Career and technical education (CTE) incorporates occupational skills, workforce readiness skills, and credentials that make high school graduates better prepared for the workforce. Students who complete CTE programs of study have higher employment rates after high school graduation and often go on to postsecondary education. For those who do not…

College retention, persistence, and completion are key indicators of a successful institution, but six-year degree completion has remained stagnant in recent years (National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, 2022). Despite institutional efforts through success initiatives to keep students retained, one set of barriers to degree completion may…

Probabilistic simulations have long served as instructional tools in statistics and probability education. With advances in technology, computer simulation environments where large quantities of data can be collected and analyzed have been suggested as venues for problem solving in contexts involving both known and unknown probability…

African American males have been overrepresented in the prison system in the United States since the 1970s. This comprehensive survey examines the influence of the prison reentry program on the lives of African American males after they are released from jail and prison in the United States. Jail is a place of confinement for persons held in…

This study examines the factors influencing immigrant students' enrollment in advanced mathematics courses during their high school years in the United States. Using data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09), this research investigates the association between each of the variables Institutional agent related social capital…

This thesis studies four independent resource allocation problems with different assumptions on information available to the central planner, and strategic considerations of the agents present in the system. We start off with an online, non-strategic agents setting in Chapter 1, where we study the dynamic pricing and learning problem under the…

This dissertation is concerned with how world knowledge (plausibility) affects reading beyond how predictable what comes next is. Previous studies have explained the effect of plausibility in terms of probability, either because plausibility is the conditional probability of a role filler given what precedes or because plausibility affects reading…

State-wide tests are designed to measure student overall ability on grade-level standards. School leaders want fine-grained information on student performance to inform curriculum and instruction. One currently used target scoring method, which compares student scores to expected values is currently used to give this feedback to schools, but there…

When we read, errors in oculomotor programming can cause the eyes to land and fixate on different words from what the mind intended. Previous work suggests that these "mislocated fixations" form 10-30% of first-pass fixations in reading eye movement data, which presents theoretical and analytic issues for eyetracking-while-reading…

Several statistical models have been developed in educational measurement to determine and track the performance of students in longitudinal studies. An example of a model designed for such purpose is the latent transition analysis (LTA) model. The LTA model (Graham, Collins, Wugalter, Chung, & Hansen 1991) is a type of autoregressive model…

We begin by defining the concept of "open" Markov processes, which are continuous-time Markov chains where probability can flow in and out through certain "boundary" states. We study open Markov processes which in the absence of such boundary flows admit equilibrium states satisfying detailed balance, meaning that the net flow…

In educational contexts, students often self-select into specific interventions (e.g., courses, majors, extracurricular programming). When students self-select into an intervention, systematic group differences may impact the validity of inferences made regarding the effect of the intervention. Propensity score methods are commonly used to reduce…

We study flexible Bayesian methods that are amenable to a wide range of learning problems involving complex high dimensional data structures, with minimal tuning. We consider parametric and semiparametric Bayesian models, that are applicable to both static and dynamic data, arising from a multitude of areas such as economics, finance and…

At many universities, more than half of students change majors at least once and a large fraction of these students change majors multiple times. The potential causes and effects of these very common behaviors are relatively understudied. This dissertation explores the college major decision-making process, both for initial and subsequent major…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine if students' participation in the ALP co-requisite developmental English program relates to the likelihood of passing gateway college-level English. Data was collected to allow for analysis of gateway college-level English passing probability for all students who participated in gateway…