Classical item analysis (CIA) entails summarizing items based on two key attributes: item difficulty and item discrimination, defined as the proportion of examinees answering correctly and the difference in correctness between high and low scorers. Recent insights reveal a direct link between these measures and aspects of signal detection theory…

Information Literacy (IL) is vitally important for student success among college students. Graduate students are often assumed to have basic information literacy skills, but research has shown that this isn't always the case ((Bussell et al., 2017; Lamb, 2017, Hebert, 2018, Xie & Savory, 2022; Robertson & Felicilda-Reynaldo, 2015; Click,…

Exercise is associated with unmasking underlying cardiac disorders and increasing an athlete's risk for experiencing a sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) event during sports. Parental knowledge is an important component of health education in relation to the future of their child's health. The purpose of this quantitative research study was to assess the…

Due to current teacher shortages, there is renewed interest in mentoring beginning teachers for induction. Induction is an intellectually rigorous process of enculturating novice teachers into the professional teaching community (Carver-Thomas et al., 2020). Induction programs build on novice teachers' experiences in university teacher preparation…

Despite the magnitude of the investment in professional development (PD) for K-12 educators and its limited returns, research on PD has typically only focused on effective elements of program design. Little work has been done to explore the role of facilitators or leaders of professional development. However, by better understanding the complex…

Diabetes mellitus is a chronic metabolic disease that affects over 34.2 million or 10.5% of the U.S. population and ranks as the seventh leading cause of death. Tennessee's diabetes prevalence rate is ranked 45th overall in the nation, with 14.9% of the population affected, and in the local area for this project, the rate is greater than 15%,…

My dissertation asks: "What does an Angel Investor learn about the venture capital investment process and how do they learn it?" This is important, because Angels finance the earlier stages of venture investing (referred to as Seed or Series A) and play an instrumental role in the formation, financing, and success of today's leading…

The importance of textbooks and other materials to the educational process cannot be overstated. Unfortunately, the prices on these vital learning materials have continued to grow steadily year over year (Hanson, 2021). Open educational resources (OER), which are "teaching, learning, and research materials that are either (a) in the public…

While understanding the concept of audience is an important step in learning to write, few studies have explored how student writers conceptualize audience in academic and nonacademic settings. This dissertation explores how college students enrolled in a first-year composition course conceptualize and operationalize audience and examines how the…

Past research on knowledge has differentiated between dimensions of knowledge, for example amount or coherence. This dissertation introduces a novel dimension of knowledge, the Motivational Utility of Knowledge (MUK), that is based on hierarchies of human needs (e.g., physical safety, status/esteem, actualization, reproduction). The effects of MUK…

A comprehensive review of the literature reveals that sport industry research is progressing in every country worldwide at its own pace. However, there is very little research evidence about the Indian sport industry and the country's limited higher education sport management programs. While India has some of the most ardent sports fans and events…

Learning to read proficiently is an essential skill needed in both academics and life. Without this skill, one's opportunities are limited socioeconomically, socially, and throughout all daily life. However, there is growing concern that the methodology currently used in many school systems is not preparing children for the rigors of reading in…

The purpose of this study was to assess school psychologists' knowledge of dyslexia interventions and basic language constructs. Participants' total levels of knowledge from these two areas were examined to determine if significant differences in dyslexia knowledge and definitional knowledge related to degree level, taking a graduate literacy…

The U.S. Surgeon General defines determinants of health as "the range of personal, social, economic, and environmental factors that influence health status" (Donatelle, 2019). These determinants encompass various health goals but despite them, health-related issues persist across the population, indicating a need for comprehensive…

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…