This research is motivated by an analysis of reading research data. We are interested in modeling the test outcome of ability to fluently recode letters into sounds of kindergarten children aged between 5 and 7. The data showed excessive zero scores (more than 30% of children) on the test. In this dissertation, we carefully examine the models…

Sociological literature has not paid the same attention to the educational attainment of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) persons, despite their status as a socially marginalized group. Through the application of sociological methods and theories, my dissertation argues that sexual identity's effect on educational attainment is…

The Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) conducted an investigation of the Intersegmental Committee for the Academic Senates (ICAS) Statements of Competencies for Mathematics and Academic Literacy. The purpose of this work is to understand how the ICAS competencies relate to college and career readiness, as represented by the augmented…

This study modeled teacher-student relationship trajectories throughout elementary school to predict gains in achievement in an ethnic-diverse sample of 657 academically at-risk students (mean age = 6.57 years, SD = 0.39). Teacher reports of warmth and conflict were collected in Grades 1-5. Achievement was tested in Grades 1 and 6. For conflict,…

Doubly bounded continuous data are common in the social and behavioral sciences. Examples include judged probabilities, confidence ratings, derived proportions such as percent time on task, and bounded scale scores. Dependent variables of this kind are often difficult to analyze using normal theory models because their distributions may be quite…

Specific risk questions concerning sexual offending, such as risk of offending against male victims given identified female victims, have seldom been discussed in the child sexual abuse literature. Two approaches to specific risk questions are described: (a) conditional probability calculations, and (b) the development of risk assessment…

Routinely in day-to-day life, as well as in formal settings such as the courtroom, people must aggregate information they receive from different sources. One intuitively important but underresearched factor in this context is the degree to which the reports from different sources fit together, that is, their coherence. The authors examine a…

Nearly all introductory statistics textbooks include a chapter on data collection methods that includes a detailed discussion of both random sampling methods and randomized experiments. But when statistical inference is introduced in subsequent chapters, its justification is nearly always based on principles of random sampling methods. From the…

We find the correlation of two jointly distributed random variables connected with a coin tossing experiment. The marginal distributions are binomial and negative binomial.

The ability to perceive sequences is fundamental to cognition. Previous studies have shown that infants can learn visual sequences as early as 2 months of age and it has been suggested that this ability is mediated by sensitivity to conditional probability information. Typically, conditional probability information has covaried with frequency…

Two pathological gamblers could choose between emitting or having the dealer emit the response options when playing each of three casino games. A response-cost procedure was introduced in a multiple baseline design across games in which the participant had to pay to perform the responses himself, which was somewhat effective at reducing many of…

In Item Response Theory (IRT), item characteristic curves (ICCs) are illustrated through logistic models or normal ogive models, and the probability that examinees give the correct answer is usually a monotonically increasing function of their ability parameters. However, since only limited patterns of shapes can be obtained from logistic models…

Speakers frequently make subject-verb number agreement errors in the presence of a local noun with a different number from the head of the subject phrase. A series of four experiments used a two-choice response time (RT) paradigm to investigate how the latency of correct agreement decisions is modulated by the presence of a number attractor, and…

Under certain conditions, statistical evidence is more persuasive than anecdotal evidence in supporting a claim about the probability that a certain event will occur. In three experiments, it is shown that the type of argument is an important condition in this respect. If the evidence is part of an argument by generalization, statistical evidence…

In a recent study, G. Kuhn and Z. Dienes (2005) reported that participants previously exposed to a set of musical tunes generated by a biconditional grammar subsequently preferred new tunes that respected the grammar over new ungrammatical tunes. Because the study and test tunes did not share any chunks of adjacent intervals, this result may be…