This book arose from commissioned research by the National Catholic Education Commission (NCEC) on the alignment and effectiveness of 'A Framework for Formation for Mission in Catholic Education' (NCEC, 2017). It articulates contemporary best practice, and traces the experience of the Catholic Church in pursuing formation as integral to mission.…

Learning is a complex, subjective process. An important perspective on learning is that anyone, regardless of their level of education, can participate in learning about science and contribute to their community. The public increasingly looks towards online resources to find answers to challenges, so it is necessary that people become empowered to…

When school districts do not have established policies to guide training, practice and professional development for all co-teaching staff, inconsistencies and inequities may arise for the student populations most directly impacted by the lack of those policies, including both general and special education students. In order to best serve the…

Teaching is globally recognized as one of the most stressful professions. Teachers are known to struggle with varying degrees of job stress (McCarthy et al., 2010; Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2017). A performance gap analysis at the organization within this dissertation in practice--a Caribbean junior high school--revealed that the teaching staff was…

Research and data show that developmental education has been a stumbling block for the majority of community college students in pursuing their higher education degree. Students can spend several semesters to complete developmental math requirements in order to take a first college-level credit-bearing math course for their degree. Many colleges…

Differential item functioning (DIF) analysis refers to procedures that evaluate whether an item's characteristic differs for different groups of persons after controlling for overall differences in performance. DIF is routinely evaluated as a screening step to ensure items behavior the same across groups. Currently, the majority DIF studies focus…

The learning sciences inherently involve interdisciplinary research with an overarching objective of advancing theories of learning and to inform the design and implementation of effective instructional methods and learning technologies. In these endeavors, learning sciences encompass diverse constructs, measures, processes, and outcomes…

This dissertation aimed to advance the field of biology education in several ways. First, we aimed to demonstrate if, and to what extent, student-generated conceptual models can be used on summative assessments to accurately assess student understanding of gene expression. Next, we described patterns of changes students make to conceptual models…

Categorical data become increasingly ubiquitous in the modern big data era. In this dissertation, we propose novel statistical learning and inference methods for large-scale categorical data, focusing on latent variable models and their applications to psychometrics. In psychometric assessments, the subjects' underlying aptitude often cannot be…

This dissertation study explored meaningful experiences contributing to students' identity, capacity, and efficacy development as culturally relevant leaders. In Chapter One, I detailed the importance and relevance of this topic in the field of higher education. Then, I reviewed the literature on college student leadership development; defined…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of co-requisite education on gateway mathematics, predicated on the Reinforced Instruction for Student Excellence (RISE) model, at a large urban community college (LUCC) in North Carolina. The research study explored the success rates in gateway mathematics courses in relation to the…

Why education faculty are motivated to stay or leave an institution has been questioned for decades. To investigate this problem, 91 faculty from schools of education from eleven research universities participated in this study using Maertz and Campion's Motivational Forces survey. The confirmatory factor analysis results indicate that the…

This design case documents the reimagination of new faculty orientation for a mid-sized public university due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. This fully virtual iteration was facilitated during the summer of 2020 and is compared both to previous in-person iterations of new faculty orientation as well as a blended modality version of the…

Background: Women with intellectual disabilities confront distinct challenges as they age, compounded by cognitive and adaptive constraints. These challenges encompass heightened health risks, barriers to social support and susceptibility to violence, underscoring the critical role of self-determination in enhancing their quality of life. Method:…

Analyzing heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) plays a crucial role in understanding the impacts of educational interventions. A standard practice for HTE analysis is to examine interactions between treatment status and preintervention participant characteristics, such as pretest scores, to identify how different groups respond to treatment.…