Recent reform documents in postsecondary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields recommend the use of evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs) in the classroom. National surveys in the United States suggest a continued reliance on instructor-centered practices that have little evidentiary support for long-term impacts…

Research on belief in conspiracy theories identified many predictors but often failed to investigate them together. In the present study, we tested how the most important predictors of beliefs in conspiracy theories explain endorsing COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 conspiracy theories and conspiracy mentality. Apart from these three measures of…

Understanding how pre-literate children's language abilities and neural function relate to future reading ability is important for identifying children who may be at-risk for reading problems. Pre-literate children are already proficient users of spoken language and their developing brain networks for language become highly overlapping with brain…

Background: Linguistic comprehension and narrative skills encapsulate a complex array of grammatical and semantic skills that underpin complex reading comprehension processes. However, most research in this area has focused on children with reading difficulties and not on typically developing children. Also the research has mostly focused on…

Children's knowledge of arithmetic principles is a key aspect of early mathematics knowledge. Knowledge of arithmetic principles predicts how children approach solving arithmetic problems and the likelihood of their success. Prior work has begun to address how children might learn arithmetic principles in a classroom setting. Understanding of…

Metacognition--knowledge, monitoring, and regulation of cognition--is key to learning and academic achievement. This is robustly supported for K-12 and higher education learners while empirical evidence in early childhood is encouraging but limited. To address these gaps in the literature, our first goal was to investigate early metacognition…

This quantitative research study explored the relationship between the quality of teacher collaboration in Professional Learning Communities and teacher sense of efficacy. The research has demonstrated that collective efficacy and teacher sense of efficacy have direct impacts on student achievement. Studies have found significant relationships…

The purpose of this dissertation study was twofold. First, this research study examined the role of noncognitive factors on degree completion, academic achievement, and persistence. Second, this research study examined the utility of the Personal Potential Index (PPI) as an avenue to reliably assess noncognitive factors of graduate students that…

Children with CHARGE syndrome, an extremely complex, highly variable genetic disorder, are significantly delayed in the onset of their motor milestones in comparison with children without disabilities due to sensory and motor deficits as well as lengthy hospitalizations and reduced physical activity. Currently, the role of parents' perceptions and…

This study identified student characteristics associated with school year mobility for more than 260,000 students in grades 4 through 8 who began the 2016-17 school year at a school in one of ten Houston area school districts. Of these students, 20,154, or just under 8%, changed schools at least once during the school year. Three characteristics…

Online education continues to grow exponentially, yet faculty acceptance of online teaching and learning has not. Decades of qualitative study indicate that a majority of faculty continue to regard online education as inferior to traditional classroom learning (Butler & Sellbom, 2002; Wilson & Stacey, 2004; Lloyd, et al., 2012; Ubell,…

This study shows longitudinal predictors of involvement in different bullying roles, including mental health, individual, family, peer and school predictors. The analyses were based on a longitudinal prospective study with 916 students followed up from ages 7 to 17 with 7 waves of data. Participants were selected through random sampling and were…

This study investigates how adolescents' daily prosocial behaviors to friends are related to diurnal cortisol using between- and within- subject analyses. Further, we examine whether role fulfillment (i.e., feeling like a good friend) moderates links between prosocial behaviors and cortisol. Ethnically diverse adolescents (N = 370; ages 11-18)…

The purpose of this study quantitative correlational research was to examine if and to what extent one or more of teachers' emotional intelligence (EI) abilities of perceiving, using, understanding, and managing, as measured by the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT), predicted practicing teachers' performance (PTP), as…

Self-efficacy constructs could predict students' practices and affect in learning the sciences. Researchers have pointed at such constructs as predictors of students' mathematics achievement and performance. Self-efficacy was also studied as predictor of emotions in learning mathematics, though little research has done so regarding self-efficacy…