Engineering design plays an important role in education. However, due to its open nature and complexity, providing timely support to students has been challenging using the traditional assessment methods. This study takes an initial step to employ learning analytics to build performance prediction models to help struggling students. It allows…

Previous studies provided evidence for a connection between language processing and language change. We add to these studies with an exploration of the influence of lexical-distributional properties of words in orthographic space, semantic space, and the mapping between orthographic and semantic space on the probability of lexical extinction.…

When equating two test forms, the equated scores will be biased if the test groups differ in ability. To adjust for the ability imbalance between nonequivalent groups, a set of common items is often used. When no common items are available, it has been suggested to use covariates correlated with the test scores instead. In this article, we reduce…

Propensity score analysis is a statistical method that balances pre-existing differences across treatment conditions achieving a similar condition as randomization and thus, allowing the estimation of causal effects in non-randomized experimental designs. The four stages in propensity score analysis are (1) propensity score estimation, (2)…

The Birthday Paradox problem can be investigated either with a carefully constructed spreadsheet (for greatest precision) or a calculator process (for reasonable precision). A number of ways of approaching this problem as a class activity are provided.

Close to two million first-year undergraduates enroll in developmental education each year. According to recent national estimates, less than half of students who start in developmental education go on to complete gateway courses and less than one-third eventually earn a degree. However, more research is needed to better assess potential…

The Born rule, which describes the formalism for determining probabilities, is one of the most fundamental postulates in quantum mechanics. This paper presents results from an investigation into how students apply the Born rule to determine probabilities for energy and position measurements. The investigation includes two stages with independent…

The natural experiment proposed in this article extracts three stories from boxes of "100 paper clips". The activity requires students to apply three lessons from inferential statistics, starting with a hypothesis test and including confidence intervals as well as tolerance intervals.

Individuals draw conclusions about possibilities from assertions that make no explicit reference to them. The model theory postulates that assertions such as disjunctions refer to possibilities. Hence, a disjunction of the sort, "A or B or both," where "A" and "B" are sensible clauses, yields mental models of an…

The majority of the literature on the psychology of gains and losses suggests that losses lead to an avoidance response. Several studies, however, have shown that losses can also lead to an approach response, whereby an option is selected more often when it produces losses. In five studies we examine the boundary conditions for these contradictory…

Propensity score (PS) adjustments have become popular methods used to improve estimates of treatment effects in quasi-experiments. Although researchers continue to develop PS methods, other procedures can also be effective in reducing selection bias. One of these uses clustering to create balanced groups. However, the success of this new method…

The study presented in this article examined the impact of two simulation-based inference activities on students' understanding of p-values in a second undergraduate statistics course. In the study, students familiar with traditional inference methods used physical and computer simulations to estimate p-values. To examine students' conceptions…

Past research indicates that individuals respond adaptively to contextual factors in multiattribute choice tasks. Yet it remains unclear how this adaptation is cognitively governed. In this article, empirically testable implementations of two prominent competing theoretical frameworks are developed and compared across two multiattribute choice…

Between 2001 and 2005, higher education in Italy went through a considerable process of reform according to the "Bologna Process." This paper evaluates the effects of this process on the academic performance of students. We estimate the difference in graduation probability between students who switched from pre-reform university courses…

Propensity score weighting often is used to correct for attrition biases in panel surveys. While methodological literature exists on the logic of propensity score weighting and its practical applications, an in-depth discussion is lacking on the effects of using this weighting to correct for attrition biases in attitudinal, behavioral, and…