A virtual learning environment aims to engage the student, enabling them to interact and express their understanding of the material. Virtual learning engagement for adult learners is essential for active learning. The lack of active learning is a problem, as evident through researched university learner responses. In this descriptive method…

Project-Based Learning has been a heavily debated topic in education for several years. The most recent push from multiple education departments highlights the need for a user-friendly online database. Although the Internet is filled with sites that provide many different instructors' options to develop or implement a Project-Based Lesson, there…

This is an empirical, ethnographic study about middle school students' mathematical joy in a formal math classroom. This study is situated in a year-long Research Practice Partnership with 6th grade mathematics teacher and 21 students in her 3rd block class. Through this collaboration, the teacher and I sought to design tasks to support students'…

In this dissertation I explore instructors' work with instructional tasks as they plan to introduce various representations of derivatives. Drawing on the notion of "framing" from sociology, I adopt a situative lens to study calculus instructors' planning of instructional tasks. I rely on Herbst and Chazan's (2012) notion of…

The purpose of this Action Research study is to examine the current teaching methods in the virtual education setting and see how professional ideologies of educators may be influenced when introduced to new knowledge. The current education model heavily favors preparing for standardized tests, which the researcher contends is not an accurate…

This dissertation investigates how collective process-oriented documentation tools, combined with Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, can enhance knowledge construction in hands-on, open-ended learning environments, such as makerspaces. Through a three-year design-based research, the study developed and tested a collective documentation…

Teacher professional development (PD) is widely pursued as a critical component of overall school improvement. However, it is frequently ineffective at changing teaching practice or impacting student outcomes. While online PD has the potential to greatly expand access to high-quality PD, questions remain about the extent to which online PD can be…

Teaching science through inquiry-based methodologies has been advocated by several governmental and professional organizations (National Research Council [NRC], 2000; NGSS Lead States, 2013); however, their use is not widespread. Why is this? What science teachers do in their classrooms is shaped by their beliefs, especially their beliefs about…

This study utilizes action research to examine the design and implementation of inquiry-based teaching in a middle school social studies classroom. As a practitioner, fulfilling the role of teacher and researcher, I sought to better understand my teaching practices. To do so, I collected multiple forms of data that would help me understand…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine any correlations between an increase in knowledge from activities which utilize self-paced learning, inquiry-guided learning, and collaborative learning pedagogical strategies and students' intentions to pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and computer science…

Achieving an in-depth understanding of unfamiliar science concepts has been found to be difficult when learners can not index science language to relevant sensorimotor experiences. Ongoing research in embodied cognition highlights the importance of relevant sensorimotor experiences in understanding and learning new information. Aiming to foster…

Critical thinking (CT) is widely recognized as an important component for effective instruction and learning. Numerous researchers have studied critical thinking and its impact on students and educational institutions at all levels (Pithers & Soden, 2000). Puig et al. (2019) acknowledged that very little research had been done to capture…

Social studies instructional experts have called for a move from a knowledge-based curriculum to conceptually-driven inquiry, though tools for educators in meeting this challenge are lacking. Simulations are potentially a powerful inquiry tool to transform students' ways of seeing the world through realistic interactions with complex social…

This dissertation describes a practitioner's design-based development of a prototype chatbot to guide students in learning biological concepts of genetic mutations and protein synthesis. This chatbot's architecture provides learning activities, feedback, and support throughout a series of short, connected lessons. The chatbot is designed to…

Professional learning continues to be one of the most widely used methods for raising student achievement and teacher development, yet school districts continue to use antiquated models that often dismiss the core features needed to be effective (Desimone, 2009). These core features include being content focused, active learning opportunities,…