We consider the challenges and implications of controlling for school contextual bias when modeling teacher preparation program effects. Because teachers are not randomly distributed across schools, failing to account for contextual factors in achievement models could bias preparation program estimates. Including school fixed effects controls for…

Background: While several validated measures of the life circumstances of people with intellectual disabilities (ID) have been developed, this stream of research has not yet been well integrated with environmentally oriented criminological theory to explain offending among people with ID. In this study, we attempt to provide a preliminary…

This study tests the output constraints hypothesis that languages with a crowded phonemic vowel space would allow less vowel-to-vowel coarticulation than languages with a sparser vowel space to avoid perceptual confusion. Mandarin has fewer vowel phonemes than Cantonese, but their allophonic vowel spaces are similarly crowded. The hypothesis…

This study provides a partial test of Klinger's ecological theory of police behavior using hierarchical linear modeling on 1,677 suspects who had encounters with police within 24 beats. The current study used data from four sources originally collected by the Project on Policing Neighborhoods (POPN), including systematic social observation,…

Purpose: The dominant variance theory approaches to researching business school reputations are based on a positivistic hypothetico-deductive research methodology and do not adequately take into account either the different levels and types of contexts in which business schools operate or the diversity of stakeholder interests. The aim of this…

The pattern of shading across an image can provide a rich sense of object shape. Our ability to use shading information is remarkable given the infinite possible combinations of illumination, shape and reflectance that could have produced any given image. Illumination can change dramatically across environments (e.g. indoor vs. outdoor) and times…

Three studies investigated the effects of extreme context stimuli and categorization on hedonic contrast by having subjects judge the attractiveness of faces. Experiment 1 demonstrated hedonic contrast in both directions by using 2 sets of stimuli presented in different orders. Preceding moderately unattractive faces with moderately attractive…

It might seem that an embryo is an embryo, and that there would be a fact of the matter. That seems especially true with respect to the way embryos are presented in textbooks, including high school biology textbooks. This paper looks at three co-existing, competing, and often conflicting views of embryos. Then with a close study of twentieth…

Three self-paced reading experiments explored the processing of "only" and its interaction with context. In isolated sentences, the focus particle "only" predicts an upcoming contrast. Ambiguous replacive sentences (e.g., "The curator embarrassed the gallery owner in public, not the artist") with "only" on the subject or object showed faster…

During extinction animals experience that the previously learned association between a conditioned stimulus (CS) and an unconditioned stimulus (US) no longer holds true. Accordingly, the conditioned response (CR) to the CS decreases. This decrease of the CR can be reversed by presentation of the US alone following extinction, a phenomenon termed…

Responds to the comments by Pomerantz and Sisti and Baum-Baicker on the current authors' original article, "Nonrational processes in ethical decision making". Pomerantz (2012) further explicated one interpersonal and contextual factor--the perceived characteristics of the recipient of any act. He cited evidence that these characteristics affect…

An individual's mindset about the perceived malleability of ability or intelligence is known to strongly influence a person's other beliefs, behaviours, and motivation. This article seeks to provide justification for holding a "growth" mindset in the domain of foreign language learning. It discusses contemporary understandings of ability and…

Calculus is one of the primary avenues for initial quantitative training of students in all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields, but life science students have been found to underperform in the traditional calculus setting. As a result, and because of perceived lack of its contribution to the understanding of biology, calculus…

Autonomy support in classrooms is believed to coordinate students' inner motivational resources in ways that enhance student engagement (e.g., Jang, Kim, & Reeve, 2012). Yet, to our knowledge, no study has investigated student-generated interpretations of the motivational significance of their teachers' autonomy-supportive practices.…

Students' thinking about the relation between effort and ability can influence their motivation, affect, and academic achievement. Students sometimes think of effort as inversely related to ability (such that people with low ability must work harder than people with high ability) and other times think of effort as positively related to ability…