Recently, with the development of more powerful and accurate computational tools, the inclusion of new didactic materials in the classroom is known to have increased. However, the form in which these materials can be used to enhance the learning process is still under debate. Many different methodologies have been suggested for constructing new…

A number of professions rely on exercise prescription to improve health or athletic performance, including coaching, fitness/personal training, rehabilitation, and exercise physiology. It is therefore advisable that the professionals involved learn the various tools available for designing effective training programs. Mathematical modeling of…

A computational experiment that investigates single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) has been developed and employed in an upper-level undergraduate physical chemistry laboratory course. Computations were carried out to determine the electronic structure, radial breathing modes, and the influence of the nanotube's diameter on the…

A computational experiment that investigates the optical activity of the amino acid valine has been developed for an upper-level undergraduate physical chemistry laboratory course. Hybrid density functional theory calculations were carried out for valine to confirm the rule that adding a strong acid to a solution of an amino acid in the l…

The problem of factor score indeterminacy implies that the factor and the error scores cannot be completely disentangled in the factor model. It is therefore proposed to compute Harman's factor score predictor that contains an additive combination of factor and error variance. This additive combination is discussed in the framework of classical…

It is now well-established that intrinsic variations in human neural and behavioral activity tend to exhibit scaling laws in their fluctuations and distributions. The meaning of these scaling laws is an ongoing matter of debate between isolable causes versus pervasive causes. A spiking neural network model is presented that self-tunes to critical…

The purpose of this study was to examine the utility of a brief assessment for the selection of an effective instruction to increase fluency performance on computation math problems. Participants were four general education third-grade students who performed below the median score on a classwide administered multiple math skills probe. Students…

Adult second language (L2) learners often experience difficulty producing and perceiving non-native phonological contrasts. Even highly proficient bilinguals, who have been exposed to an L2 for long periods of time, struggle with difficult contrasts, such as /r/-/l/ for Japanese learners of English. To account for the relative ease or difficulty…

Making decisions over multivariate time series is an important topic which has gained significant interest in the past decade. A time series is a sequence of data points which are measured and ordered over uniform time intervals. A multivariate time series is a set of multiple, related time series in a particular domain in which domain experts…

Objective: Sample size and statistical power calculation should consider clustering effects when schools are the unit of randomization in intervention studies. The objective of the current study was to investigate how student outcomes are clustered within schools in an obesity prevention trial. Method: Baseline data from the Food, Health &…

Students with learning disabilities score lower than other at-risk groups on state standardized assessment tests. Educators are searching for intervention strategies to improve math achievement for students with learning disabilities. The study examined the effects of a mathematics intervention known as Cover, Copy, and Compare for learning basic…

Improving foundational academic skills for elementary level students continues to be a challenge for classroom teachers. This study implemented weekly progress monitoring procedures using curriculum-based measurement assessments in conjunction with weekly individual student-teacher graphing and goal-setting conferences to determine the effect the…

An upper-level undergraduate or beginning graduate project is described in which students obtain the Lennard-Jones 6-12 potential parameters for Ne[subscript 2] and Ar[subscript 2] from ab initio calculations and use the results to express pairwise interactions between the atoms in clusters containing up to N = 60 atoms. The students use simulated…

The recent technological advancements have led to the availability of a plethora of heterogenous datasets, e.g., images tagged with geo-location and descriptive keywords. An object in these datasets is described by a set of high-dimensional feature vectors. For example, a keyword-tagged image is represented by a color-histogram and a…

Today's Internet-based crime reporting systems make timely and anonymous crime reporting possible. However, these reports also result in a rapidly growing set of unstructured text files. Complicating the problem is that the information has not been filtered or guided in a detective-led interview resulting in much irrelevant information. To…