This paper reports the development of a practical tool that provides expert feedback to students following an extended simulation exercise in cross-country flight planning. In contrast to development for laboratory settings, the development of an expert instructional product for everyday use posed some interesting challenges, including dealing…

Purpose: To determine if respiratory and laryngeal function during spontaneous speaking were different for teachers with voice disorders compared with teachers without voice problems. Method: Eighteen teachers, 9 with and 9 without voice disorders, were included in this study. Respiratory function was measured with magnetometry, and laryngeal…

Obtaining an accurate microscopic description of water structure and dynamics is of great interest to molecular biology researchers and in the physics and quantum chemistry simulation communities. This dissertation describes efforts to apply quantum Monte Carlo methods to this problem with the goal of making progress toward a fully "ab initio"…

The purpose of this dissertation is to develop a better understanding of boundary issues in global virtual teams, especially in higher education settings. Although previous research in the past decade has studied various aspects of global virtual teams, there is no comprehensive review of boundary issues and their impact. This dissertation…

A simulation study was conducted to evaluate the performance of three tests of mediation: the bias-corrected and accelerated bootstrap (Efron & Tibshirani, 1993), the asymmetric confidence limits test (MacKinnon, 2008), and a multiple regression approach described by Kenny, Kashy, and Bolger (1998). The evolution of these methods is reviewed and…

Background: Adoption of electronic medical records has been gradual in part due to physician concerns that its use in the exam room will interfere with the physician-patient relationship. Studies demonstrate their concern to be loss of eye contact with the patient and that entering information into the computer in the presence of the patient will…

When speaking, how do we convert our thoughts into the sounds that come out of our mouths? Though seemingly effortless, the process of word production is realized by a complex system working over different levels of representation. By focusing on the sublexical factors, this work investigates the representations and dynamics of the word production…

A fundamental goal of educational research is identifying students' current stage of skill mastery (complete/partial/none). In recent years a number of cognitive diagnosis models have become a popular means of estimating student skill knowledge. However, these models become difficult to estimate as the number of students, items, and skills grows.…

We apply the Supplemented EM algorithm (Meng & Rubin, 1991) to address a chronic problem with the "two-stage" fitting of covariance structure models in the presence of ignorable missing data: the lack of an asymptotically chi-square distributed goodness-of-fit statistic. We show that the Supplemented EM algorithm provides a…

This study tested a dynamic field theory (DFT) of spatial working memory and an associated spatial precision hypothesis (SPH). Between 3 and 6 years of age, there is a qualitative shift in how children use reference axes to remember locations: 3-year-olds' spatial recall responses are biased toward reference axes after short memory delays, whereas…

The meaning of a novel word can be acquired by extracting it from linguistic context. Here we simulated word learning of new words associated to concrete and abstract concepts in a variant of the human simulation paradigm that provided linguistic context information in order to characterize the brain systems involved. Native speakers of Spanish…

The impacts of incorrect responses to reverse-coded survey items were examined in this simulation study by reversing responses to traditional Likert-format items from 700 administrators in randomly selected schools in a 7-county region in central Arkansas that were obtained from an archival dataset. Specifically, the number of reverse-coded items…

To address the challenge of increasing opportunities for active learning into a medical physiology course with 190 students enrolled, we chose an integrated approach. This was facilitated by the availability of a patient simulator facility at the School of Nursing at the Medical College of Georgia, and an 20-min simulation of acute hemorrhage on…

In cognitive diagnosis, the test-taking behavior of some examinees may be idiosyncratic so that their test scores may not reflect their true cognitive abilities as much as that of more typical examinees. Statistical tests are developed to recognize the following: (a) nonmasters of the required attributes who correctly answer the item (spuriously…

A comprehensive understanding of biological functions requires new systemic perspectives, such as those provided by systems biology. Systems biology approaches are hypothesis-driven and involve iterative rounds of model building, prediction, experimentation, model refinement, and development. Developments in computer science are allowing for ever…