While a great deal of research has studied the messages students contribute to electronic discussion forums, productive participation in online learning conversations requires more than just making posts. One important pre-condition for productive interactivity and knowledge construction is engagement with the posts contributed by others. In this…

Principal Component Analysis is widely used in applied multivariate data analysis, and this article shows how to motivate student interest in this topic using cricket sports data. Here, principal component analysis is successfully used to rank the cricket batsmen and bowlers who played in the 2012 Indian Premier League (IPL) competition. In…

Since 1990 many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have witnessed extraordinary progress in school enrollment; however, the progress has slowed in recent years. UNESCO warns that unless new measures are taken, the number of out-of-school children in 2015 will increase from current levels. Inequalities in most developing countries have been found to…

How the neighborhood environment relates to intimate partner violence against women has been studied using theories applied originally to general violence. Extending social disorganization and collective efficacy theories, they apply a traditional measure informal social control that does not reflect behaviors specific to partner violence. We…

This article provides the first quantitative review of the literature on music and suicidality. Multivariate logistic regression techniques are applied to 90 findings from 21 studies. Investigations employing ecological data on suicide completions are 19.2 times more apt than other studies to report a link between music and suicide. More recent…

Von Davier et al. (this issue) describe two analyses that aim at determining whether the constructs measured with a number of observed items are categorical or continuous in nature. The issue of types versus traits has a long history and is relevant in many areas of behavioral research, including personality research, as emphasized by von Davier…

Massively multiple online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are very popular among students. Educational MMORPGs, however, are very rare, as are studies on gamers' behavioral patterns during such games. The current study is an empirical observation and analysis of the behavioral patterns of 100 gamers participating in an educational MMORPG called…

While clinical exams using SPs are used extensively across the medical schools for summative purposes and high-stakes decisions, the method of identifying students for remediation varies widely and there is a lack of consensus on the best methodological approach. The purpose of this study is to provide an alternative approach to identification of…

The current study aimed to investigate temporal processing in Chinese children with Attention-Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder(ADHD) using time production, time reproduction paradigm and duration discrimination tasks. A battery of tests specifically designed to measure temporal processing was administered to 94 children with ADHD and 100…

This article proposes that acculturation orientations are related to two sets of cultural values: utilitarianism (Ut) and traditionalism (Tr). While utilitarian values enhance assimilation, traditional values support language and identity maintenance. It is proposed that the propensity to either end of this value opposition can be measured by an…

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the conceptual, methodological, and statistical challenges in selecting appropriate peer institutions for comparative purposes. The authors' approach embraces a Western scientific tradition that physical things and phenomena can be "reduced into a set of key variables--identifiable parts--that make key…

The effect of relative domain importance as a weighting mechanism in quality of life (QoL) measures has been a topic of debate for decades. Studies investigating the role of domain importance in QoL measures have produced mixed results. The mixed results may very well be the consequences of a limited choice of global satisfaction or QoL measures,…

Two groups of 12-year-old ethnic minority (EM) users of alphasyllabary (66 Tibetan and 45 Yi) were compared with 42 Han Chinese students in comprehending Chinese narrative and expository texts, each with inferential questions requiring short open-ended written answers. Three constructs (verbal working memory, orthographic and sentential…

Critical Civic Inquiry (CCI) is a transformative student voice initiative that engages students in critical conversations about educational equity and inquiry-based learning to increase student voice and promote civic action. A quasi-experimental study was conducted to assess if participation in CCI increased the psychological empowerment (as…

Although evidence of negative associations between early literacy development and children's behavior problems exists, the field still lacks an understanding of the complicated links between these two areas. Children's gender has often not been included in much of the extant research as a potential moderating variable, yet gender differences may…