Introduces a study on primary school children's reasoning about the concepts of probability and choice. Concludes that relatively few children are sufficiently advanced in their thinking about chance situations to be able to see that different chance situations can have the same probabilistic nature. (ASK)

Examines possible differences in secondary students' conceptions of randomness before and after instruction in probability, which occurs for Spanish students between the ages of 14 and 17. Indicates that students' subjective understanding of randomness is close to some interpretations of randomness throughout history. Contains 16 references.…

Using data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's 1994 Diet and Health Knowledge Survey, estimates the odds that an adult individual smokes. Calculates odds of smoking by year of schooling, gender, and age. Odds of smoking are reduced by at least half after the first 10 years of schooling. (Contains 16 references.) (MLH)

Presents discovery mathematics activities involving sporting equipment. (ASK)

This brief investigation exemplifies such considerations by relating concepts from number theory, set theory, probability, logic, and calculus. Satisfying the call for students to acquire skills in estimation, the following technique allows one to "immediately estimate" whether or not a number is prime. (MM)

Molar and molecular views of behavior imply different approaches to data analysis. The molecular view privileges moment-to-moment analyses, whereas the molar view supports analysis of more and less extended activities. In concurrent performance, the molar view supports study of both extended patterns of choice and more local patterns of visiting…

Purpose: We describe the impact of two interventions, a consumer-directed voucher for in-home supportive services and a chronic disease self-management-health-promotion nurse intervention, on the probability of use of two types of home care-skilled home health care and personal assistance services-received by functionally impaired Medicare…

The effects on child engagement of adult use of systematic, naturalistic instructional strategies within an embedded instruction context were examined. Following baseline observations of two children with disabilities and same-age classmates without disabilities, three different instructional strategies were implemented with each child with a…

By analyzing the Fisher information allotted to the correct response of a Rasch binary item, Huynh (1994) established the response probability criterion 0.67 (RP67) for standard settings based on bookmarks and item mapping. The purpose of this note is to help clarify the conceptual and psychometric framework of the RP criterion.

The four dominant theories of reasoning from conditionals are translated into formal models: The theory of mental models (Johnson-Laird, P. N., & Byrne, R. M. J. (2002). Conditionals: a theory of meaning, pragmatics, and inference. "Psychological Review," 109, 646-678), the suppositional theory (Evans, J. S. B. T., & Over, D. E. (2004). "If."…

The use of Bayes' formula is applied to the biological problem of pedigree analysis to show that the Bayes' formula and non-Bayesian or "classical" methods of probability calculation give different answers. First year college students of biology can be introduced to the Bayesian statistics.

This article reviews several basic statistical tools needed for modeling data with sampling weights that are implemented in Mplus Version 3. These tools are illustrated in simulation studies for several latent variable models including factor analysis with continuous and categorical indicators, latent class analysis, and growth models. The…

Objective:: This paper discusses the ways in which existing microeconomic theories of partner abuse, intra-family bargaining, and distribution of resources within families may contribute to our current understanding of physical child abuse. The empirical implications of this discussion are then tested on data from the 1985 National Family Violence…

This article provides the first individual-level estimates of the change over time in the probability of non-residence for initially resident fathers in the United States. Drawing on the 1968-1997 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we used discrete-time event history models to compute the probabilities of non-residence for six 5-year…

Recent experimental evaluations have suggested little or no effect of batterer programs on reassault but are compromised by methodological and analytical issues. This study assesses program effect using propensity score analysis with a quasi-experimental sample in an attempt to address these issues. The sample consisted of 633 batterers and their…