It is impossible to perceive who owns an object; this must be inferred. One way that children make such inferences is through a first possession bias--when two agents each use an object, children judge the object belongs to the one who used it first. Two experiments show that this bias does not result from children directly inferring ownership…

Three studies investigated 3-year-old children's ability to determine a speaker's communicative intent when the speaker's overt utterance related to that intent only indirectly. Studies 1 and 2 examined children's comprehension of indirectly stated requests (e.g., "I find Xs good" can imply, in context, a request for…

Visualizing the events described in a text is crucial for constructing a rich and coherent visuospatial mental representation (i.e., situation model) of the text. According to current reading comprehension theories, the construction of such a situation model likely involves all sensory modalities. However, at present these insights are hardly used…

Recent research suggests that 12-month-old infants use shape to individuate the number of objects present in a scene. This study addressed the question of whether infants would also rely on shape when shape is only a temporary attribute of an object. Specifically, we investigated whether infants realize that shape changes reliably indicate…

This dissertation aims to develop the Generator of the Event Structure Lexicon (GESL) which is a tool to automate annotating the event structure of verbs in text to support textual inference tasks related to lexically entailed subevents. The output of the GESL is the Event Structure Lexicon (ESL), which is a lexicon of verbs in text which includes…

This study examined what happened when 65 undergraduate prospective secondary level teachers across content areas evaluated the reliability of four online sources about climate change: an oil company webpage, a news report, and two climate change organizations with competing views on climate change. The students evaluated the sources at three time…

Purpose: This study aimed to describe the development of inferential abilities of children age 3 to 6 years in a narrative using a dialogic reading task on an iPad. Method: Participants were 121 typically developing children, divided into 3 groups according to age range (3-4 years old, 4-5 years old, 5-6 years old). Total score of inferential…

In this article, Strayer and Matuszewski present a six-phase strategy that teachers can use to help students develop a conceptual understanding of inferential hypothesis testing through simulation. As Strayer and Matuszewski discuss the strategy, they describe each phase in general, explain how they implemented the phase while teaching their…

Heterogeneity in response styles can affect the conclusions drawn from rating scale data. In particular, biased estimates can be expected if one ignores a tendency to middle categories or to extreme categories. An adjacent categories model is proposed that simultaneously models the content-related effects and the heterogeneity in response styles.…

Children base trait inferences about people on direct observations of behavior. In some situations, these inferences might conflict with information supplied by others. This study examined 3- to 6-year-olds' willingness to change their own trait attributions about an actor after receiving a consistent or inconsistent trait label from an authority…

"Simulation-based inference" (e.g., bootstrapping and randomization tests) has been advocated recently with the goal of improving student understanding of statistical inference, as well as the statistical investigative process as a whole. Preliminary assessment data have been largely positive. This article describes the analysis of the…

Calls for evidence-based policy often fail to recognise the fundamentally political nature of policy making. Policy makers must identify, evaluate and utilise evidence to solve policy problems in the face of competing priorities and political agendas. Evidence should inform but cannot determine policy choices. This paper draws on theories of…

A large number of approaches have been proposed for estimating and testing the significance of indirect effects in mediation models. In this study, four sets of Monte Carlo simulations involving full latent variable structural equation models were run in order to contrast the effectiveness of the currently popular bias-corrected bootstrapping…

This study is focused on conceptual paper and the purpose of this study is to conduct an empirical investigation into the Malaysian Preschool institutions, focusing on measuring their technical efficiency and productivity changes. This study is to examine the nature of productivity changes by means of bootstrapped Malmquist TFP indices. The study…

This article presents the results of a qualitative research with a group of 15 university students of social sciences on informal inferential reasoning developed in a computer environment on concepts involved in the confidence intervals. The results indicate that students developed a correct reasoning about sampling variability and visualized…