As the world contends with a global pandemic, climate catastrophes, white supremacy, coloniality, and concurrent genocides my attention splinters. In an act of futurity, or future making, I ask myself: "What is needed to move from this place toward softer, more liberatory futures?" This body of work finds its answer in exploring two…

Syntactic knowledge, the implicit and explicit knowledge of syntax, is a necessary--but often overlooked--component of proficient reading (e.g., Deacon & Kieffer, 2018). Though some research exists on effective syntactic instruction, such as sentence combining (Neville & Searls, 1985; Wilkinson & Patty, 1993), researchers have called…

For a long period of time, translation has been taught using the traditional teacher-centered approaches in which students are rarely engaged in the process of their learning. In these teacher-centered approaches, students play no role but that of passive learners who wait for the teacher to 'spoon-feed' them with the knowledge they need to learn…

Technology advances have changed the way faculty teach and students learn. The classroom has evolved from students listening to their faculty lecture to convey their knowledge to students utilizing interactive electronic resources that can take students worldwide in milliseconds. Tools in the classroom have also allowed faculty to quiz students…

Complex Instruction (Cohen & Lotan, 2014) is a groupwork pedagogy aimed at making classrooms equitable. The notion of status is at the core of this pedagogy and guides how teachers ought to respond to inequitable groupwork. In this dissertation study, I consider how the concept of status (from Expectation States Theory) is applied within…

Higher education faculty have begun to explore innovative teaching methods in response to the increased diversity of undergraduate degree seekers. Differentiated instruction (DI), popularly utilized in K-12 education, offers an approach to teaching that relies on continuous assessment designed to inform educators of how to adjust content, process,…

This study aimed to discover the lived experiences of Serious Game designers. More specifically, how they incorporate higher-order thinking skills, as defined by Revised Bloom's Taxonomy (2001), and assessing these skills. The main research questions are: "Which Serious Game design principles allow for the incorporation of higher-order…

Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) consists of computing techniques to rewrite text to make it simpler to read and understand, and prior research has explored its use to provide reading assistance to various user groups who may benefit from reading support. Prior literacy research has identified great diversity in literacy skills among DHH…

Although a large percentage of counselors who are wounded healers eventually become clinical counseling supervisors, little is known about the effects on clinical supervision. Counseling supervisors have the responsibility of gatekeeping, managing client care, and modeling counseling for counselors-in-training; the process is likely affected by…

This dissertation investigated the relationship between students and teachers in the context of writing pedagogical practices and writing curriculum. This study sought to extend the understanding of classroom relationships, specifically centered around writing instruction. Three dyads of teachers and students were observed as they interacted and…

This dissertation was designed to foster a deeper understanding of population invariance in the context of composite-score equating and provide practitioners with guidelines for addressing score equity concerns at the composite score level. The purpose of this dissertation was threefold. The first was to compare different composite equating…

Though the number of instructional design models has increased, the usefulness of an instructional design process (linear or iterative) when making design decisions for e-learning solutions remains uncertain. This basic qualitative study was used to explore the perspectives of corporate instructional designers who were mandated to move from a…

Society has grown out of touch with moral character and virtues. The effect of this disregard for virtue is a departure in the collective of our societal moral values. As individuals, without upholding virtuous ways of being, our character can regress and therefore prevent us from reaching our best potential as individuals participating in…

Adaptive tutoring systems often model student knowledge in ways that break away from a "one size fits all" approach to learning. Nonetheless, the strengths of these systems can often be limited, as knowledge representations are not easily interpreted by teachers, which make these systems difficult to integrate into pedagogical practices.…

This study investigates the instructional practices of a chemistry professor during an immersion summer program, with a focus on employing multimodal discourse within a studio-based learning environment. For this study, multimodal discourse includes natural language, gestures, mathematical expressions, symbolic visual representations, and manual…