Using a constructivist framework, eight senior chemistry majors were interviewed twice to determine: (i) structural inferences they are able to make from chemical and physical properties; and (ii) their ability to apply their inferences and understandings of these chemical and physical properties to solve tasks on the reactivity of organic…

The use of fixed (FE) and random effects (RE) in two-level hierarchical linear regression is discussed in the context of education research. We compare the robustness of FE models with the modelling flexibility and potential efficiency of those from RE models. We argue that the two should be seen as complementary approaches. We then compare both…

It is known that interventions are hard to assign randomly to subjects in social psychological studies, because randomized control is difficult to implement strictly and precisely. Thus, in nonexperimental studies and observational studies, controlling the impact of covariates on the dependent variables and addressing the robustness of the…

Sampling tasks and sampling distributions provide a fertile realm for investigating students' conceptions of variability. A project-designed teaching episode on samples and sampling distributions was team-taught in 6 research classrooms (2 middle school and 4 high school) by the investigators and regular classroom mathematics teachers. Data…

Recent efforts to motivate parents' involvement in their child's literacy development involve informing parents about how to incorporate literacy development into daily routines. Teacher leadership and communication are critical--the more teachers encourage and assist parents and caregivers in supporting their child's literacy development, the…

Recent reforms emphasize a shift in how students should learn and demonstrate knowledge of science. These reforms call for students to learn content knowledge using science and engineering practices, creating integrated science knowledge. While there is existing literature about the development of integrated science knowledge assessments, few…

This study explored the differential contribution of cognitive and motivational factors on the comprehension of an expository text in secondary school students. One hundred and fifty-five 7th and 8th grade students were assessed in prior knowledge, inferences, metacognition, reading motivation, topic interest, and reading comprehension of history…

Many researchers have long assumed imaginative play critical to the healthy cognitive, social, and emotional development of children, which has important implications for early-education policy and practice. But, the authors find, a careful review of the existing literature highlights a need for a better theory to clarify the nature of the…

How do human infants learn the causal dependencies between events? Evidence suggests that this remarkable feat can be achieved by observation of only a handful of examples. Many computational models have been produced to explain how infants perform causal inference without explicit teaching about statistics or the scientific method. Here, we…

The scale-invariant memory, perception, and learning (SIMPLE) model developed by Brown, Neath, and Chater (2007) formalizes the theoretical idea that scale invariance is an important organizing principle across numerous cognitive domains and has made an influential contribution to the literature dealing with modeling human memory. In the context…

An understanding of conditional probability is essential for students of inferential statistics as it is used in Null Hypothesis Tests. Conditional probability is also used in Bayes' theorem, in the interpretation of medical screening tests and in quality control procedures. This study examines the understanding of conditional probability of…

This response to the comments contains three main sections, each addressing a subset of the comments. In the first section, I will respond to the comments by Brennan, Haertel, and Moss. All of these comments suggest ways in which my presentation could be extended or improved; I generally agree with their suggestions, so my response to their…

The aim of this study is to reveal differences between attitudes and approaches of students from different types of high school and the first grade of university towards problem solving in chemistry. For this purpose, the scale originally developed by Mason and Singh (2010) to measure students' attitude and approaches towards problem solving in…

The purpose of this study is to assess the impact of a newly developed modules, Interactive Web-Based Visualization Tools for Gluing Undergraduate Fuel Cell Systems Courses system (IGLU), on learning motivations of engineering students using two samples (n[subscript 1] = 144 and n[subscript 2] = 135) from senior engineering classes. The…

Missing data is endemic in much educational research. However, practices such as step-wise regression common in the educational research literature have been shown to be dangerous when significant data are missing, and multiple imputation (MI) is generally recommended by statisticians. In this paper, we provide a review of these advances and their…