The development of spatial navigation in children depends not only on remembering which landmarks lead to a goal location but also on developing strategies to deal with changes in the environment or imperfections in memory. Using cue combination methods, the authors examined 3- and 4-year-old children's memory for different types of spatial cues…

Little is known about individual differences in integrating numeric base-rates and qualitative text in making probability judgments. Fuzzy-Trace Theory predicts a preference for fuzzy processing. We conducted six studies to develop the FPPI, a reliable and valid instrument assessing individual differences in this fuzzy processing preference. It…

Experimental evidence suggests that the content of a memory for even a simple display encoded in visual short-term memory (VSTM) can be very complex. VSTM uses organizational processes that make the representation of an item dependent on the feature values of all displayed items as well as on these items' representations. Here, we develop a…

The scale-invariant memory, perception, and learning (SIMPLE) model developed by Brown, Neath, and Chater (2007) formalizes the theoretical idea that scale invariance is an important organizing principle across numerous cognitive domains and has made an influential contribution to the literature dealing with modeling human memory. In the context…

Prior research has considered the sequential order of function words, after the contextual words of the text have been removed, as a stylistic indicator of authorship. This research describes an effort to enhance authorship attribution accuracy based on this same information source with alternate classifiers, alternate n-gram construction methods,…

The objective of this article is to contribute to the documented dearth of research on teachers' probabilistic knowledge. Prospective teachers of elementary school mathematics were asked to identify which result from five flips of a fair coin was least likely to occur. Participants, instead of being presented with sequences, were presented with…

An understanding of conditional probability is essential for students of inferential statistics as it is used in Null Hypothesis Tests. Conditional probability is also used in Bayes' theorem, in the interpretation of medical screening tests and in quality control procedures. This study examines the understanding of conditional probability of…

Parceling is referred to as a procedure for computing sums or average scores across multiple items. Parcels instead of individual items are then used as indicators of latent factors in the structural equation modeling analysis (Bandalos 2002, 2008; Little et al., 2002; Yang, Nay, & Hoyle, 2010). Item parceling may be applied to alleviate some…

Peers have a paradoxical influence on each other's educational decisions. On one hand, students are prone to conform to each other's ambitious educational decisions and, on the other hand, are discouraged from ambitious decisions when surrounded by successful peers. In this study I examine how peers influence each other's decision to apply to an…

This study examines the impact of providing parents with an informational brochure about the role of algebra II in college access on students' grade 11 algebra II completion rates in Texas. One hundred nine schools, covering all 20 Educational Service Center regions in Texas, participated in the study. Parents in the 54 treatment schools were…

It might be said that for most occupations there is now less of a need for mathematics than there was say fifty years ago. But, the author argues, geometry, probability, and statistics constitute essential knowledge for everyone. Maybe not the geometry of Euclid, but certainly geometrical ways of thinking that might enable us to describe the world…

The purpose of this study was to examine the potential for using propensity score-based matching methods to estimate teacher contributions to student learning. Value-added models are increasingly used in teacher accountability systems in the United States in spite of ongoing qualms about the validity of teacher quality estimates resulting from…

We establish an interesting connection between the number of runs and the length of the first run when tossing a fair coin.

A growing literature suggests that generating and evaluating explanations is a key mechanism for learning and inference, but little is known about how children generate and select competing explanations. This study investigates whether young children prefer explanations that are simple, where simplicity is quantified as the number of causes…

In this rejoinder, von Eye and DeShon discuss the decision strategies proposed in their original article ("Directional Dependence in Developmental Research," this issue), as well as the ones proposed by the authors of the commentary (Pornprasertmanit and Little, "Determining Directional Dependency in Causal Associations," this issue). In addition,…