Technical documentation for educational tests focuses primarily on properties of individual scores at single points in time. Reliability, standard errors of measurement, item parameter estimates, fit statistics, and linking constants are standard technical features that external stakeholders use to evaluate items and individual scale scores.…

Analogical reasoning is a core facet of higher cognition in humans. Creating analogies as we navigate the environment helps us learn. Analogies involve reframing novel encounters using knowledge of familiar, relationally similar contexts stored in memory. When an analogy links a novel encounter with a familiar context, it can aid in problem…

Proving and refuting are fundamental aspects of mathematical practice that are intertwined in mathematical activity in which conjectures and proofs are often produced and improved through the back-and-forth transition between attempts to prove and disprove. One aspect underexplored in the education literature is the connection between this…

The purpose of this paper is to highlight issues related to students' personal inferences that arise when students verbally explain their justification for calculus statements. We conducted clinical interviews with three undergraduate students who had taken first-semester calculus but had not yet been exposed to formal proof writing activities…

Using data from teaching experiments and theories from quantitative reasoning, we built second-order accounts of students' mathematics with regards to how they conceived rate of change through operating on existing quantities. In this report, we explain three different ways STEM undergraduates structurally conceive rate of change as they…

A considerable amount of research has emerged in recent years concerning second language (L2) learner sensitivity to various information types. From this, Clahsen and Felser proposed the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH) to account for increased learner sensitivity to certain kinds of non-structural (e.g., contextual, discoursal, semantic, and…

Library and information science (LIS) research is becoming more quantitative. However, statistics is not extensively taught within LIS research methods courses, and statistics courses are uncommon within LIS programs. Previous research on statistics in LIS revealed that researchers have mainly relied on descriptive statistics in publications. This…

Randomized control trials are considered the pinnacle for causal inference. In many cases, however, randomization of participants in social work research studies is not feasible or ethical. This paper introduces the co-twin control design study as an alternative quasi-experimental design to provide evidence of causal mechanisms when randomization…

Background: For decades, education researchers have relied on the work of Campbell, Cook, and Shadish to help guide their thinking about valid impact estimates in the social sciences (Campbell & Stanley, 1963; Shadish et al., 2002). The foundation of this work is the "validity typology" and its associated "threats to…

We developed and field-tested an active learning exercise designed to provide biology students with the opportunity to consider key aspects of the nature of science as a method of inquiry, particularly the roles of observation and inference in the development of scientific explanations and how scientists deal with uncertainty. In the activity…

Adopting a cognitive perspective, this study examined roles of working memory capacity (WMC), first language (L1) syllogistic inferencing, and second language (L2) linguistic knowledge on literal and inferential understanding of L2 reading comprehension in adolescent L2 learners. Participants were 193 Korean ninth-grade learners of English. The…

Understanding scientific phenomena requires learners to construct mental models of causal systems. Simulation-based discovery learning offers learners the opportunity to construct mental models and test them against the behavior of a simulation. The purpose of this study was to investigate sequential patterns of learner actions and utterances…

Emotional intelligence, or the ability to perceive, interpret, and regulate emotions, has been linked to numerous adaptive outcomes. However, recent investigations have demonstrated that emotional intelligence can exert a nonlinear impact on motivational, interpersonal, and affective factors. Although past work has provided evidence of optimal…

Halo effects in teacher judgments, can occur when the assessment of one aspect of a person's achievement is generalised to another aspect of achievement for that same person. We conducted an experimental study in which participants (N = 107) had to grade vignettes of the same student in two different subjects. The first vignette described either a…

Although there is recognition that there may be differential outcomes for groups of students within schools, examination of outcomes for subgroups presents challenges to researchers and policymakers. It complicates analytic procedures, particularly when the number of students per school in the subgroup is small. We explored five alternatives for…