The problem addressed in this study was that regular education teachers lacked the training to include students with disabilities in inclusive classrooms. The evidence indicated that teachers were beginning to show greater levels of frustration, students were being referred out of the classroom, and many students were being sent to the special…

This dissertation consists of three essays on education and macroeconomics. The first chapter analyzes whether public education financing systems can account for large differences among developed countries in earnings inequality and intergenerational earnings persistence. I first document facts about public education in the U.S. and Norway, which…

This article presents an analysis of interactions in the usage, structure, cognition, coadaptation of conversational partners, and emergence of linguistic constructions. It focuses on second language development of English verb-argument constructions (VACs: VL, verb locative; VOL, verb object locative; VOO, ditransitive) with particular reference…

A group of 20 patients with probable Alzheimer disease (AD) and a control group were tested in a verb generation task, in a verb synonym task and several cognitive tests. Three types of verbs and novel verbs were presented in simple sentence frames, in two different conditions. In one condition participants were presented with the verb in the…

Background: Despite a powerful civil rights movement and legislation barring discrimination in housing markets, residential neighborhoods remain racially segregated. Purpose: This study examines the extent to which neighborhoods' racial composition is inherited across generations and the extent to which high schools' and colleges' racial…

The mirror effect for word frequency refers to the finding that low-frequency words have higher hit rates and lower false alarm rates than high-frequency words. This result is typically interpreted in terms of conventional signal detection theory (SDT), in which case it indicates that the order of the underlying old item distributions mirrors…

The extreme interval values and statistics (expected value, median, mode, standard deviation, and coefficient of variation) for the smallest (min) and largest (max) values of exponentially distributed variables with parameter ? = 1 are examined for different observation (sample) sizes. An extreme interval value g[subscript a] is defined as a…

Nearly one in five children under age 18 lived in poor families in 2008, according to poverty statistics released by the Census Bureau in September 2009. Though high, this statistic does not capture the full impact of the economic downturn, which is expected to drive poverty even higher in 2009. However, updated poverty statistics will not be…

A general diagnostic model was used to specify and compare two multidimensional item-response-theory (MIRT) models for longitudinal data: (a) a model that handles repeated measurements as multiple, correlated variables over time (Andersen, 1985) and (b) a model that assumes one common variable over time and additional orthogonal variables that…

The relationship between educational attainment and economic outcomes is shaped by a variety of educational experiences, including field of training, length of time spent in school, and level of attainment. This report explores the relationship between educational attainment, field of training, and eventual occupation and earnings. The report also…

Students who take classes in education departments at universities receive significantly higher grades than students who take classes in other academic departments. The higher grades awarded by education departments cannot be explained by differences in student quality or by structural differences across departments (i.e., differences in class…

Missing data are nearly always a problem in research, and missing values represent a serious threat to the validity of inferences drawn from findings. Increasingly, social science researchers are turning to multiple imputation to handle missing data. Multiple imputation, in which missing values are replaced by values repeatedly drawn from…

The paper reports the results from 16 versions of a simple probability estimation task, where probability estimates derived from base-rate information have to be modified by case knowledge. In the bus problem [adapted from Falk, R., Lipson, A., & Konold, C. (1994), the ups and downs of the hope function in a fruitless search. In G. Wright & P.…

The "matching" hats problem is a classic exercise in probability: if "n" people throw their hats in a box, and then each person randomly draws one out again, what is the expected number of people who draw their own hat? This paper presents several extensions to this problem, with solutions that involve interesting tricks with iterated…

Over 55 years ago, the Western states formed the Western Regional Education Compact and agreed to share higher education resources in the West through the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE). Through WICHE's three student exchange programs, nearly 26,000 residents of 15 Western states are enrolled at reduced levels of…