Undergraduate Political Science programs often require students to take a quantitative research methods course. Such courses are typically among the most poorly rated. This can be due, in part, to the way in which courses are evaluated. Students are generally asked to provide an overall rating, which, in turn, is widely used by students, faculty,…

The main goals of postsecondary prison education programs are to increase the education level of prisoners and improve their chances of success upon release. However, in order to accomplish this goal, prisoners must first participate in the education programs. This is especially crucial for female prisoners, many of whom enter prison more…

Aims: The purpose of this study is to examine the gender-specific associations of different dimensions of individual-level social capital with regular alcohol consumption and binge drinking in 16-17 years old adolescents in Crete, Greece. Methods: Of the 835 randomly selected students, 708 completed the Youth Social Capital Scale and the Health…

This study uses simulation examples representing three types of treatment assignment mechanisms in data generation (the random intercept and slopes setting, the random intercept setting, and a third setting with a cluster-level treatment and an individual-level outcome) in order to determine optimal procedures for reducing bias and improving…

From past knowledge of Ziegler's and Phillipson's work, the author knew before reading the manuscript that there would be significant conceptual disagreements. Yet, he was hoping to find enough points of convergence that they could lead to enriching exchanges and, maybe, future shared efforts at bridging gaps between their respective views.…

Some researchers claim that variability is an operant dimension of behavior. The present paper reviews the concept of operant behavior and emphasizes that differentiation is the behavioral process that demonstrates an operant relation. Differentiation is conceived as change in the overlap between two probability distributions: the distribution of…

Previous studies have indicated that dependencies between nonadjacent elements can be acquired by statistical learning when each element predicts only one other element (deterministic dependencies). The present study investigates statistical learning of probabilistic nonadjacent dependencies, in which each element predicts several other elements…

In recalling a list of previously experienced items, participants are known to organize their responses on the basis of the items' semantic and temporal similarities. Here, we examine how spatial information influences the organization of responses in free recall. In Experiment 1, participants studied and subsequently recalled lists of landmarks.…

Recent advances in causal reasoning have given rise to a computational model that emulates the process by which humans generate, evaluate, and distinguish counterfactual sentences. Contrasted with the "possible worlds" account of counterfactuals, this "structural" model enjoys the advantages of representational economy,…

Conditionals somehow express conditional beliefs. However, conditional belief is a bi-propositional attitude that is generally not truth-evaluable, in contrast to unconditional belief. Therefore, this article opts for an expressivistic semantics for conditionals, grounds this semantics in the arguably most adequate account of conditional belief,…

Preschoolers develop a wide range of mathematical informal knowledge and intuitive thinking before they enter formal, goal-oriented education. In their everyday activities young children get engaged with situations that enhance them to develop skills, concepts, strategies, representations, attitudes, constructs and operations concerning a wide…

Assuming a coin is fair is common place in introductory statistical education. This article offers three approaches to test if a coin is fair. The approaches lend themselves to straightforward simulation studies that can enrich student understanding of joint probability and sample size requirements. Simulation studies comparing the relative merits…

We consider here the problem of calculating the moments of binomial random variables. It is shown how formulae for both the raw and the central moments of such random variables may be obtained in a recursive manner utilizing Stirling numbers of the first kind. Suggestions are also provided as to how students might be encouraged to explore this…

Do infants, like adults, consider both the probability of falling and the severity of a potential fall when deciding whether to cross a bridge? Crawling and walking infants were encouraged to cross bridges varying in width over a small drop-off, a large drop-off, or no drop-off. Bridge width affects the probability of falling, whereas drop-off…

How do people make rich inferences from such sparse data? Recent research has explored this inferential ability by investigating probabilistic reasoning in infancy. For example, 8- and 11-month-old infants can make inferences from samples to populations and vice versa (Denison & Xu, 2010a; Xu & Denison, 2009; Xu & Garcia, 2008a). The…