Anticipatory motor planning abilities mature as children grow older, develop throughout childhood and are likely to be stable till the late sixties. In the seventh decade of life, motor planning performance dramatically declines, with anticipatory motor planning abilities falling to levels of those exhibited by children. At present, the processes enabling successful anticipatory motor planning ...

Interest in end-of-year accountability exams has increased dramatically since the passing of the NCLB law in 2001. This push has impacted educational research in a wide variety of ways, including a strong desire to be able to model student work in order to make conclusive statements about what students know and how this relates to how they will perform on end-of-year standardized exams. This th...

There is an infinite variety of motions ranging from our daily activities to the exceptional movement of an athlete or a musician. Based on his extensive observation of child growth, Gesell (1945) stated some empirical rules. In particular, he noted that the development of motion progresses from a generally integrated state to an individualized state in which individual sections have specialize...

Probabilistic models with one or more latent variables are designed to report on a corresponding number of skills or cognitive attributes. Multidimensional skill profiles offer additional information beyond what a single test score can provide, if the reported skills can be identified and distinguished reliably. Many recent approaches to skill profile models are limited to dichotomous data and ...

Learning practical nursing skills is an important part of the baccalaureate in nursing. However, many newly qualified nurses lack practical skill proficiency required to ensure safe patient care. The invasive skill peripheral vein cannulation (PVC) is particularly challenging to learn and perform. This study explored conditions influencing nursing students' learning and performance of the techn...

In experiments including over 450 university-level students, we studied the effectiveness and time efficiency of several levels of feedback complexity in simple, computer-based training utilizing static question sequences. The learning domain was simple vector math, an essential skill in introductory physics. In a unique full factorial design, we studied the relative effects of “knowledge of co...

We investigated the effect of increases in task complexity on the dual-task draw-and-pass performance of professional rugby league players. Moreover, we determined the relationship between dual-task draw-and-pass proficiency measured in isolation and draw-and-pass performances as they occurred in actual competitive matches. In Study 1, 12 rugby league players performed 2-on-1 and 3-on-2 attacki...

An increasing number of automated models can make inferences about learners’ understanding based on their problem solving choices in interactive educational technologies. One potential use of these models is to personalize feedback interventions. We investigate using the output of an inverse planning model to choose feedback activities for learners. The inverse planning model uses the patterns ...

The brain demonstrates a remarkable capacity to undergo structural and functional change in response to experience throughout the lifespan. Evidence suggests that, in many domains of skill acquisition, the manifestation of this neuroplasticity depends on the age at which learning begins. The fact that most skills are acquired late in childhood or in adulthood has proven to be a limitation in st...

views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the author and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the funding agencies. Abstract This thesis addresses the problem of sensor-based skill composition for robotic assembly tasks. Skills are robust, reactive strategies for executing recurring tasks in our domain. In everyday ...