This article examines the estimation of two-stage clustered designs for education randomized control trials (RCTs) using the nonparametric Neyman causal inference framework that underlies experiments. The key distinction between the considered causal models is whether potential treatment and control group outcomes are considered to be fixed for…

Can students be taught to better comprehend the diagrams in their textbooks? Can such teaching transfer to uninstructed diagrams in the same domain or even in a new domain? What methods work best for these goals? Building on previous research showing positive results compared to control groups in both laboratory studies and short-term…

There is an increasing emphasis on evidence-based education, and the sciences of learning are progressing rapidly. But are reports, guidelines, and outreach enough to disseminate this knowledge and affect educational practice? In fact, policy makers and the public often resist evidence-based recommendations about education. This article suggests…

Human social interaction depends on individuals identifying the common ground they have with others, based both on personally shared experiences and on cultural common ground that all members of the group share. We introduced 3- and 5-year-old children to a culturally well-known object and a novel object. An experimenter then entered and asked,…

Synthetic control methods are an innovative matching technique first introduced within the economics and political science literature that have begun to find application in educational research as well. Synthetic controls create an aggregate-level, time-series comparison for a single treated unit of interest for causal inference with observational…

Existing studies of source use in academic student writing tend to i), focus more on the writing than the reading end of the reading-to-write continuum and ii), involve the use of insufficiently "naturalistic" writing tasks. Thus, in order to explore the potential of an alternative approach, this paper describes an exploratory case study…

Students attending a Native Hawaiian-serving institution read statements from two hypothetical job candidates. The passages had equivalent meaning, but one incorporated Hawaiian leadership values (HLV) without identifying them as such. Participants judged the HLV candidate to have lower credibility, rationality, and effectiveness, and preferred…

Student conceptions related with matter and the particulate nature of matter (PNM), are vital for advanced understanding in chemistry, and have been a research area of significant attention. Lacking in the literature are studies addressing chemical misconceptions from an ontological point of view. The purpose of the current study was to develop a…

This article aims at exploring various strategies for coping with the auditory processing disorder in the light of foreign language acquisition. The techniques relevant to dealing with the auditory processing disorder can be attributed to environmental and compensatory approaches. The environmental one involves actions directed at creating a…

Rural students are at risk for vocabulary underdevelopment and often have less access to educational resources. The purpose of this investigation was to examine the effectiveness of an Internet-based Speech/Language Pathologist (SLP)-teacher consultation to support rural teachers' vocabulary instruction to improve their students' lexical…

This study aims to explore the factors in a patient's rehabilitation achievement after a total knee replacement (TKR) patient exercises, using a PCA-ANFIS emotion model-based game rehabilitation system, which combines virtual reality (VR) and motion capture technology. The researchers combine a principal component analysis (PCA) and an adaptive…

The processes by which individuals can construct proofs based on visual arguments are poorly understood. We investigated this issue by presenting eight mathematicians with a task that invited the construction of a diagram, and examined how they used this diagram to produce a formal proof. The main findings were that participants varied in the…

What do paleontologists, dinosaur tracks, and the nature of science have in common? They're combined here in an inquiry activity where students use methods of observation and inference to devise evidence-based explanations for the data they collect about dinosaur tracks, much like the methods used by paleontologists. Students then debate the…

In this thesis, we study the importance of background knowledge in relation extraction systems. We not only demonstrate the benefits of leveraging background knowledge to improve the systems' performance but also propose a principled framework that allows one to effectively incorporate knowledge into statistical machine learning models for…

Although previous research has established that multiple top-down factors guide the identification of words during speech processing, the ultimate range of information sources that listeners integrate from different levels of linguistic structure is still unknown. In a set of experiments, we investigate whether comprehenders can integrate…