Concern over academic entitlement has grown in higher education in the last two decades. Academic entitlement, defined as unfounded expectations of academic success, undeserved services and unrealistic accommodations (McLellan & Jackson, 2017), in nursing students is an under investigated phenomena. In this correlational, cross-sectional…

The purpose of this qualitative, phenomenological study was to investigate the perceptions of early career engineers regarding leadership competency development within the undergraduate engineering curricula. Participants were selected using purposeful, convenience, and snowball sampling. Study participants represented the early career engineering…

To this day, Columbia College maintains one of the most robust liberal arts curricula among the tertiary education landscape, an institutional decision that has been both lauded and denounced by students, professors, and cultural critics alike. As this dissertation examines, high tensions from all angles largely stem from the Core Curriculum's…

Engineering education research can benefit from comprehensive tools for assessing student self-concept and its relationship to identity development. This research addresses this gap by introducing a novel framework for evaluating engineering self-concept and exploring its influence on identity status transitions among first-year students. Key…

In academia, there remains a broad cultural divide between STEM and the humanities that was identified over half a century ago by C.P. Snow. However, the nature of this divide has changed in recent years as a scientific tool, the digital computer, has become ubiquitous in daily life. The humanities must now contend with how to account for this…

Undergraduate students' understanding of function continuity has not been explored broadly in previous research. The relevant findings in the literature are predominantly concerned with calculus students' understanding and misconceptions of continuity. Many of these misunderstandings are tied to the relationships which continuity has with limits…

Internships are an impactful form of workplace learning that helps undergraduate engineering students acquire and enhance competencies to improve their employability. However, the nuances about what makes an internship successful are not well understood. Furthermore, learning during engineering internships has not been thoroughly researched.…

An ongoing concern in higher education is the disjunction between how faculty teach and how students learn best. A primary objective of higher education is to produce content experts, which does not automatically translate to expert teachers of content. Lacking formal instruction on how to teach their content, faculty often teach in the same…

The nursing profession has evolved significantly over the past decade. As a result of changes in the healthcare environment, a more diverse patient population, higher patient acuity, burnout and staffing shortages, nurses are practicing more autonomously than before. Nurses must demonstrate the ability to use critical thinking and clinical…

In the past 15-20 years, contemplative practices, designed to cultivate present-moment awareness, have become more common in K-12 educational settings with some growth in higher education contexts seeking to reorient around teaching the "whole student". In response to calls that have also emerged in higher education to advance social…

With the ever-changing career opportunities for dental hygienists, integrating leadership education in dental hygiene curricula is imperative for preparing future dental hygienists to lead effectively within their profession. However, despite the acknowledged importance of leadership skills for healthcare professionals, a significant gap exists in…

Preparation of new graduate nurses is more important now than ever given the current state of health care. The pandemic has caused online nursing education to be a permanent content delivery modality across all degree programs. Best practices for e-learning only address course organization, instructional materials, learner interaction, course…

The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to explore nontraditional students' experiences and strategies used to overcome math anxiety. It addressed two research questions; how adult students developed their beliefs about math anxiety, and how they described the strategies used to change their beliefs and become successful in completing an…

This study explores the impact of design thinking education on critical thinking skills among undergraduate (science, technology, engineering, and math) STEM students. The research adopted a correlational, case-control design to analyze the relationship between participation and design thinking education and critical thinking levels among…

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive design study was to explore how college freshmen attending an out-of-state undergraduate university describe the influence of social media on the search and choice phases of the college decision process. The study's foundation was Hossler and Gallagher's college choice theory which divides the college…