Height and Happiness in a Developing Country

© 2014, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.This paper analyzes the Indonesian Family Life Survey to estimate the relationship between height and happiness in a developing country, Indonesia. This paper finds that tall men and women are happier than their short counterparts and that the magnitude of the relationship is large. More important, a parsimonious set of channels is identified to substantially explain the relationship between height and happiness: education and earnings for men, and education and relative position of earnings for women. However, for men but not for women, height still exhibits a non-negligible relationship with happiness even after controlling for an extensive array of covariates

Metacognition and motivation as predictors for mathematics performance of Belgian elementary school children

In this paper, we investigate the role of metacognitive postdiction skills, intrinsic motivation and prior proficiency in mathematics as Propensity factors within the opportunity-propensity (O-P) model of learning. We tested Belgian children from Grade 1 till 6 in January and June. The study revealed overlapping yet different predictors for mathematical accuracy and fluency, which led us to the practical recommendation for teachers to pay attention to both aspects of mathematics. The metacognitive postdiction skills of children were related to accuracy in mathematics during the whole elementary school period. In addition, we observed that children evaluated their own performance as worse when they were slower in Grades 3 and 4. Intrinsic motivation was related to accuracy but not to fluency in Grade 3. Especially prior mathematical accuracy mattered as a propensity factor. More than half of the variance in accuracy and less than one-fifth of the variance in fluency in January predicted the performances of children for mathematics in June, a finding that highlights the importance of longitudinal designs including students' prior mathematical accuracy' as well. Finally, we observed that poor mathematics performers are less intrinsically motivated, and less metacognitively accurate. Moreover, they overestimate their performances more often than well-performing peers in all grades, stressing the importance of paying attention to these aspects in mathematics education

A Coupled Reactive-Transport Model for Electrokinetic Remediation

In this chapter, we present a model for the reactive-transport of chemical species through partially saturated porous media for electrokinetic remediation processes. A generalized theoretical model is presented, easily adaptable to specific remediation setups, target contaminants and supporting matrices; and we give detailed guidelines for the implementation of tailor-made numerical methods for the computer-aided solution. The model is subdivided into two coupled modules: one for reactive-transport, numerically solved by means of a non-linear finite element method; and another one for chemical equilibrium, solved using an enhanced Newton–Raphson method