This dissertation offered insights into the repercussions of safetyism within societies shaped by cognitive distortions and political correctness. Safetyism, which prioritized emotional safety over intellectual liberty and a multitude of viewpoints, contributed to heightened vulnerability among individuals. Protecting individuals from provocative…

This study examines the role Google Calendar has in improving Self-Regulated Learning (SRL), planning, and time management in post-secondary students with intellectual disabilities (ID). Individuals with ID experience difficulties in executive functioning (EF) skills, such as reasoning, problem-solving, planning, abstract thinking, judgment,…

This study links the teaching practice of productive struggle, a psychological perspective of classroom activities, and the classroom microculture, an interactionist perspective that combines sociocultural and psychological considerations (Cobb & Yackel, 1996). The research question for this study is: "In what ways does a teacher…

This is an exploratory study of how pedagogy in the form of math stories, shapes young learners' perceptions, motivations, and sense-making of math concepts. The research is presented in an exploratory documentary, with audio-video data collected through the iPhone. The pilot test of story-driven math learning solutions was conducted by two…

There have been recent pushes for more active learning in mathematics classrooms, especially at the undergraduate level. To incorporate more active learning, there is a need for tasks that explicitly support this type of instruction, attention to student reasoning and whose ideas are publicly acknowledged, and awareness of differences in students'…

There is a major gap in educational best-practices regarding how to scholastically foster diagnostic accuracy among Nurse Practitioner (NP) students. This research establishes foundational information that will lead to evidenced-based educational interventions and curricular changes leveraging the technique of self-explanation in order to increase…

Strategies mathematics teachers use can unintentionally have an adverse impact on student anxiety in the classroom. The purpose of the Action Research study was to investigate and strengthen strategies that mathematics teachers use to reduce student anxiety. Participants and data collected in Cycle 1 consisted of interviews and a focus group with…

Analogy is a powerful learning mechanism for children to learn novel, abstract concepts from only limited input, yet also requires cognitive supports. My dissertation sought to propose and examine number lines as a mathematical schema of the number system to facilitate both the development of rational number understanding and analogical reasoning.…

There is currently much conversation on the issue of the achievement gap as scholars, politicians, and educational leaders continue to grapple with educational inequity and underperformance of students in urban neighborhoods who are mostly Black and Latinx as compared with higher performing students, mostly white, in suburban neighborhoods. This…

As our society has become increasingly data dependent, statistics education has emerged as a field of study. Research has focused on statistics course content outcomes, showing most students struggle with statistical concepts, including variation and the standard deviation. Variation is a foundational concept in statistics. Without a firm grasp of…

This study tested the hypothesis that exploratory learning, with and without analogous problems, would improve students' ability to make connections between conceptually-related topics. In this randomized experiment, undergraduates in introductory physics (N = 171) studied a new topic under three different instructional conditions. Order and type…

Schema-based instruction (SBI) was used to examine the solving of proportional reasoning word problems for middle school students with high-incidence disabilities (HID). Seventh- and eighth-grade students with HID participated in the study. Students were randomly assigned to one of three groups. A multiple-baseline-across-groups design was…

Although a large part the Physics Education Research (PER) literature investigates students' conceptual understanding in physics, these investigations focus on qualitative, conceptual reasoning. Even in modeling expert problem solving, attention to conceptual understanding means a focus on initial qualitative analysis of the problem; the equations…

This is an exploratory design study of a novel system for learning programming and 3D role-playing game design as tools for social change. This study was conducted at two sites. Participants in the study were ages 9-14 and worked for up to 15 hours with the platform to learn how to program and design video games with personally or socially…

The purpose of this study is to examine the proportional reasoning of pre-service teachers at the beginning of their teacher preparation program using the developmental shifts described by Lobato and Ellis (2010). They cast changes in proportional reasoning as transitions or "shifts" in students' thinking and these shifts can serve as…