While understanding the concept of audience is an important step in learning to write, few studies have explored how student writers conceptualize audience in academic and nonacademic settings. This dissertation explores how college students enrolled in a first-year composition course conceptualize and operationalize audience and examines how the…

Educational leaders today are well versed in the complex and often overwhelming nature of their respective roles. The difficulty of educational leadership increases exponentially when implementing innovative practices like competency-based learning that challenge every aspect of the traditional structure and function of schools, thereby requiring…

The problem being studied was that although humor provides positive effects on student learning, teaching quality, and effectiveness, there are many difficulties in building a professional identity with the use of humor. The purpose of this qualitative autoethnographic study was to explore how humor could shape a professional's identity and be…

DEVS (Discrete Event System Specification) is a formalism that was introduced in the mid-1970s by Bernard Zeigler, for modeling and analysis of discrete event systems. DEVS is essentially a formal mathematical language for specifying complex systems through models that can be simulated and has been executed in object-oriented software, DEVSJava…

A growing body of academic writing literature has been devoted to studying the rhetorical patterns and language use in diverse academic texts. One of the central goals of these studies is to demystify these texts to acquaint writers, particularly less experienced ones, with the genre conventions. However, Teaching Philosophy Statements (TPS) as a…

A perennial problem for many first-year composition (FYC) instructors is deciding what curricular materials to use to teach their students about rhetoric and composition and how to use those resources to enable their students to practice and hone their writing skills. This dissertation argues that humor writing is a viable option as it offers…

The purpose of this action research study was to investigate and improve the school choice experience for students in a large urban school district on the East Coast. Participants in Cycle 1 were comprised of middle and high school staff, and data was collected via surveys, semi-structured interviews, and document analysis. Action steps included…

The public discourse about teaching has been shaped by actors often far removed from the classroom. In the face of education reform organizations, neoliberal and conservative politicians, and news media that amplify salacious and simplistic stories, teachers' voices have often been drowned out. However, the rise of blogging, social media, and…

This case study explores what K-12 students learn from a 13-week class activity about attracting attention to civic issues on social media. This research responds to calls by scholars of civic education to expand notions of civic engagement and digital citizenship, which often have focused on urging students to protect their reputations in digital…

The research-to-practice gap (RPG) is a continued concern in education, with limited knowledge and use of evidence-based practices by school practitioners frequently cited in the educational literature. Although studies exist evaluating practitioners' perspectives on RPG, to date, no study has examined the education researchers' approaches to…

Reading achievement at the junior high level continues to be a concern in the United States and research has indicated that decreased reading motivation is one possible reason. Researchers have established that the use of authentic audiences leads to increased motivation and achievement at the elementary, high school, and college levels but have…

This research presents findings from a classroom-based case study to determine how a global competence framework influences first-year composition (FYC) students' understanding of global competency and cosmopolitanism. Sub-questions included examining how participants demonstrated skills as global and cultural communicators, how their perceptions…

The employment of genre-based pedagogy and Task-Based Language Teaching in second language education is representative of a paradigmatic shift towards a focus on meaning-making. Despite this shift, second language acquisition (SLA) research continues to predominantly rely on complexity, accuracy, and fluency metrics to assess learner production…

Even though engineering and science are tasked with developing solutions and knowledge for a diverse population, Black and Brown communities remain severely underrepresented in these disciplines. The problem exceeds easy solutions like "a seat at the table" and requires rethinking with whom and for whom the field designs ideas and…

U.S. Navy education is calling for enterprise-wide-transformation in instructional practices, which includes trainee-centered environments. The purpose of the study, which uses a qualitative method with an explanatory case study design, was used to explore military instructors' and administrators' lived experiences using traditional learning…