Numerous challenges, complexities, and considerations are associated with delivering Special Education supports and services. To meet the needs of students with disabilities (SWDs) in a school setting, a multidisciplinary team needs to work together closely. To create a functional foundation for collaboration, membership should include a special…

Teachers continually report receiving inadequate training and support in classroom management practices. If teachers do have the opportunity to receive professional development, most are designed as a one-time learning opportunity and do not provide any follow-up training or coaching. Performance feedback has been shown to improve teachers'…

This study evaluated the implementation of the school-based Prevent-Teach-Reinforce (PTR) model within multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) for elementary school students engaging in high levels of problem behavior. Three students and their classroom teachers in two public schools participated in the team-based PTR process during which they…

Children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) frequently engage in escape-maintained problem behavior, which can limit their access to academic instruction and lead to placement in more restrictive educational settings. While there are function-based interventions to treat escape-maintained problem behavior, these interventions…

In this dissertation I argue that truth-conditional semantics for vague predicates, combined with a Bayesian account of statistical inference incorporating knowledge of truth-conditions of utterances, generates false predictions regarding negations and metalinguistic inference. I thus propose a fundamentally probabilistic semantics for vagueness…

Rule-governed behavior (RGB) is behavior that is controlled by verbal descriptions of contingencies rather than by direct contact or a history of direct contact with the contingencies. Humans rely on RGB to navigate a multitude of life experiences, and in doing so, we avoid direct contact with destructive or harmful contingencies or contingencies…

A wide body of literature has documented the disproportionality in exclusionary discipline rates (Gregory et al., 2010; Losen et al., 2015; Office of Special Education Programs, 2020; Skiba, 2014; Welsh & Little, 2018). Students with disabilities or other minority backgrounds are removed from their classrooms at higher rates than their peers…

The intent of this study was to examine three high impact instructional strategies and determine their impact on self-efficacy in writing in fourth-grade and fifth-grade classrooms. Goal setting, goal tracking, and celebration of success are instructional strategies that are widely used with various capacities in the classroom. These strategies…

The implementation of effective classroom management strategies has been associated with increases in student academic engagement and decreases in student disruptive behavior. However, teacher-training programs often fail to provide pre-service teachers with the knowledge base and experience necessary to implement these strategies. Training…

The objective of Experiment I was to determine whether establishing conditioned reinforcement for engaging in math for pre-kindergarten students was possible using the three conditioning procedures outlined in previous research for conditioning book stimuli. The purpose of Experiment II was to determine whether this change in preference for…

Mattering is defined as feelings of significance and importance (Rosenberg & McCullough, 1981). Mattering can be enacted through feeling dependent on others and sharing in celebrations of achievement or periods of frustration. Moments of mattering can mediate the complex challenges that college students face through the duration of their…

An abundance of research exists supporting the use of functional analyses to assess and treat problem behavior. In contrast, little research has been conducted on the application of functional analysis (FA) procedures to academic behaviors. The current study attempted to fill this research gap by conducting an FA of academic responding for five…

I conducted a descriptive study consisting of 30 preschool participants with and without disabilities to examine the relation between the 3 bidirectional operants. The bidirectional operants were speaker-as-own-listener cusps, which included bidirectional verbal operants between people, bidirectional self-talk conversational units, and…

Reading interest is a significant predictor of reading achievement, with effects on both reading comprehension and vocabulary. We measured students' interest in reading as an estimate of duration of observable reading using whole intervals of silent-reading time. In Experiment 1, we assessed associations among interest in reading (i.e.,…

In this dissertation, the author presents two projects regarding teaching strategies that apply to an intelligent tutoring system (ITS). The author applied multiple-solution teaching methods to the ITSs. The first project is an ITS that aims to help college students learn how to use Computer-Aided-Design (CAD) software, FreeCAD ITS. The second…