The human brain's ability to adapt and change in response to environmental inputs drives nearly all forms of learning throughout the lifespan. The unique plasticity of the human brain allows for the uptake of sociocultural inventions, such as reading and mathematics, through widespread changes across a range of cortical areas and white matter…

The purpose of this research was to explore the perceptions of student affairs administrators, working in both public and private higher education institutions, regarding how they learned to use technology and gain insight into how their work would evolve in the future. While the COVID-19 pandemic affected everyone in the higher education…

Occupations in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) are growing faster than all other fields in the United States. While this is exciting, there is concern that many of these positions will go unfilled, as students in STEM are leaving their educational pursuits at an alarming rate. The following two studies provide an in-depth…

Through multiple educational reforms, China has pursued developing well-rounded learners with solid content knowledge, higher-order thinking skills, and the ability to transfer knowledge to real-world problem spaces. The imbalance of learning resources between urban and rural China, however, has caused disadvantages for learners in rural China to…

The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the mechanisms involved in phonetic learning of an unfamiliar accent, focusing on understanding what processes underlie changes to phonetic category structure, how such learning affects subsequent online lexical processing, and whether the same mechanisms that underlie learning for a single speaker…

Spatio-temporal processes are ubiquitous and prevalent across disciplines. Understanding the mechanisms underlying processes and integrating this information into models is of great interest, as it can improve forecasting accuracy and align with scientific motivation. Examples of such models include Partial Differential Equation (PDE) Models or…

The three research papers completed and compiled to make up this dissertation explore the relationship between social presence and social construction of knowledge in asynchronous online discussion forums in higher education courses in the instructional technology field. Paper 1 is a literature review of the interaction analysis model (IAM)…

Research identifies several aspects of school climate and confirms the importance of parental satisfaction with school climate in terms of student learning. The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has a highly competitive market for international schools, and families living in this region have experienced a disruption in their children's…

Bullying within the clinical environment is a pervasive issue that significantly impacts prelicensure nursing students. The aim of this study was to describe prelicensure nursing students' experiences of and reactions to bullying by registered nurses (RNs) during their clinical experience. The qualitative research design involved narrative…

With the widespread use of technology in education, the nature and role of technology in the process of learning are becoming increasingly difficult to understand. There is a need to shift the focus of education technology from innovating around tools to innovating around designing new digital learning environments. Designing digital learning…

Learning is a complex, subjective process. An important perspective on learning is that anyone, regardless of their level of education, can participate in learning about science and contribute to their community. The public increasingly looks towards online resources to find answers to challenges, so it is necessary that people become empowered to…

The concept of trauma has garnered interest since the Vietnam War and continues to be a visible topic (Center for Substance Abuse Treatment [CSAT], 2014) in the literature. Research has determined that the prevalence of trauma is widespread and its effects are potentially far-reaching, often outlasting the event for many years (Substance Abuse and…

The purpose of this study was to explore the influence of curricular organization on student cognitive load and student performance in online learning environments. The findings of this study contribute to the development of usable instruction design principles for online education. This research study used the lens of cognitive load theory to…

This mixed-methods study aims to determine if the use of video communication can positively impact the self-efficacy reported by caregivers. Three inquiry questions guided the study. First, how can the use of informative, targeted videos influence the self-efficacy reported by a caregiver? Next, how well do caregivers understand what is expected…

Using a sequential explanatory mixed methods design, this study was designed to acquire quantitative and qualitative data that expose community college student perceptions on multimodal compositions compared to traditional writing practices. As traditional writing continues to be privileged in college writing classrooms, a critical pedagogy…