Transitivity of preferences is a fundamental principle shared by most major contemporary rational, prescriptive, and descriptive models of decision making. To have transitive preferences, a person, group, or society that prefers choice option "x" to "y" and "y" to "z" must prefer "x" to…

When pigeons are given a choice between two alternatives, one leading to a stimulus 20% of the time that always signals reinforcement (S+) or another stimulus 80% of the time that signals no reinforcement (S-), and the other alternative leading to one of two stimuli each signaling reinforcement 50% of the time, they show a strong preference for…

This article is a systematic reflection on a sequence of episodes related to teaching probability. Our central claim is that reducing problems to a consideration of the sample space, which consists of equiprobable outcomes, may not be in accord with learners' initial ways of reasoning. We suggest a "desirable pedagogical approach" in which the…

Polynomial loglinear models for one-, two-, and higher-way contingency tables have important applications to measurement and assessment. They are essentially regarded as a smoothing technique, which is commonly referred to as loglinear smoothing. A SAS IML (SAS Institute, 2002a) macro was created to implement loglinear smoothing according to…

The present study with college students examined the effect of amount on the discounting of probabilistic monetary rewards. A hyperboloid function accurately described the discounting of hypothetical rewards ranging in amount from $20 to $10,000,000. The degree of discounting increased continuously with amount of probabilistic reward. This effect…

This dissertation examines the college experience of traditional-age community college students. The objectives of this dissertation are threefold. To explain early exits from higher education, the first manuscript integrates Tinto's interactionalist theory and Coleman's theory of social capital to describe the mechanisms through which…

This study examined whether students who participated in the trades and industry curriculum did better than their counterparts on standardized tests. Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) High School Transcript Study (HSTS) were used. A nationally represented sample of over 37,000 public and private school students were…

In this paper I investigate whether students self-select into the U.S. for-profit colleges or whether the choice of for-profit sector is accidental or due to the reasons external to the students (geographic exposure to for-profit providers, tuition pricing, or random circumstances). The main student-level data samples come from the National…

There is currently a considerable diversity of quantitative measures available for summarizing the results in single-case studies. Given that the interpretation of some of them is difficult due to the lack of established benchmarks, the current article proposes an approach for obtaining further numerical evidence on the importance of the results,…

The cognitive mechanisms for writing to dictation of Chinese syllables by healthy adults were investigated using large-sample multiple regression analyses. In the experiment, subjects wrote down a corresponding character upon hearing a syllable. We mainly examined the effects of three types of attributes (i.e., lexical, semantic, and phonology to…

Personnel selection shows an enduring need for short stand-alone tests consisting of, say, 5 to 15 items. Despite their efficiency, short tests are more vulnerable to measurement error than longer test versions. Consequently, the question arises to what extent reducing test length deteriorates decision quality due to increased impact of…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders have impairments in language acquisition, but the underlying mechanism of these deficits is poorly understood. Implicit learning is potentially relevant to language development, particularly in speech segmentation, which relies on sensitivity to transitional probabilities between speech sounds. This study…

Distinguishing between good and bad science is not easy. Evaluating whether or not a claim really is supported by good research is like buying a car. There is an optimal solution to the problem, which is to read and digest all of the relevant research, but most people do not have time to execute the optimal solution. What they need is a good…

The study was about a non normative within-career transition in sport: Handball players' move from their current to an alternative team. Eighty male handball players were presented with scenarios that contained five pieces of information about current satisfaction with the present team, attractiveness of the alternative team (better springboard…

Recent evidence suggests that people are highly efficient at detecting conflicting outputs produced by competing intuitive and analytic reasoning processes. Specifically, De Neys and Glumicic (2008) demonstrated that participants reason longer about problems that are characterized by conflict (as opposed to agreement) between stereotypical…