Drawing causal inference with observational studies is the central pillar of many disciplines. One sufficient condition for identifying the causal effect is that the treatment-outcome relationship is unconfounded conditional on the observed covariates. It is often believed that the more covariates we condition on, the more plausible this…

Single-case design is a repeated-measures research approach for the study of the effect of an intervention, and its importance is increasingly being recognized in education and psychology. We propose a Bayesian approach for estimating intervention effects in SCD. A Bayesian inference does not rely on large sample theories and thus is particularly…

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of the causal connectivity of the statements ("their total number of causal connections") and the modality of presentation of discourse ("oral-written") in the generation of emotion inferences by Spanish-speaking students. With this aim, we asked a group of Argentine college…

Arguably one of the most valuable tools for investigating pupil behaviour in an educational environment is systematic classroom observation. Classroom observation is often cited as having the potential to enable research of the learning process in action. Low inference classroom observation instruments are designed to record a sequence of data…

This study examines informal hypothesis testing in the context of drawing inferences of underlying probability distributions. Through a small-scale teaching experiment of three lessons, the study explores how fifth-grade students distinguish a non-uniform probability distribution from uniform probability distributions in a data-rich learning…

Light is used ubiquitously across science and engineering to explore, characterise, understand matter, and catalyse processes. Relative to its utility in science and engineering, very little research has been conducted on how students develop an understanding of light-matter interactions, especially at the quantum level, which is necessary to…

Access to definitions facilitates the learning of word meanings when novel words are encountered in reading. However, the memorial costs and benefits of inferring word meanings from context, compared to seeing definitions of unfamiliar words before reading, are not yet well understood. We conducted two experiments with adult L1 (English) and L2…

Conventionally, regression discontinuity analysis contrasts a univariate regression's limits as its independent variable, "R," approaches a cut point, "c," from either side. Alternative methods target the average treatment effect in a small region around "c," at the cost of an assumption that treatment assignment,…

Open-ended comprehension questions are a common type of assessment used to evaluate how well students understand one of multiple documents. Our aim is to use natural language processing (NLP) to infer the level and type of inferencing within readers' answers to comprehension questions using linguistic and semantic features within their responses.…

Researchers often include covariates when they analyze the results of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), valuing the increased precision of the estimates over the potential of inducing small-sample bias when doing so. In this paper, we develop a sufficient condition which ensures that the inclusion of covariates does not induce small-sample bias…

Coherent mental models for successful comprehension require inferences that establish semantic "bridges" between discourse constituents and "elaborations" that incorporate relevant background knowledge. While it is established that individual differences in the extent to which postsecondary students engage in these processes…

Despite the explosive growth in stereotype threat (ST) research over the decades, a substantive amount of variability in ST effects still cannot be explained by extant research. While some attribute this unexplained heterogeneity to yet unidentified ST mechanisms, we explored an alternate hypothesis that ST theory is often misspecified in…

A recent study claiming to provide a basis for gifted education to drop the construct of overexcitabilities in favor of the construct of openness to experience and align itself with the Five Factor Model and a talent development perspective on gifted education is shown to be without merit. An analysis shows that the study supports the conclusion…

The COVID-19 pandemic generated a new scenario in education, where technological resources mediate teaching and learning processes. This paper presents the development of a virtual teacher training experience aimed at promoting inferential reasoning in practicing and prospective mathematics teachers using inference problems on the Chi-square…

The present study reports a large, cross-sectional study of Mandarin-speaking children's ability to compute quantity implicatures. To chart the developmental trajectory of this pragmatic ability, we tested 225 Mandarin-speaking children aged 4-8 years on their interpretations of scalar and non-scalar implicatures, as well as numerals. Scalar…