Background: Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) give unbiased estimates of average effects. However, positive effects for the majority of students may mask harmful effects for smaller subgroups, and RCTs often have too small a sample to estimate these subgroup effects. In many RCTs, covariate and outcome data are drawn from a larger database. For…

A tree model for diagnostic educational testing is described along with Monte Carlo simulations designed to evaluate measurement accuracy based on the model. The model is implemented in an assessment of inferential reading comprehension, the Multiple-Choice Online Causal Comprehension Assessment (MOCCA), through a sequential, multidimensional,…

With the rise in popularity of social media and e-commerce platforms, "discrete math" is at the heart of our online experiences, playing a front-end role in the recommendation of what to click, watch, or buy, or who to follow or friend, as well as a back-end role in data storage, access, and transfer. This thesis focuses on two such…

There is ongoing debate on whether adults' narratives of trauma memories are similarly or less coherent than those of non-trauma memories. For child maltreatment, relevant studies have focused on child/adolescent narratives rather than adult narratives of sexual abuse and found that these narratives were less coherent than non-abuse narratives.…

There is more to the moral life than mere adherence to a set of moral rules or principles to which the moral agent has autonomously subscribed. Something more fundamental is required for moral personhood, requiring explication in terms of 'sensitive perception' in relation to the particularities pertaining to any given set of circumstances…

The U.S. Department of Agriculture Final Rule on School Wellness Policy requires schools to self-evaluate wellness policies and environments. To understand the utility of this information, this study evaluates the validity of school-reported wellness information against directly observed data. Wellness leaders at 10 Midwestern elementary schools…

Purpose: This study examined the discriminative ability of acoustic indices of vocal hyperfunction combining smoothed cepstral peak prominence (CPPS) and relative fundamental frequency (RFF). Method: Demographic, CPPS, and RFF parameters were entered into logistic regression models trained on two 1:1 case-control groups: individuals with and…

Humans actively seek information to reduce uncertainty, providing insight on how our decisions causally affect the world. While we know that episodic memories can help support future goal-oriented behaviors, little is known about how hypothesis testing during exploration influences episodic memory. To investigate this question, we designed a…

One of the main current challenges in Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics is the portability or transferability of predictive models obtained for a particular course so that they can be applied to other different courses. To handle this challenge, one of the foremost problems is the models' excessive dependence on the low-level…

Studies of reward effects on behavior in adolescence typically rely on performance metrics that confound myriad cognitive and non-cognitive processes, making it challenging to determine which process is impacted by reward. The present longitudinal study applied the diffusion decision model to a reward task to isolate the influence of reward on…

The purpose of this study was to investigate possible predictive relationships between interval identification and melodic dictation performance on tasks where students identify short pitch spans after a brief tonicization. College musicians (N = 35) completed an interval identification test and a series of melodic dictation tasks. Results…

The uniformly most accurate (UMA) is an important optimal approach in interval estimation, but the current literature often introduces it in a confusing way, rendering the learning, teaching and researching of UMA problematic. Two major aspects cause this confusion. First, UMA is often interpreted to maximize the accuracy of coverage, but in fact,…

The conjoint-recognition model (CRM) implements fuzzy-trace theory's opponent process conception of false memory. Within the family of measurement models that separate the memory effects of recollection and familiarity, CRM is the only one that accomplishes this for false as well as true memory. We assembled a corpus of 537 sets of…

A common method used by memory scholars to enhance retention is to make materials more challenging to learn--a benefit termed desirable difficulties. Recently, researchers have investigated the efficacy of Sans Forgetica, a perceptually disfluent/distinctive font which may increase processing effort required at study and enhance memory as a…

Test equating requires collecting data to link the scores from different forms of a test. Problems arise when equating samples are not equivalent and the test forms to be linked share no common items by which to measure or adjust for the group nonequivalence. Using data from five operational test forms, we created five pairs of research forms for…