Objective: Clients often have limited time in a nutrition education setting. An improved understanding of the strategies used to accurately estimate calories may help to identify areas of focused instruction to improve nutrition knowledge. Methods: A "Think Aloud" exercise was recorded during the estimation of calories in a standard dinner meal…

Goal contagion occurs when a perceiver interacts with a partner whose behavior implies he/she is pursuing a particular goal and the perceiver accurately infers and subsequently pursues the partner's goal. Goal contagion was assessed in conversations between unacquainted individuals. In 2 experiments, the ways in which goal specificity, inference…

Diagnosing learning behavior is one of teachers' most central tasks. So far, accuracy in teachers' judgments on students' achievement has been investigated. In this study, a new perspective is taken by developing and testing a three-dimensional model that describes the process of diagnosing learning behavior within a sample of N = 293…

Purpose: This study compared the diagnostic accuracy of a general grammaticality measure (i.e., percentage grammatical utterance; PGU) to 2 less comprehensive measures of grammaticality--a measure that excluded utterances without a subject and/or main verb (i.e., percentage sentence point; PSP) and a measure that looked only at verb tense errors…

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to (a) describe and compare the nonword repetition (NWR) performance of preschool-age Spanish-speaking children (3- to 5-year-olds) with and without language impairment (LI) across 2 scoring approaches and (b) to contrast the classification accuracy of a Spanish NWR task when item-level and percentage…

Within the framework of item response theory (IRT), there are two recent lines of work on the estimation of classification accuracy (CA) rate. One approach estimates CA when decisions are made based on total sum scores, the other based on latent trait estimates. The former is referred to as the Lee approach, and the latter, the Rudner approach,…

Performing a cognitive task while maintaining upright stance can lead to increased or reduced body sway depending on tasks and experimental conditions. Because greater sway is commonly taken to indicate loosened postural control, and vice versa, the precise impact of cognitive load on postural stability has remained unclear. In much of the large…

We examined the extent to which word characteristics (i.e., differences in orthographic transparency among words) and child characteristics (i.e., emergent literacy skills) explain variation in children's spelling, using data from young Korean children (N = 168). We compared predicted probabilities of various types of words (e.g., transparent vs.…

Age differences in rates of forced confabulation and memory consequences thereof were assessed using a recall task similar to real forensic interview procedures. Children viewed a target video and were tested with the same 18 questions immediately afterward and 1 week later. Of the 18 questions, 12 were answerable; the 6 unanswerable questions…

Variable-length computerized adaptive testing (VL-CAT) allows both items and test length to be "tailored" to examinees, thereby achieving the measurement goal (e.g., scoring precision or classification) with as few items as possible. Several popular test termination rules depend on the standard error of the ability estimate, which in turn depends…

The Common Core assessments emphasize short essay constructed response items over multiple choice items because they are more precise measures of understanding. However, such items are too costly and time consuming to be used in national assessments unless a way is found to score them automatically. Current automatic essay scoring techniques are…

This research has two facets within separate research areas. The research area of Belief, Desire and Intention (BDI) agent capability development was extended. Deception detection research has been advanced with the development of automation using BDI agents. BDI agents performed tasks automatically and autonomously. This study used these…

This study tested the hypothesis that intuitions about the effect of operations, e.g., "addition makes bigger" and "division makes smaller", are still present in educated adults, even after years of instruction. To establish the intuitive character, we applied a reaction time methodology, grounded in dual process theories of reasoning. Educated…

In order to reap the social gratifications of Online Social Networks (OSNs), users often disclose self-related information, making them potentially vulnerable to their online audiences. We give a brief overview of our theoretical ideas and empirical research about additional cognitive and metacognitive factors relevant for the perception of risk…

Principals in one Western state were surveyed about teacher evaluation systems commonly used across the state. Findings suggest that principals' beliefs about aligning practice to performance expectations, about how much the view of professional practice is growth-oriented, and the degree to which systems use multiple measures are the variables…