Students often find that learning to program is hard. Introductory programming courses have high drop-out rates and students do not learn to program well. This paper presents experiences from three educational institutions where introductory programming courses were improved by adopting Python as the first programming language and roles of variables as an aid in understanding program behavior. ...

The purpose of this study was to contribute to the construct validity of the scores from Rose’s (2003) 34-item Ideal Mentor Scale (IMS) and to examine whether male and female doctoral students value different attributes in their ideal mentor. Two hundred and twenty-four doctoral students from colleges (Education, Public Health, Nursing, Arts and Sciences, Engineering, and Business) throughout a...

This paper tests risk and overreaction explanations of the book-to-market equity (BE/ME) premium in returns by focusing on the joint relationship between distress and BE/ME. Within the most distressed firms, the difference in returns between high and low book-to-market securities is more than twice as large as that in non-distressed firms, and is largely driven by extremely low returns on firms...

and we acknowledge the contributions of participants at these conferences. All errors or omissions are our own. Abstract Were Australian Internet stock returns unusual? We examine daily returns on a primary sample of the 21 Australian Internet stocks in the Merrill Lynch (Australian) Internet Stock Index at the climax of the boom-bust period, between 21 September 1999 and 20 September 2000. App...

Interpersonal curiosity (IPC) is the desire for new information about people. Fifty-one IPC items were administered to 321 participants (248 women, 73 men), along with other measures of curiosity and personality. Three factors were identified from which five-item subscales were developed that had good internal consistency: Curiosity about Emotions, Spying and Prying, and Snooping. Confirmatory ...

The Children’s Perception of Interparental Conflict Scale (CPIC) is based on the cognitive-contextual framework for understanding interparental conflict. This study investigates the factor validity and the invariance of two factor models of CPIC within a sample of Portuguese adolescents and emerging adults (14 to 25 years old; N = 677). At the subscale level, invariance analyses (configural and...

We assess and apply the term-structure model introduced by Nelson and Siegel (1987) and re-interpreted by Diebold and Li (2003) as a modern three-factor model of level, slope and curvature. First, we ask whether the model is a member of the affine class, and we find that it is not. Hence the poor forecasting performance recently documented for affine term structure models in no way implies that...

Purpose – To examine issues of standardization and adaptation in global marketing strategy and to explain the dynamics of standardization. Design/methodology/approach – This is a conceptual research paper that has been developed based on gaps in prior frameworks of standardization/adaptation. A three-factor model of standardization/adaptation of global marketing strategy was developed. The thre...

The Biggs’ Study Process Questionnaire (SPQ) was used to test competing models of students’ approaches to learning in a sample of undergraduate students (n = 125) from an inquiry based Bachelor of Health Sciences program. In addition to an internal consistency and test-retest reliability analysis of the SPQ, confi rmatory factor analysis was used to evaluate the goodness-of-fi t of two competin...