In this article, the author describes a simulation of a coevolutionary "arms race" and introduce a way of teaching it that lets students use the theory of natural selection to explain the outcomes of the simulation. The simulation uses the numerical cards from an UNO[R] playing card deck to represent the speeds of individuals in populations of…

A commonly attempted approach to modifying attitudes regarding people with disabilities is to place people without disabilities in situations that are designed for them to experience what it is like to have a disability. This approach, called disability simulation, continues despite criticisms including a reported lack of effectiveness data and…

Judgments of associative memory (JAM) were indexed by ratings given to pairs of cue and response words. The normed probabilities, p(response|cue), were obtained from free association norms. The ratings were linearly related to the probabilities. The JAM functions were characterized by high intercepts (approximately 50 on a 100 point scale) and…

In this article, we describe a preliminary study that integrates research on engineering design activities for K-12 students with work on microworlds as learning tools. Here, we extend these bodies of research by exploring whether--and how--authentic recreations of engineering practices can help students develop conceptual understanding of…

Misspecification of the nature of organizations may be a major reason for difficulty in achieving performance improvement. Organizations are often viewed as machine-like, but complexity science suggests that organizations should be viewed as complex adaptive systems. I identify the characteristics of complex adaptive systems and give examples of…

As part of its efforts to ensure school safety, the government of New South Wales, Australia, has developed simulation exercises to better prepare principals to manage serious incidents, in collaboration with police. This article describes two initiatives implemented across NSW. The exercises provide principals in both secondary and primary…

Purpose: The Technology Enhanced Enterprise Education project (TE3) promotes the use of learning technologies to enhance enterprise and entrepreneurship education in the 12 HEI partners of the Mercia Institute of Enterprise (MIE). This paper describes the formal processes and procedures underpinning TE3, describes issues around material…

A widely used approach for categorizing the level of differential item functioning (DIF) in dichotomous items is the scheme proposed by Educational Testing Service (ETS) based on a transformation of the Mantel-Haeszel common odds ratio. In this article two classification schemes for DIF in polytomous items (referred to as the P1 and P2 schemes)…

People tend to perceive ongoing continuous activity as series of discrete events. This partitioning of continuous activity may occur, in part, because events correspond to dynamic patterns that have recurred across different contexts. Recurring patterns may lead to reliable sequential dependencies in observers' experiences, which then can be used…

An object that moves is spotted almost effortlessly; it "pops out." When the observer is stationary, a moving object is uniquely identified by retinal motion. This is not so when the observer is also moving; as the eye travels through space all scene objects change position relative to the eye producing a complicated field of retinal motion.…

An overall assessment of phobic fear requires not only a verbal self-report of fear but also an assessment of behavioral and physiological responses. Virtual reality can be used to simulate realistic (phobic) situations and therefore should be useful for inducing emotions in a controlled, standardized way. Verbal and physiological fear reactions…

Psychologists are applying growth mixture models at an increasing rate. This article argues that most of these applications are unlikely to reproduce the underlying taxonic structure of the population. At a more fundamental level, in many cases there is probably no taxonic structure to be found. Latent growth classes then categorically approximate…

In this paper we describe our research using a multi-user virtual environment, "Quest Atlantis," to embed fourth grade students in an aquatic habitat simulation. Specifically targeted towards engaging students in a rich inquiry investigation, we layered a socio-scientific narrative and an interactive rule set into a multi-user virtual environment…

Second Life's unstructured atmosphere and wide-open spaces where student creativity can grow and flourish are two of the reasons Pepperdine University Professor Bill Moseley integrated the program into his curriculum. In this article, the author discusses how Second Life works and its challenges. Second Life is often described as a 3-D version of…

We explore in this study how infants may derive phonetic categories from adult input that are highly variable. Neural networks in the form of self-organizing maps (SOMs; Kohonen, 1989, 1995) were used to simulate unsupervised learning of Mandarin tones. In Simulation 1, we trained the SOMs with syllable-sized continuous F[subscript 0] contours,…