Educational intervention research addresses multiple barriers that under-sourced communities face in education. I test three methods to improve education program design and evaluation to develop programs that have substantial and lasting impacts on student outcomes. In my dissertation, I review current challenges to educational program evaluation…

Scholars repeatedly addressed the importance and challenges of providing practical research training for master's-level CITs (Jorgensen & Umstead, 2020). However, most articles on counseling research education highlight the training for doctoral students, and most articles on pedagogical practice left out the Council for Accreditation of…

Reading is a complex, uniquely human invention for communication through print. It is a critical ability for making progress in education. Students with reading difficulties, the most common learning disability, struggle with reading fluency and accuracy. Skilled reading is enabled by the coordination of a network of brain regions interconnected…

Methods to estimate the causal effects of interventions are increasingly used in clinical medicine, public policy and social science. Using observational data, researchers can obtain causal treatment effect estimates without the ethical risks and time constraints that typically burden randomized experiments. The three studies in this dissertation…

While enrolling in a college for a degree is still considered to be more of the expectation than the rule in households across the United States it is facing public criticism regarding its overall cost versus long-term benefits. This has prompted researchers to reevaluate practices in higher education to determine ways in which post-secondary…

This dissertation explores conceptual and methodological issues related to measuring implementation in quantitative educational research. Implementation, defined as the enactment of interventions in educational contexts, plays a pivotal role in understanding how programs operate and affect student outcomes. Despite its importance, there is…

With reading being such an essential part of education, teachers need resources to help with instructional strategies. This scoping review will gather information on one such resource in teaching reading. It focuses on a scoping review of the information available on teachers using music to teach phonemic awareness. The scoping review will…

The purpose of this mixed methods dissertation study is to determine an operational definition for a new construct: a spiritually competent orientation (SCO). The SCO construct has emerged in recent literature but has only been defined theoretically. An exploration of the literature from which it emerged implies the possibility of improving the…

The purpose of this dissertation was to experiment with qualitative research methodologies while exploring the complexities of doctoral education, research practices, philosophies of inquiry, and other topics intersecting with(in) educational scholarship. My vision for this work was fueled by postmodernist critiques of humanist education,…

The purpose of this study was to conduct a systematic review of the literature relating to stress management interventions that have been implemented on teachers in urban settings. A total of 44 relevant experimental studies were found that were conducted in the United States and 14 of those articles were conducted in urban settings. The articles…

This dissertation is based on auto-criticism, a new qualitative inquiry that combines educational criticism and arts-based research. It focuses on my own experiences as an aspiring educator who struggles with stuttering and public speaking anxiety. The study aims to describe, interpret, evaluate, and thematize my experiences of dealing with public…

The problem investigated in this study is the high attrition rate in academic advisors (AA) that may be caused by compassion fatigue (CF). The purpose of this quantitative study was to address the high attrition rate in AAs by exploring the association between CF in AAs in higher education institutions across the United States and the associated…

Educational researchers are often tasked with postulating and measuring unknown processes that account for observed outcomes. Logically, this requires inductive reasoning about which constructs are relevant to the situation we seek to understand, prior to attempts at measurement. Exploratory mixed methods designs, along with a few classic designs…

Mixed methods (MM) research is an emergent methodology that involves collecting, analyzing, and intentionally integrating qualitative and quantitative data in a study. MM is increasingly used by graduate students and scholars across contexts. These researchers? practices of MM research, however, have been found to be limited in the literature, and…

Background: Higher education is more diverse than ever with a drastic increase in college enrollment over the past two decades by those who have not traditionally sought undergraduate credentials, including students with disabilities (Espinosa, Turk, Taylor, & Chessman, 2019; Clouder et al., 2020). Despite the growing demographic diversity of…