While interactivity is regarded as a distinguishing characteristic of computer technology, the explanation on its impact remains in its infancy. The present research investigates what it means to provide a more (or less) interactive computer interface design by attempting to uncover its cognitive influences on the user's expectation of outcome and…

I study three separate questions in this dissertation. In Chapter 1, I develop and estimate a structural dynamic model of occupation and job choice to test hypotheses of the importance of wages and non-wages and learning in occupational transitions, and find that wages are approximately 3 times as important as non-wage benefits in decisions and…

Strengthening the association between education and communication is difficult due to the scarcity of educationally initiated research into the mechanics of communication. Most of the existing communication research is domiciled in the departments of sociology, psychology, anthropology, journalism and business. Many educators are satisfied in…

Based on Bronfenbrenner's (1979, 1992) ecological framework, the Counseling Training Environment Scale (CTES) was developed as a self-report measure that assesses the learning and training environment of counseling and related mental health training programs as perceived by current students. A two-phase mixed-methods design was used to create…

The current study examines the Strong Interest Inventory's (SII) ability to measure vocational interests and better understand how it predicts concurrent undergraduate academic majors. Although much literature exists concerning vocational interest measurement, no published study has utilized all scales on the SII to predict concurrent academic…

Spatial or temporal data mining tasks are performed in the context of the relevant space, defined by a spatial neighborhood, and the relevant time period, defined by a specific time interval. Furthermore, when mining large spatio-temporal datasets, interesting patterns typically emerge where the dataset is most dynamic. This dissertation is…

A self-report assessment scale of school connectedness was validated in this study based on the data from middle-school children in a northeastern state of the United States (n = 145). The scale was based on the School Bonding Model (Morita, 1991), which was derived reductively from the social control (bond) theory (Hirschi, 1969). This validation…

In this study, the researcher investigated whether the degree of communication apprehension reported by college freshmen who have been homeschooled differs significantly from that reported by their peers with more traditional high school backgrounds. Inspired by the researcher's college classroom experiences, the study provided insights into the…