Teaching and Research

A ghostwriter is a writer who writes books, articles, stories, reports or other texts that are officially credited to another person.

Sabotage is when a student prevents others from completing their work. This includes cutting pages out of library books, deleting data from classmate's computer or otherwise willfully disrupting the experiments of others.

Cross tabulation (or crosstabs for short) is a statistical process that summarizes categorical data to create a contingency table. They are heavily used in survey research, business intelligence, engineering and scientific research. They provide a basic picture of the interrelation between two variables and can help find interactions between them.

The term epistemic feedback is a form of feedback which refers to an interplay between what is being observed (or measured) and the result of the observation. The concept can apply to a process to obtain information, where the process, itself, changes the information when being obtained. For example, instead of quietly asking customers for their opinions about food in a restaurant, making an announcement about food quality, as being tested in a survey, could cause cooks to focus on having high-quality results.

When a probability density function has multiple local maxima, it is common to refer to all of the local maxima as modes of the distribution. Such a continuous distribution is called multimodal (as opposed to unimodal).

Uncertainty reduction theory comes from the sociopsychological perspective. It addresses the basic process of how we gain knowledge about other people. According to the theory, people have difficulty with uncertainty, they want to be able to predict behavior and therefore they are motivated to seek more information about people.

Formative assessment or diagnostic testing is a range of formal and informal assessment procedures employed by teachers during the learning process in order to modify teaching and learning activities to improve student attainment. It typically involves qualitative feedback (rather than scores) for both student and teacher that focuses on the details of content and performance.

An intelligent tutoring system (ITS) is a computer system that aims to provide immediate and customized instructions or feedback to learners, usually without intervention from a human teacher.