Instructional technology continues to become more prevalent in classrooms around the globe. However, it is unclear whether teachers are prepared and have the self-efficacy to incorporate instructional technology into the classroom. This study reviews an instructional technology course for preservice teachers and whether student comfort increased…

Randomized control trials are considered the pinnacle for causal inference. In many cases, however, randomization of participants in social work research studies is not feasible or ethical. This paper introduces the co-twin control design study as an alternative quasi-experimental design to provide evidence of causal mechanisms when randomization…

Education is a moral enterprise, and higher education has the accountability to produce skilled learners with cognitive, psychological, and social-emotional competences. Formal and informal approaches of character education increase in demand. On the one hand, students should be guided to gain character strength and moral compass to confront the…

The three research papers completed and compiled to make up this dissertation explore the relationship between social presence and social construction of knowledge in asynchronous online discussion forums in higher education courses in the instructional technology field. Paper 1 is a literature review of the interaction analysis model (IAM)…

This explanatory-sequential mixed-methods design research aims to describe the steps of an organizational change model made to sustain organizational change during the COVID-19 crisis for school leaders in Local District East, one of the local districts of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The overarching research question that…

Though efforts have been made for centuries, how concepts are represented in the brain is still elusive. The embodiment view claims that the sensory, motor and other brain areas through which people acquire concept information during life experiences represent this information during concept retrieval. Some compelling neurobiological evidence…

This study examines the prioritization of various roles and responsibilities common to individuals performing the job of dual-role Chief School Administrator (CSA), which is an educational leadership position in which one leader performs the duties of the superintendent and the principal in the same school district. In New Jersey, where twenty…

Greater eyes-focused eye movement pattern during face recognition is associated with better performance in adults but not in children. We test the hypothesis that higher eye movement consistency across trials, instead of a greater eyes-focused pattern, predicts better performance in children since it reflects capacity in developing visual…

The SELTEC model of Level I fieldwork was developed and published in 2020. The SELTEC model combines service and experiential learning to benefit student learners, the educational system, and the community. The purpose of the study was to determine students' perceptions of a SELTEC model experience compared to a traditional Level I fieldwork…

The morphological structure of complex words impacts how they are processed during visual word recognition. This impact varies over the course of reading acquisition and for different languages and writing systems. Many theories of morphological processing rely on a decomposition mechanism, in which words are decomposed into explicit…

Chi-square tests based on maximum likelihood (ML) estimation of covariance structures often incorrectly over-reject the null hypothesis: [sigma] = [sigma(theta)] when the sample size is small. Reweighted least squares (RLS) avoids this problem. In some models, the vector of parameter must contain means, variances, and covariances, yet whether RLS…

Measuring change in an educational or psychological construct over time is often achieved by repeatedly administering the same items to the same examinees over time and fitting a second-order latent growth curve model. However, latent growth modeling with full information maximum likelihood (FIML) estimation becomes computationally challenging…

Background and Aim: At present, in the reform of higher education, the cultivation requirements for innovative people are increasing day by day. The learning results and desired characteristic behaviors of college students in ideological and moral education in many universities are not satisfactory. Student's learning attitudes and learning…

Automated scoring of student responses to open-ended questions, including short-answer questions, has great potential to scale to a large number of responses. Recent approaches for automated scoring rely on supervised learning, i.e., training classifiers or fine-tuning language models on a small number of responses with human-provided score…

As editors Sara L. Hartman and Bob Klein acknowledge, rural places have long experienced systemic inequities that decrease rural students' access to education, yet many rural schools and communities have found creative means to make up for the dearth of outside resources. "The Middle of Somewhere" brings to light a wide variety of…