Due to the complexity and unpredictability of a concussive injury, it is difficult to formulate and provide appropriate individualized care for concussed student-athletes. Therefore, faculty in higher education play an important collaborative role in supporting student-athletes' academic recovery following a concussion. This area of concussion…

Over the past decade, infographics have become a ubiquitous genre-circulated in mass media, posted on walls in public spaces, shared on social media sites; and more recently, assigned as reading and writing assignments in academic classes. Their ubiquity and appeal as a visual representation of processes and data make them a promising genre for…

This study used a mixed methods research design to examine teachers' perceptions of and knowledge about Universal Design for Learning (UDL). It specifically investigated whether participant teachers viewed the UDL instructional model as one that has the potential to improve student outcomes and whether the training in UDL was sufficient to allow…

The field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) has observed how interest-driven extramural English (EE), an outside-of-classroom engagement with English (Sundqvist, 2009), can facilitate language development. Research supports the potential EE has when brought into formal English language teaching (ELT) settings; However,…

A number of theories exist to explain why people gesture when speaking, when they produce gesture, and the origin of their gestures. This dissertation focuses on four individual variables that can influence gesture: (i) familiarity, (ii) imageability, (iii) codability, and (iv) motor experience. Four experiments were designed to determine how each…

Productive hiring practices can increase the opportunity that every student will be taught by an effective teacher. Integrity of hiring practices is sacrificed when decision-making models, methods, and protocols fall short due to improper implementation. To compensate for the lack of information generated from poor hiring resources and protocols,…

Driven by the critical period hypothesis (CPH), Kachru's (1985) World Englishes paradigm, and Krashen's (1982) theory of second language acquisition (SLA), this study examined instructors and learners' attitudes toward English as an International Language (EIL) speaking instruction in Saudi Arabia and whether exposure to EIL speaking instruction…

A door, a mirror, and a window are metaphors for how Service-Learning Teaching Assistants (S-LTA's) made meaning from the unfamiliar in their service-learning (S-L) experience. Standing at the threshold of the door, the participants entered the experience and take you through their feelings as they encountered the unfamiliar. Once passed the door,…

The experimenter conducted three experiments to compare incidental language acquisition of familiar and non-familiar stimuli, and asses the effects of specific pairing experiences on the emergence of bidirectional naming (BiN) for familiar and non-familiar stimuli. In Experiment I the experimenter assessed the numbers of accurate untaught listener…

This dissertation examines the Chinese practice of adopting English names in the context of Chinese international students studying at American institutions of higher education. This work adopts the position of Bourdieu (1991) that there is a fundamental unity of the market, in that economic and political capital is connected to linguistic and…

In Asia, English is used as a lingua franca (ELF; Kirkpatrick, 2010). For Thai university graduates to be successful in their future careers, being able to understand various accents with Thailand's major trading partners, particularly American, Chinese, and Japanese, seems vital. As a listening test which includes these accents is needed, the…

Lexical inferencing is considered a listening strategy that is commonly employed by advanced EFL (English as a Foreign Language) listeners and a factor that contributes to successful listening comprehension. However, investigations of the factors that influence inferencing success in listening as well as how much each factor contributes to success…

Since the evolution of the Internet, online instruction has grown significantly and expected to continue. In the United States, 90% of colleges and universities provide online programs to between 6.7 million and 15 million students. Despite the benefits and expected growth of online instruction, researchers have found challenges in this learning…

The need to prepare students with 21st-century skills via technology integration into the classrooms is a must. This need has led to innovations in pedagogy such as flipped classroom models. This phenomenon makes use of technology to deliver the content of the class at home, allowing classroom time to be more productively spent extending the…

This cross-sectional study assessed the relation between spatial skills and mathematics in 854 participants across kindergarten, third grade, and sixth grade. Specifically, the study probed for a threshold for spatial skills when performing mathematics, above which spatial scores and mathematics scores would be significantly less related. This…