Teachers' professional development is an important factor to improve the quality of teaching in colleges and universities. At present, teachers' professional development in colleges and universities mainly focuses on teacher training and consultation, lacking personalized attention to teachers' professional development. With the development of…

The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the mechanisms involved in phonetic learning of an unfamiliar accent, focusing on understanding what processes underlie changes to phonetic category structure, how such learning affects subsequent online lexical processing, and whether the same mechanisms that underlie learning for a single speaker…

The use of higher-order thinking talk (HOTT), where speakers identify relations between representations (e.g., comparison, causality, abstraction) is examined in the spontaneous language produced by 64 typically developing (TD) and 46 brain-injured children, observed from 14-58 months at home. HOTT is less frequent in lower-income children and…

Undocumented college students experience a myriad of stressors (e.g., fear of deportation, limited resources; transitioning to college; Enriquez et al., 2018; Hurst et al., 2013) because of systemic oppression, yet they often engage in various advocacy efforts to challenge those oppressive systems. Although different persuasion (e.g., "Focus…

Family and peer effects, as well as socio-emotional skills, are considered to have an essential role in cyberbullying. Although the dynamics of social factors and socio-emotional processes underlying cyberbullying are still open for research to further understand the direct and indirect relationships among the social factors (e.g., peers and…

The use of reflective interfaces has been proposed as a useful strategy to reduce cyber harassment amongst adolescents on social networking sites (SNS). By using machine-learning techniques, harassing online messages can be detected before a user submits it online, whereafter a message prompts the user to reconsider the post. This study builds…

Cyberbullying has become increasingly prevalent, particularly on social media. There has also been a steady rise in cyberbullying research across a range of disciplines. Much of the empirical work from computer science has focused on developing machine learning models for cyberbullying detection. Whereas machine learning cyberbullying detection…

A negative consequence of the proliferation of social media is the increase in online abuse. Bullying, once restricted to the playground, has found a new home on social media. Online social networks on their part have intensified efforts to tackle online abuse, but unfortunately, such is the scale of the problem that many young people are still…

Access to laboratory facilities and associated instrumentation represents a major barrier to learning in physical science education, due to constraints introduced by limited time and financial resources, cost of acquisition, and health and safety requirements. Virtualized laboratories offer some mitigation of these problems but may also introduce…

As 30% of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate difficulties with vocal output, augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) intervention can provide a means for those persons to have the ability to communicate with others. To determine the most effective mode of AAC for individuals with ASD, practitioners must have…

Universities annually welcome students from a wide variety of locations, cultures, and backgrounds, aiming to educate them in their career of choice. However, they often hit a wall when it comes to creating opportunities for students who hold deep and often polarizing diversity markers, specifically religious preference, faith and/or worldview, to…

The purpose of this mixed-methods study is to (a) learn more about first-year parents' expectations of communication with the university, (b) learn more about communication practices of university faculty and staff regarding communication with parents, (c) examine the reasons behind the expectations and practices of both parent groups and…

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are purely online learning environments that are typically available for free for anyone with internet access. These courses have attracted hundreds of thousands, if not millions of learners around the world and the number of users has increased rapidly along with the growth of new platforms and a wide diversity…

This study aimed to explore the influence of international education experience on women's leadership in higher education, focusing on the Saudi Arabia context. I examined the impact of international education on Saudi women's academic leadership in terms of three dimensions, which were (a) cultural, (b) global, and (c) communication competencies.…

How early do children produce multiword utterances? Do children's early utterances reflect abstract syntactic knowledge or are they the result of data-driven learning? We examine this issue through corpus analysis, computational modeling, and adult simulation experiments. Chapter 1 investigates when children start producing multiword utterances;…