This paper examines the effect of syntactic structures on referent predictability. Focusing on stimulus-experiencer (SE) verbs, we conducted two sentence-completion experiments in Chinese by contrasting SE verbs in three structures (active canonical, active "ba," and passive). The results showed that although verb semantics and discourse…

A strategy to facilitate understanding of spatial randomness is described, using student activities developed in sequence: looking at spatial patterns, simulating approximate spatial randomness using a grid of equally-likely squares, using binomial probabilities for approximations and predictions and then comparing with given Poisson…

In typical development, word learning goes from slow and laborious to fast and seemingly effortless. Typically developing 2-year-olds seem to intuit the whole range of things in a category from hearing a single instance named--they have word-learning biases. This is not the case for children with relatively small vocabularies ("late…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to develop an ordinal prediction model for diagnosing middle ear dysfunction in 10- to 16-month-old infants using wideband absorbance. Method: Wideband absorbance, tympanometry, and distortion product otoacoustic emissions were measured in 358 ears of 186 infants aged 10-16 months (M = 12 months). An ordinal…

It is widely known that the presence of multicollinearity in a dataset can have detrimental effects on determining which predictors are responsible for the variation in the response (e.g. Pedhazur, 1982). There also exist some indication that the presence of multicollinearity does not impact one's ability to accurately estimate/predict the value…

Little is known about how observers' scanning strategies affect performance when monitoring events in closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage. We examined the fixation behaviour of change detectors and non-detectors monitoring dynamic scenes. One hundred forty-seven participants observed mock CCTV videos featuring either a mock crime or no crime.…

School districts of the United States have to address their financial problems when economy is in difficulty. This study examines the financial practices of the school districts in metro-Atlanta area to understand how they operate their systems to meet with the challenges. Personal interviews were held with financial officers of six participating…

This study presents a model for the early identification of students who are likely to fail in an academic course. To enhance predictive accuracy, sentiment analysis is used to identify affective information from text-based self-evaluated comments written by students. Experimental results demonstrated that adding extracted sentiment information…

Producers and consumers of test scores are increasingly concerned about fraudulent behavior before and during the test. There exist several statistical or psychometric methods for detecting fraudulent behavior on tests. This paper provides a review of the Bayesian approaches among them. Four hitherto-unpublished real data examples are provided to…

Contrast analysis is a relatively simple but effective statistical method for testing theoretical predictions about differences between group means against the empirical data. Despite its advantages, contrast analysis is hardly used to date, perhaps because it is not implemented in a convenient manner in many statistical software packages. This…

Evidence from life science, cognitive science, and philosophy supports the hypothesis that knowledge is a central norm of the human practice of assertion. However, to date, the experimental evidence supporting this hypothesis is limited to American anglophones. If the hypothesis is correct, then such findings will not be limited to one language or…

Educational resources can be easily found on the Web. Most search engines base their algorithms on a resource's text or popularity, requiring teachers to navigate the results until they find an appropriate resource. This makes searching for resources a tedious and cumbersome task. Specialized repositories contain resources that are annotated with…

Reward-prediction errors track the extent to which rewards deviate from expectations, and aid in learning. How do such errors in prediction interact with memory for the rewarding episode? Existing findings point to both cooperative and competitive interactions between learning and memory mechanisms. Here, we investigated whether learning about…

Metrics including Cohen's kappa, precision, recall, and F[subscript 1] are common measures of performance for models of discrete student states, such as a student's affect or behaviour. This study examined discrete model metrics for previously published student model examples to identify situations where metrics provided differing perspectives on…

Recommender systems provide users with content they might be interested in. Conventionally, recommender systems are evaluated mostly by using prediction accuracy metrics only. But, the ultimate goal of a recommender system is to increase user satisfaction. Therefore, evaluations that measure user satisfaction should also be performed before…