The purpose of this study is to examine the lived experiences of graduate student women who experienced pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering while enrolled in graduate school using Berlant's (2011) "cruel optimism." The primary goal of this study is to understand the subjective experiences of pregnant graduate students and how…

Women make less than men in some science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. While explanations for this gender pay gap vary, they have tended to focus on differences that arise for women and men after they have worked for a period of time. In this study we argue that the gender pay gap begins when women and men with earned degrees…

This dissertation is composed of three interlinked studies that pilot new methods for combining corpus linguistics and semantic network analysis (SNA) to understand and teach academic language. Findings indicate that this approach leads to a deeper understanding of technical writing and offers an exciting new avenue for writing curriculum. The…

The purpose of this phenomenological qualitative study was to understand the influence that mentoring has on the wellness of African American doctoral alumni of counselor education programs who took part in White mentorship. The gap within the literature consists of two major components: the lack of empirical data that displays the lived…

This study examined the collegiate experience of strongly ethnically identified Italian American college students and sought to understand how they made sense of their experiences. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine participants who graduated from a Bachelor's degree program in the United States within the last five years.…

According to the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium (ISC)2, Cybersecurity Workforce Study, 20% of the global cybersecurity are women. The numbers of women are an increase from 11% in 2013, but considering that women represent 52% of the workforce, it is not enough. The U.S. Department of Labor and Statistics…

My dissertation, titled "Walking the walk: How Writing, Rhetoric, and Composition doctoral programs prepare their graduate students for intersectional Writing Studies research," responds to recent, repeated calls for a large-scale review of the doctoral programs in Writing, Rhetoric, and Composition Studies (de Mueller and Ruiz, 2017;…

A recent college graduate working as a coffee shop barista, earning minimum wage and carrying thousands of dollars in student loan debt, is a familiar trope in conversations about the value of a bachelor's degree. In the college-for-all era, young people are encouraged to attain a bachelor's degree to bolster their labor market opportunities…

This qualitative study examined the perceptions of African American college graduates who defied the odds by graduating in four to six years from a Predominantly White Institution in Pennsylvania. Graduation rates are significantly lower for African American college students, so shedding light on these students' experiences is very important. The…

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) have consistently been shown to improve the educational outcomes of students when used alone or combined with traditional instruction. However, building an ITS is a time-consuming process which requires specialized knowledge of existing tools. Extant authoring methods, including the Cognitive Tutor Authoring…

Academic origins in economics departments, defined as the universities at which tenure-track faculty completed their doctoral studies, may have implications for how the department's undergraduate and PhD students are trained and placed, as well as the type of research produced. In this project, we use roster data on the academic origins of the…

A project is a finite activity aimed at producing a tangible product or service. Designing and developing instruction is a type of "project." Instructional design projects ("design projects") require instructional designers (IDs) to manage multiple and often overlapping work tasks, balance the "triple constraint"…

From a post-structuralist standpoint, this chapter interprets the meaning of the narratives embedded in the lived experiences of these L2 learners and users after describing and uncovering the social variables that affect the participating Chinese graduate students' learning process and learning outcomes described in the previous chapters. Section…

This chapter introduces the learner profiles and the sociocultural roadmap of participating Chinese graduate students. The learner profiles illustrate the demographic and linguistic background of each participating student. Their lived experiences include pre-departure experience (i.e., learning the English language as a foreign language),…

To prevent radiologists from overlooking lesions, radiology textbooks recommend "systematic viewing," a technique whereby anatomical areas are inspected in a fixed order. This would ensure complete inspection (full coverage) of the image and, in turn, improve diagnostic performance. To test this assumption, two experiments were…