In this dissertation, I will present social-cognitive frameworks that support the use of mental imagery for possible self enhancement; and articulate and evaluate a pedagogical intervention designed for the foreign language class. This intervention will allow students to explore and develop prominent and vivid mental representations (self-schemas)…

This dissertation describes a program of research encompassing three studies that focused on examining the effects of enhanced expectancies and perceptions of success on motor learning. OPTIMAL theory (Wulf & Lewthwaite, 2016) proposes that practice manipulations that enhance a learner's expectations for future successful outcomes lead to…

As the growing popularity of podcasting and its application in education become more apparent, there have been a number of studies on the academic use of podcasts. A podcast is a digital file that can be delivered automatically to a device such as a portable media player or a computer via the Internet. However, the majority of research studied the…

This study examined the second language (L2) development of adult learners of Spanish at three levels of proficiency during and after a semester of instruction. A fundamental goal was to identify cognitive and psychosocial individual differences (IDs) that can explain between-learner variation over time in order to expand our understanding of the…