Shanghai is dubbed as a role model for science and mathematics education as its fifteen-year-olds have been outperforming all in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) since 2009. Shanghai's achievements are attributed to its interest in adopting innovative international trends in education and equally effectively implementing…

This article describes a modified importance-performance framework for use in evaluation of recreation-based experiential learning programs. Importance-performance analysis (IPA) provides an effective and readily applicable means of evaluating many programs, but the near universal satisfaction associated with recreation inhibits the use of IPA in…

Continuity and discontinuity are sometimes marked in discourse by means of connectives. This study tested for the first time whether causal and concessive connectives induce expectations of emotional continuity and discontinuity, respectively. Using a novel double-task paradigm, participants first listened to an antecedent clause with a causal or…

Young children can engage in diagnostic reasoning. However, almost all research demonstrating such capacities has investigated children's inferences when the individual efficacy of each candidate cause is known. Here we show that there is development between ages five and seven in children's ability to reason about the number of candidate causes…

Granger models are popular when it comes to testing hypotheses that relate series of measures causally to each other. In this article, we propose a taxonomy of Granger causality models. The taxonomy results from crossing the four variables Order of Lag, Type of (Contemporaneous) Effect, Direction of Effect, and Segment of Dependent Series…

After explicit instruction on how to give possible bidirectional (two-way) causality explanations for a correlation, 240 students from eight sections of social psychology and research methods courses wrote "reverse causality" explanations on various test questions, creating a total of 882 answers. Averaging across multiple graded…

Methods of causal inference are not widely used by education researchers, even though they can be extremely useful tools for eliminating selection bias and confounding factors in empirical studies. For example, researchers have established that taking additional math classes in high school is strongly correlated with success in college and higher…

In some randomized clinical trials, patients may die before the measurements of their outcomes. Even though randomization generates comparable treatment and control groups, the remaining survivors often differ significantly in background variables that are prognostic to the outcomes. This is called the truncation by death problem. Under the…

Previous research has shown that providing video recommendations to students in virtual learning environments implemented at scale positively affects student achievement. However, it is also critical to evaluate whether the treatment effects are heterogeneous, and whether they depend on contextual variables such as disadvantaged student status and…

Two different tools for assessing pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of mathematics teachers used in the framework of the COACTIV study are systematically compared in this paper, namely the paper-and-pencil test consisting of items on the three facets "knowledge of explaining and representation," "knowledge of student thinking and…

Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is a method for cross-case analyses that works best when complemented with follow-up case studies focusing on the causal quality of the solution and its constitutive terms, the underlying causal mechanisms, and potentially omitted conditions. The anchorage of QCA in set theory demands criteria for follow-up…

This study focuses on the mathematics department at a South African university and in particular on teaching of calculus to first year engineering students. The paper reports on a cause-effect analysis, often used for business improvement. The cause-effect analysis indicates that there are many factors that impact on secondary school teaching of…

Randomized A/B tests in educational software are not run in a vacuum: often, reams of historical data are available alongside the data from a randomized trial. This paper proposes a method to use this historical data--often highdimensional and longitudinal--to improve causal estimates from A/B tests. The method proceeds in two steps: first, fit a…

We welcome Professor Pearl's comment on our original article, Dawid et al. Our focus there on the distinction between the "Effects of Causes" (EoC) and the "Causes of Effects" (CoE) concerned two fundamental problems, one a theoretical challenge in statistics and the other a practical challenge for trial courts. In this…

This study was planned and conducted to determine the chocolate consumption habits of prospective teachers. The study population was comprised of students attending the Faculty of Education at Gazi University in Ankara and the sample consisted of 251 prospective teachers selected with simple random sampling. 96.4% and 3.6% of the prospective…