This paper uses insights from behavioral economics to explain a particularly surprising borrowing phenomenon: One in six undergraduate students offered interest-free loans turn them down. Models of impulse control predict that students may optimally reject subsidized loans to avoid excessive consumption during school. Using the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS), we investigate st...

Corrected authors’ contributions MN made substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, analysis and interpretation of data, and drafted the manuscript. DA made substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, analysis and interpretation of data. MC made substantial contributions to the inception of the study, revision of the manuscript, and is ...

The work described in this paper tackles learning and communication between cognitive artificial agents. Focus is on dialogue as the only way for agents to acquire knowledge, as it often happens in natural situations. Since this restriction has scarcely been studied as such in artificial intelligence (AI), until now, this research aims at providing a dialogue model devoted to knowledge acquisit...

Performance benchmarks are proposed to assist undergraduate psychology programs in defining their missions and goals as well as documenting their effectiveness. Experienced academic program reviewers compared their experiences to formulate a developmental framework of attributes of undergraduate programs focusing on activity in 8 domains: curriculum, assessment issues, student learning outcomes...

First-year students often become discouraged during introductory biology courses when repeated attempts to understand concepts nevertheless result in poor test scores. This challenge is exacerbated by traditional course structures that impose premature judgments on students' achievements. Repeated testing has been shown to benefit student ability to recognize and recall information, but an effe...

Should You Compete or Cooperate with Your Schoolmates? Building upon some education studies finding that cooperative behaviour in class yields better achievements among students, this paper presents a simple model showing that free riding incentives lead to an insufficient degree of cooperation between schoolmates, which in turn decreases the overall achievement. A cooperative learning approach...

This paper presents an application of formal concept analysis to the study of student assessment data. Formal concept analysis (FCA) is an algebraic framework for data analysis and knowledge representation that has been proven useful in a wide range of application areas such as life sciences, psychology, sociology, linguistics, information technology and computer science. We use the FCA approac...

It would be unlikely for any first year programming class to be solely composed of novices. We all have students with a range of abilities, and this generates challenges as to the best way in which to manage and teach the class. The students at the top need to be enthused whilst we provide extra help to the students at the bottom, and try not to demotivate the ones in the middle. This paper rep...