. This study compared the achievement of students in the Netherlands in 1997 and 2004 on written division problems. Based on this comparison, they claim that there is a performance…

Objectives: This article presents a systematic review of the evidence on problem-solving therapy (PST) for depressive disorders in noninstitutionalized adults. Method: Intervention studies using randomized controlled designs are included and methodological quality is assessed using a standard set of criteria from the Cochrane Collaborative Review…

Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is a frequently used multivariate analysis technique in statistics. Jennrich and Sampson (1966) solved a significant EFA factor loading matrix rotation problem by deriving the direct Quartimin rotation. Jennrich was also the first to develop standard errors for rotated solutions, although these have still not made…

The evidence-based practice (EBP) movement has the potential to significantly advance the quality of psychological and educational services provided by psychologists working in schools. Training psychologists in EBP has challenged the profession and caused faculty in graduate programs to reevaluate and retool professional training curricula and…

A module is presented which instructs the reader in the following activities: (1) identification of a researchable problem, (2) preparation of a research proposal, (3) selection of appropriate research tools and methods, (4) identification of different kinds of variables in research, (5) preparation of a research report, (6) drawing of conclusions…

Problems in the usefulness of current financial assessment methods are examined and specific suggestions are made for assessment methodology and validation procedures. Expert ratings, if improved, could be a meaningful validation criterion. Self-assessment, while useful for individual schools, is not as useful for multiple institutions as…

A marker method (MM) and a rating method (RM) for testing a phasing hypothesis of family problem-solving interactions (PSIs) are compared. Focus was on studying the procedure employed in each method to test a phasing hypothesis of problem solving and how the methods compare against a set of criteria. In the RM, each family problem-solving episode…