Experience and Explanation: Using Videogames to Prepare Students for Formal Instruction in Statistics

Well-designed digital games can deliver powerful experiences that are difficult to provide through traditional instruction, while traditional instruction can deliver formal explanations that are not a natural fit for gameplay. Combined, they can accomplish more than either can alone. An experiment tested this claim using the topic of statistics, where people’s everyday experiences often conflict with normative statistical theories and a videogame might provide an alternate set of experiences for students to draw upon. The research used a game called Stats Invaders!, a variant of the classic videogame Space Invaders. In Stats Invaders!, the locations of descending alien invaders follow probability distributions, and players need to infer the shape of the distributions to play well. The experiment tested whether the game developed participants’ intuitions about the structure of random events and thereby prepared them for future learning from a subsequent written passage on probability distributions. Community-college students who played the game and then read the passage learned more than participants who only read the passage.     

Session Limits and the Probability of the Next Visit

Among the approaches that have been used to balance the demand for services with the agency’s service resources is to limit the number of visits available to clients. Such limits have been introduced, however, without any empirical basis for estimating the impact of a limit on the overall demand for services or the proportion of clients. The probability of a next visit is a statistic that addresses these shortcomings. Analyses indicate that there is a fairly stable pattern to students use of counseling services, that this pattern is affected by the imposition of a limit, and that reducing the probabilities of a next visit for the first, second, and third visits has a greater impact on reducing total service demand than imposing a limit at the 12th visit, the most commonly reported point     

Multi-candidate reduction: Sentence compression as a tool for document summarization tasks

This article examines the application of two single-document sentence compression techniques to the problem of multi-document summarization—a “parse-and-trim” approach and a statistical noisy-channel approach. We introduce the multi-candidate reduction (MCR) framework for multi-document summarization, in which many compressed candidates are generated for each source sentence. These candidates are then selected for inclusion in the final summary based on a combination of static and dynamic features. Evaluations demonstrate that sentence compression is a valuable component of a larger multi-document summarization framework.     

Factors affecting placement decisions of children following short-term emergency care

Case files of 424 residents at an emergency treatment center for abused and neglected children were used to generate a beginning set of variables which, in combination, predicted whether or not children from the center would be discharged to their natural family environment. Variables with descending order of predictive significance were place from which the child was admitted, the length of time spent in treatment, the age and the race of the child, Other variables--the number of siblings, the child's sex and the presence of physical/sexual abuse--did not approach significance.     

An international collaborative investigation of beginning seventh grade students' understandings of scientific inquiry: Establishing a baseline

Although understandings of scientific inquiry (as opposed to conducting inquiry) are included in science education reform documents around the world, little is known about what students have learned about inquiry during their elementary school years. This is partially due to the lack of any assessment instrument to measure understandings about scientific inquiry. However, a valid and reliable assessment has recently been developed and published, Views About Scientific Inquiry (VASI; Lederman et al. [2014], Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 51, 65–83). The purpose of this large-scale international project was to collect the first baseline data on what beginning middle school students have learned about scientific inquiry during their elementary school years. Eighteen countries/regions spanning six continents including 2,634 students participated in the study. The participating countries/regions were: Australia, Brazil, Chile, Egypt, England, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Mainland China, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey, and the United States. In many countries, science is not formally taught until middle school, which is the rationale for choosing seventh grade students for this investigation. This baseline data will simultaneously provide information on what, if anything, students learn about inquiry in elementary school, as well as their beginning knowledge as they enter secondary school. It is important to note that collecting data from all of the approximately 200 countries globally was not humanly possible, and it was also not possible to collect data from every region of each country. The results overwhelmingly show that students around the world at the beginning of grade seven have very little understandings about scientific inquiry. Some countries do show reasonable understandings in certain aspects but the overall picture of understandings of scientific inquiry is not what is hoped for after completing 6 years of elementary education in any country.