Collaborative learning provides learners with significant opportunities to collaborate on solving problems and creating better products. There has been a growing utilization of adaptive and intelligent systems to support productive learning while promoting collaborative practices. One of the core capabilities of these adaptive and intelligent…

Deep learning techniques are being unified for decision support in various applications. However, it remains challenging to train robust deep learning models, due to the inherent insufficient labeled data that is usually time-consuming and labor-intensive. Self-supervised learning is a feature representation learning paradigm to learn robust…

When multiple clients are collaboratively learning and training a shared model, incentives problems can arise. The clients may have different learning objectives and application domains, or they may be competitors whose participation in the learning system could reduce their competitive advantage. While collaborative learning is a powerful…

The purpose of this dissertation is to develop a virtual, collaborative parent education program for parents of school-age children. Although parenting websites and online discussion forums have been around since the world wide web became widely available in the early 1990s (Lupton, Pedersen & Thomas, 2016), a rise in the use and necessity of…

Exploring clinical education models that may increase the number of clinical placements while improving learning outcomes is an important step in preparing competent entry-level speech-language pathologists. Placement shortages play an important role in the urgency of evaluating the efficacy of alternative clinical education models in SLP. The 2:1…

Although there are some federal and state statutes and regulations regarding principal evaluation systems, there are a variety of principal evaluation systems across the nation and in California. California's principal evaluation system is at the district level, meaning that implementation and effectiveness rest solely on the district. A district…

Most mathematicians state mathematics is a field of beauty, creativity, and innovation, yet what is echoed by students is not how mathematics allows students to explore, but rather the ways in which it constrains and does not necessitate creativity. In comparison, many students associate coding with freedom, and the ability to create and express…

As educators, our goal is to help our students be successful, but in order to accomplish this, we need to understand what factors contribute to student success. One factor, small-group active learning, has been correlated to improved academic outcomes; however, the magnitude of this improvement can vary across different courses, different types of…

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore how high school teachers describe problem-based learning as an instructional model for student learning in various academic disciplines in the United States. The research was grounded in constructivist learning theory and Problem-based learning (PBL). The study addressed two research…

Dialogue act (DA) classification plays an important role in understanding, interpreting and modeling dialogue. Dialogue acts (DAs) represent the intended meaning of an utterance, which is associated with the illocutionary force (or the speaker's intention), such as greetings, questions, requests, statements, and agreements. In natural language…

This dissertation will look at large scale collaboration through the lens of online communities to answer questions about what makes a collaboration persist. Results address how collaborations attract contributions, behaviors that could give rise to patterns seen in the data, and the properties of collaborations that drive those behaviors. It is…

The purpose of this action research study was to link together theory and educational leaders' practice to give form to and improve their ability to make ethically sound decisions. The questions that guided the study included: 1. How can I, as a superintendent, lead the principals I work with to use all four ethical paradigms in their own decision…

Many of the digital tools teachers currently implement in their courses are still embedded within the hierarchical banking principles that humanities instructors have long abandoned in favor of problem-posing and collaborative models. The institutional learning management system (LMS) is in need of a redesign if humanities educators, especially…

Many important real-world decision-making problems involve group interactions among individuals with purely informational interactions. Such situations arise for example in jury deliberations, expert committees, medical diagnoses, etc. We model the purely informational interactions of group members, where they receive private information and act…

This dissertation explored the roles schools can play in the successful outcomes of large carnivore or keystone reintroduction projects. Schools are more than centers for knowledge acquisition--they connect their community and disseminate information quickly to a wide audience. This study took place in California's Eastern Sierra Nevada, a…