This study examined the direct and indirect effects of foundational language (vocabulary and syntactic knowledge) and literacy (orthographic knowledge) skills, transcription (spelling and handwriting fluency), and higher-order cognitive skills (comprehension monitoring and inferencing making) on writing among Chinese children. Participants were…

Young children often endorse stereotypes--such as "girls are bad at math." We explore one mechanism through which these beliefs may be transmitted: via pragmatic inference. Specifically, we ask whether preschoolers and adults can learn about an unmentioned social group from what is said about another group, and if this inferential…

In recent years, proponents of configurational comparative methods (CCMs) have advanced various dimensions of robustness as instrumental to model selection. But these robustness considerations have not led to computable robustness measures, and they have typically been applied to the analysis of real-life data with unknown underlying causal…

Words have meanings vastly undetermined by the contexts in which they occur. Their acquisition therefore presents formidable problems of induction. Lila Gleitman and colleagues have advocated for one part of a solution: indirect evidence for a word's meaning may come from its syntactic distribution, via syntactic bootstrapping. But while formal…

Although people take care of their own possessions, they also engage in stewardship and take care of things they do not own. Here, we examined what young children infer when they observe stewardship behavior of an object. Through four experiments on predominantly middle-class Canadian children (total N = 350, 168 girls and 182 boys from a…

Scholars and legal practitioners of voting rights are concerned with estimating individual-level voting behavior from aggregate-level data. The most commonly used technique, King's ecological inference (EI), has been questioned for inflexibility in multiethnic settings or with multiple candidates. One method for estimating vote support for…

Inferential reasoning is an integral part of science and civic society, but research shows that it is a problematic domain for many people. One possibility for a more accessible approach to inferential reasoning is to use randomization tests via computer simulations. A case study was conducted with primary preservice teachers after they had passed…

Scalar inference, the process by which we infer meanings stronger than what was explicitly said, has long been a central topic of investigation in theoretical semantics-pragmatics, as well as in psycholinguistics. Upon encountering the sentence "Mary ate some of the deep dish", for instance, hearers regularly compute the pragmatic…

The purpose of this dissertation is to develop principles and strategies for and identify limitations of multisite cluster randomized trials in the context of partially and fully nested designs. In the first study, I develop principles of estimation, sampling variability, and inference for studies that leverage multisite designs within the context…

A critically important balance in educational measurement between practical concerns and matters of technique has atrophied in recent decades, and as a result, some important issues in the field have not been adequately addressed. I start with the work of E. F. Lindquist, who exemplified the balance that is now wanting. Lindquist was arguably the…

Inferencing is an important and complex process required for successful reading comprehension. Previous research has suggested instruction in inferencing is effective at improving reading comprehension. However, varying definitions of inferencing is likely impacting how inferencing instruction is implemented in practice and inferencing ability is…

Theoretical models of reading comprehension have consistently highlighted the importance of inference generation in the meaning-making process. Additionally, previous research has indicated that instruction in making inferences is effective at improving inference ability and general reading comprehension. In this meta-analysis, we aimed to further…

The clustered observational study (COS) design is the observational study counterpart to the clustered randomized trial. In a COS, a treatment is assigned to intact groups, and all units within the group are exposed to the treatment. However, the treatment is non-randomly assigned. COSs are common in both education and health services research. In…

The present work focuses on the performance of two types of shrinkage priors--the horseshoe prior and the recently developed regularized horseshoe prior--in the context of inducing sparsity in path analysis and growth curve models. Prior research has shown that these horseshoe priors induce sparsity by at least as much as the "gold…

We analyze here how pre-service teachers explicate their views about the wave-particle duality of photons and what role it plays in their arguments supporting the quantum nature of light. The data for the analysis is provided by 12 written reports about the double-slit experiment with feeble light. The analysis is based on constructing semantic…