Using self-reported academic cheating from the classes of 1959 through 2002 at the three major United States military service academies (Air Force, Army, and Navy), we measure how peer cheating influences individual cheating behavior. We find higher levels of peer cheating result in a substantially increased probability that an individual will…

A whimsical mathematics event for children and adults, derived from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, was held at the Providence Children's Museum in Rhode Island. NCTM's Standards were the basis of all the activities. (Contains 10 figures and 1 table.)

Using national transcript data, the authors examine inequality in access to an advanced curriculum in high school and assess the consequences of curricular intensity on test scores and college entry. Inequalities in curricular intensity are primarily explained by student socioeconomic status effects that operate within schools rather than between…

In an effort to answer the "Educational Call to Arms", our national public schools have turned to Advanced Placement (AP) courses as the predominate vehicle used to address the lack of academic rigor in our public high schools. Advanced Placement is believed by many to provide students with the rigor and work ethic necessary to…

Gilbert Gottlieb's theory of probabilistic epigenesis replaced the nature-nurture dichotomy, and similar oppositions, with an integrated account of the development of the entire behavioral phenotype. In that theory, invariant developmental outcomes cannot be identified with an organism's 'nature,' if by that term is meant a set of predetermined…

When behavior suggests that the value of a reinforcer depends inversely on the value of the events that precede or follow it, the behavior has been described as a "contrast" effect. Three major forms of contrast have been studied: "incentive contrast," in which a downward (or upward) shift in the magnitude of reinforcement produces a relatively…

Most traditional models, frameworks, and findings that apply to the majority of students and faculty do not adequately apply to important subpopulations. The recommendations here will help researchers become more sensitive to the nuances among various educational subgroups, and to pay more attention to outliers.

A truancy intervention pilot project was implemented in an urban high school and incorporated two innovative approaches: (a) student enrollment in a school-based health center for comprehensive health services, and (b) recruitment of teachers from within the students' school to engage in mentored relationships. Students with 15 or more days of…

The No Child Left Behind Act has brought great attention to the effectiveness of math and literacy program in U.S. Schools. Literacy instruction was the hot topic of the 1990s, but numeracy has taken center stage in current education debates. Although the importance of literacy skills in other subject areas is quite obvious, the connection between…

Objective: The problems children have upon entering foster care can potentially explain prior research findings that frequent placement changes are associated with poor outcomes. This study sought to disentangle this cascading relationship in order to identify the independent impact of placement stability on behavioral outcomes downstream.…

In many mathematics classes, students are asked to learn via the discovery method, in the hope that the intrinsic beauty of mathematics becomes more accessible and that making conjectures, forming hypotheses, and analyzing patterns will help them compute fluently and solve problems creatively and resourcefully (NCTM 2000). The activity discussed…

A vast body of research finds an association between missteps taken during the teen years (such as motherhood or dropping out of high school) and poor economic and educational outcomes. However, youth who take major missteps as teens often have subsequent success in school or the labor market. This paper attempts to draw lessons from youth who…

This article investigates several methods of identifying individual guessers from their response data. Both the posterior probability method and the likelihood ratio method are based on the two-state mixture modeling approach to response times. The accuracy method is based on response accuracy data. Results from the simulation study showed that…

The increase in burglary crimes, along with the rise in the citizens' worry about burglary crimes, has brought new challenges to the criminal justice systems in developed nations over the last decade. Crime surveys often point to a substantial dissonance between the actual likelihood of burglary and the perceived likelihood of victimization. This…

Risks of life on the street caused by inclement weather, harassment, and assault threaten the unsheltered homeless population. We address some challenges of enumerating the street homeless population by testing a novel capture-recapture (CR) estimation approach that models individuals' intermittent daytime visibility. We tested walking and…