JURE 2012 Programme book - EARLI Jure 2012

Monday, July 23 JURE 2012 Conference Programme
As for the translation of research, the crucial question is how cognitive neuroscience can inform
and improve education and vice versa. There is a growing awareness that we should build more
and better research-­‐school collaborations between researchers and practitioners (e.g. Stein &
Fisher, 2011). Within these collaborations, researchers should help teachers to become more
“literate” in neuroscience, and teachers should help researchers to become more “literate” in the
issues and problems related to classroom practice (Ansari et al., 2011). In general, one of the
goals is to replace the “neuromyths” which have become accepted in education by evidence-­‐
based theories of learning on which the educational practices can be based upon. The workshop
will also further elaborate on the concept of “evidence” in evidence-­‐based educational practice.
The key question which will be addressed in the workshop builds upon the answers to the
previous questions but this time it is about the future rather than the past: How do we build the
bridges between cognitive neuroscience and education? Can we identify some general principles
and mechanisms? The workshop will discuss some of the conceptual and methodological
frameworks which are proposed to guide the construction of these bridges. For example, models
of educational intervention research might include a randomized “classroom trials” link –
modeled after the “clinical trials” stage of medical research – between the initial development of
an intervention and the implementation of it (Levin & O’Donnell, 1999).
PDC.1.3. Structural Equation Modeling: Basic workshop
Professional Development Course, 13.30-­‐15.00, Room: VG CIP-­‐Pool
Dylan Molenaar
Meet Ricardo: Ricardo is a PhD student studying the circumstances in which people comply to
‘sensation seeking’ (e.g., bungee jumping, karaoke singing, binge drinking, etc.). Currently,
Ricardo is interested in investigating whether sensation seeking can be predicted from the
personality attribute ‘extraversion’ (e.g., being outgoing, enjoying company, enjoying parties,
etc.). To investigate this, he designed a study in which he administered a questionnaire that
measures the tendency to comply to sensation seeking, and he administered an extraversion
questionnaire. After a long period of data collection, he started his data analyses. To address his
question whether sensation seeking can be predicted from extraversion, he first took the
summed item scores on both the sensation seeking questionnaire and the extraversion
questionnaire. Next, he submitted these scores to a regression analysis in SPSS and observed
whether the regression was significant. Unfortunately, it was not... End of the story for Ricardo.
In this workshop you will learn what Ricardo could have done to address his question in a more
appropriate way, possibly resulting in more favorable results concerning his hypothesis.
Specifically, you will learn that analyzing summed item scores is a suboptimal way to infer
relations among theoretical constructs. In the workshop, a more explicit and appropriate
statistical approach will be discussed. This approach goes by the name Structural Equation
Modeling (SEM).
SEM is a highly flexible technique that enables statistical modeling of relations among a set of
variables. For instance, in the case of Ricardo, a SEM analysis would require him to set up an
appropriate measurement model for both ‘sensation seeking’ and ‘extraversion’ and specify the
hypothesized relations among them. This workshop focusses on these aspects of SEM, i.e.,
measurement models, structural models, hypotheses tests, model fit, and model modification.
After the workshop you will be able to analyze data similar to those of Ricardo using the Mplus
program, and thus become more successful than Ricardo!
16