This qualitative descriptive case study explores how genealogists describe the mechanism of epistemic change in their research, highlighting the roles of epistemological doubt, epistemological volition, and resolution strategies. It explores the integration of digital technologies in genealogical practices in the United States and their…

Most of the world's languages include multiple varieties and dialects. Individual ability to successfully alternate between these varieties can be a socio-cultural and academic necessity for many bilingual speakers, including children in the US who alternate between African American English (AAE) and Mainstream American English (MAE). This…

Humans excel at detecting patterns in information, abstracting rules, and making inferences. Underlying these skills is relational reasoning: the cognitive ability to identify and map abstract, generalizable relations between pieces of information. Though this powerful ability supports higher-order cognition, it can also be a processing bottleneck…

The capacity of educators to dynamically adjust their thought processes and behaviors in response to the diverse needs and characteristics of students in an unfolding teaching situation is widely acknowledged as a cornerstone of effective teaching. While teachers' instructional adaptations have been documented and studied from various angles, the…

Co-speech gesture in monolinguals has been linked to several cognitive processes: prompting memory stores, conveying spatial concepts, searching for lexical equivalents, and supporting rhythm and cohesion. The production of co-speech gesture also occurs in spoken language bilinguals. Studies have demonstrated that bilinguals fluent in American…

Human intelligence has the ability to capture abstract concepts from experience and utilize that learned knowledge for adaptation to new situations. Lifelong machine learning aims to achieve those same properties of human intelligence by designing algorithms to learn from a sequence of tasks, extract useful knowledge of previous tasks, and re-use…

Adults with developmental disabilities and educational researchers have identified many holes in the practices currently used to educate non-speaking youth with developmental disabilities, especially those with extensive support needs (Kapp, 2020; Taub, et al., 2017). While technology cannot provide a magical, sweeping fix to barriers to…

Visual notetaking has gained prominence in education due to its benefits in capturing information effectively. However, there is limited research on the neural and cognitive mechanisms involved in this way of taking notes. Therefore, to fill this research gap, this within-subject experimental study aimed to use an electroencephalogram (EEG) to…

This qualitative, exploratory dissertation aimed to describe how accessibility, usability, and cognitive load experts explained and experienced the usability and accessibility aspects of the LT department's website pages, information, and digital links. A usability, accessibility, and cognitive load manual examination was conducted with four…

Using narrative inquiry, this study investigated the lived experience of embodied cognition--the integrated emotional and intellectual functions "of" cognition--in transformative learning in the context of a disorienting dilemma. These two fundamental "conscious" experiences of embodied cognition are preceded by three…

The purpose of this phenomenological study is to investigate the impact of instructional design elements on cognitive load for adult neurodiverse learners in online learning environments. For the utility of this study, cognitive load will be generally defined as the working memory and mental resources needed to perform a task. This study is…

The beneficial effects of nature and natural environments have been extensively researched and the findings generally support that nature and natural environments can reduce stress and improve cognitive function. To evaluate if self-reported stress levels are reduced, or if cognitive functions are enhanced among adult learners in the presence of a…

This research builds upon scholarship of critical theorists and critical whiteness studies. The "invisibility" of whiteness has been increasingly acknowledged and attended to in counseling psychology. Further, prominent scholars have continuously urged the field of counseling psychology to acknowledge race as a psychological…

In this dissertation, I utilize the post-structural philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari as a lens for investigating the proof process. Deleuze and Guattari were both post- structural philosophers who, like many in this tradition, troubled traditional notions related to stable identities, meaning, language, and mathematics. For…

Schools, institutionally designed to formalize education, often leave individuals longing for something more. Multiple disciplines attribute the pursuit of something more to transformation. While a common discussion in academic literature, transformation is underdeveloped in education. This dissertation explored transformational education from a…