In this dissertation, I engage in three analytic cuts to think about/with a relational ontological orientation to data and data literacies/science education. The analysis focuses on the following question: What possibilities for teaching and learning about data are made possible when we attune to the relational, noisy, liminal, and material…

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly integrating into our society. University education needs to maintain its relevance in an AI-mediated world, but the higher education sector is only beginning to engage deeply with the implications of AI within society. We define AI according to a relational epistemology, where, in the context of a…

The growing use of analytics has increased the demand for more highly data literate graduates. Awareness of ambiguity in data has been suggested as a new data literacy skill. Here, we describe a student-centered semester-long project that can be used to teach this skill in an introductory analytics or database course. The project requires students…

Uncertainty is an important and fundamental concept in physics education. Students are often first exposed to uncertainty in introductory labs, expand their knowledge across lab courses, and then are introduced to quantum mechanical uncertainty in upper-division courses. This study is part of a larger project evaluating student thinking about…

Measurement uncertainty is a key topic in the university physics laboratory curriculum. In this study, we investigate students' ability to draw conclusions from measurement data and reasoning about measurement uncertainty in inquiry labs. This investigation centres around a task where students conclude whether measurements from two experiments…

The exploration/exploitation trade-off (EE trade-off) describes how, when faced with several competing alternatives, decision-makers must often choose between a known good alternative (exploitation) and one or more unknown but potentially more rewarding alternatives (exploration). Prevailing theory on how humans perform the EE trade-off states…

Students from a regional state university participated in a semester-long project in community service-learning with local community nonprofit agencies to plan, promote, and implement an event. Student tolerance of ambiguity and locus of control were evaluated before the beginning of the course and after completion of the project. Results from…

In the literature on the relationship between learning environments and students' approaches to learning, much attention has been directed to aspects that foster a "deep approach." Considerably less attention has been directed to aspects that result in the opposite, namely a "surface approach." Indeed, there is a small…

Cross-situational word learning, the ability to decipher word-referent links over multiple ambiguous learning events, has been documented across development and proposed to be key to vocabulary acquisition. However, this work has largely focused on learning from one-to-one structure, where each referent is consistently linked with a single label.…

The purpose of this narrative qualitative study was to investigate the impact of ethnic/racial ambiguity and legal invisibility on racial identity perception and experiences of differential treatment of Arab and Arab American Muslim students at U.S. public higher education institutions. Guided by the multilevel model of intersectionality…

The article offers analyses of the phenomenon of copying (plagiarism) in higher education. The analyses were based on a quantitative survey using questionnaires, conducted in 2019 at one of the Polish universities. Plagiarism is discussed here both as an element of the learning process and a subject of public practices. The article presents…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to apply the motivation-opportunity-ability (MOA) framework to investigate the relationships between ambiguity tolerance (AT), reflective thinking (RT) and performance in a complex task to predict knowledge-sharing intent. Design/methodology/approach: In this study, 190 subjects performed a complex scheduling…

When making decisions, the amount of time remaining matters. When time horizons are long, exploring unknown options can inform later decisions, but when time horizons are short, exploiting known options should be prioritized. While adults and adolescents adapt their exploration in this way, it is unclear when such adaptation emerges and how…

This study considers the experience of education abroad alumni through a social justice lens. We leverage literature that places systemic change at the fore, underscoring the importance of addressing deeply ingrained attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions that perpetuate systemic inequalities or hinder progress. Practitioners and scholars have…

The 2020 COVID-19 crisis forced universities to make a dramatic shift to emergency remote education (ERE). While the urgency of the pandemic is gone, schools continue implementing ERE, but more often on a short-notice, short-term basis in response to various situations. This research examines students' suggestions for improving university…