Purpose: This research employs machine learning and mediation analysis, along with path analysis, to investigate the correlations between factors such as body mass index (BMI) and the occurrence of diabetes and heart disease among the Indian population. The objective is to enhance models that are specifically designed to accommodate lifestyles,…

External representations powerfully support and augment complex human behavior. When navigating, people often consult external representations to help them find the way to go, but do maps or verbal instructions improve spatial knowledge or support effective wayfinding? Here, we examine spatial knowledge with and without external representations in…

Background: In the United States, there is increased demand to expand the engineering workforce. Many military veterans have received technical training that can be leveraged in engineering. Their pursuit of engineering degrees has great potential to expand and diversify the engineering workforce. Purpose: This study examines the pathways of US…

In today's world, lifelong learning (LLL) is a key element of individual and societal success. However, despite knowing potential determinants of LLL, we do not yet understand how they interact to facilitate LLL. Therefore, the present study aims to verify the usefulness of the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) in predicting LLL. We applied a…

Students regularly encounter challenges and difficulties in their schoolwork. Mounting evidence suggests that the ways they cope with them can make a difference to their subsequent tenacity, engagement, learning, and achievement. To learn more about the factors that can foster productive coping, we conducted a study using a model based on…

The decomposition of the overall effect of a treatment into direct and indirect effects is here investigated with reference to a recursive system of binary random variables. We show how, for the single mediator context, the marginal effect measured on the log odds scale can be written as the sum of the indirect and direct effects plus a residual…

Previous studies have applied a variable-centered approach to conduct extensive investigations of preservice early childhood teachers' (PECTs') epistemic beliefs in the domain of mathematics (application-related beliefs, process-related beliefs, static orientation), enjoyment of mathematics, mathematics anxiety, mathematical content knowledge, and…

Camouflaging involves various strategies employed by autistic individuals to modulate the visibility of their autistic characteristics in social situations and is thought to be primarily motivated by psychosocial factors. Most studies to date have examined a limited number of psychosocial factors related to camouflaging. This study tested an…

Introduction" Previous research has found that family factors predict adolescents' academic burnout, but few studies have described the mechanisms underlying the relationship. At the same time, there is a lack of longitudinal data on the possible mechanisms. This study aimed to examine the relationship between family functioning and academic…

The negative effects of media multitasking have been addressed in previous studies, and the widespread adoption of online learning to control the outbreak of COVID-19 has further increased concerns about the media use, especially media multitasking, among adolescent students. However, very few studies have explored the protective factors against…

For over two decades now, the application of Citizen Science to Education has been evolving, and fundamental topics, such as the drivers of motivation to participate in Citizen Science projects, are still under discussion. Some recent developments, though, like the use of Artificial Intelligence to support data collection and validation, seem to…

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…

Mediation models have been widely used in many disciplines to better understand the underlying processes between independent and dependent variables. Despite their popularity and importance, the appropriate sample sizes for estimating those models are not well known. Although several approaches (such as Monte Carlo methods) exist, applied…

Predictors of academic success at university are of great interest to educators, researchers and policymakers. With more students studying online, it is important to understand whether traditional predictors of academic outcomes in face-to-face settings are relevant to online learning. This study modelled self-regulatory and demographic predictors…

Recent critiques of physics education research (PER) studies have revoiced the critical issues when drawing causal inferences from observational data where no intervention is present. In response to a call for a "causal reasoning primer" in PER, this paper discusses some of the fundamental issues in statistical causal inference. In…