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…

Many educators are committed to democratic education. However, practitioners who have experienced hierarchical learning structures may unconsciously replicate these norms in their own teaching methods. Through honest reflection, teachers can reckon with their formative experiences and use the resulting insights to transcend ingrained behaviors or…

Teachers' questioning is a key practice that influences student learning, yet not all teachers' questioning is equally effective, and fine-grained analyses uncovering the details of teachers' questioning are scarce. My study investigated the types of questions asked by three in-service elementary school math teachers, the associated levels of…

Teacher educators play a multifaceted role in designing and implementing curriculum to nurture preservice teachers' growth in content knowledge, pedagogical skills, and teaching efficacy. Amidst evolving educational landscapes and diverse classroom environments, there's an increasing emphasis on fostering teacher agency and autonomy to navigate…

This dissertation aimed to better understand how violin and viola private instructors teach Mental Practice in their studios, investigating different approaches on how to apply and teach auditory, motor, and visual imagery, score study, and auditory modeling, as well as its benefits. This research was divided into two different stages. In the…

This study examined the engagement of preservice elementary teachers (PSTs) with mathematics tasks that were open in various ways and to varying extents. In K-12 settings, practitioners who have implemented recently popular open tasks report increased engagement and from a wider variety of students. While these anecdotal reports and related…

As nursing faculty transition to online education, faculty roles and responsibilities have shifted from face-to-face to online courses. Nursing faculty need to implement instructional approaches that are relevant and engaging to online nursing students, as this leads to student learning. The problem is undergraduate online nursing faculty are…

As online programs grow, so should attempts to create a better virtual asynchronous learning experience. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of video-based online learning activities in increasing components of social, teaching, and cognitive presence, among interprofessional healthcare students of various age groups. Studying this…

This dissertation presents a qualitative case study investigating the influence of cognitive coaching on elementary international teachers within a southeastern school district. Guided by four research questions, the study delved into the experiences and perceptions of international teachers participating in cognitive coaching sessions, aiming to…

The effects of fluency-based instruction and accuracy-based instruction on contingency adduction were assessed using an alternating treatments design. Stimulus equivalence tasks were used to measure contingency adduction. Stimulus classes were composed of arbitrary visual forms. One treatment condition consisted of teaching fast, fluent responding…

Due to the ever-increasing leveraging of technology in learning and human performance, multimedia e-learning continues to see rapid adoption as an instructional method for both business and formal education environments. Cognitive load theory (CLT) and the cognitive theory of multimedia learning (CTML) provide prescriptive strategies to optimize…

This dissertation investigates the interplay between the implicit knowledge that learners have of a nonnative language and their processing of that language, examining two types of relative clauses (RCs) in English: gapped RCs (e.g., "the man that they hired") and resumptive RCs (e.g., *"the man that they hired him").…

Structural reasoning is a combined ability to "look for structures, recognize structures, probe into structures, act upon structures, reason in terms of general structures, and see how a piece of knowledge acquired resolves a perturbation experienced" (Harel and Soto, 2017). The purpose of this study was to explore the cognitive…

This dissertation studied the effects of Teacher Directed Games (TDGs) on student vocabulary development and student engagement in a second language. Achieving automaticity with vocabulary is crucial to mastering a second language. A sample of 40 first grade students in a Jewish Day School participated in the study. Students learned their…

As schools continue to focus on outcome-based instructional practices, less emphasis is placed on the creativity and reasoning necessary for students to become effective critical thinkers. As a result, students struggle to demonstrate creative problem-solving skills in the classroom. This study examines how the facilitation of an instructional…