New questions and concerns arise every day about the impact of AI in schools, such as how teachers will learn about AI and leverage it in their classrooms, how they can use it to develop their own teaching expertise, and if AI for educators really leads to better teaching and learning. The authors believe that AI can help teachers become more…

Student ratings of instruction are used to elicit formative feedback to help improve teaching quality, however, due to their subjective nature they are vulnerable to implicit bias. In particular, gender bias, as framed by role congruity theory, has the potential to negatively impact female instructors more than their male counterparts. Changing…

The Train-the-Trainer approach is widely used in Cooperative Extension education to efficiently disseminate research-based information to many clientele groups, including farmers. This paper compares the traditional Train-the-Trainer model to a comprehensive Collaborative Train-the-Trainer model and discusses weaknesses of the traditional model…

During their practical training, feedback for preservice teachers should address the demands of diverse classrooms. Using the critical incident technique within a participatory research framework, this study investigated whether and how mentors adjust their feedback in this regard. Based on a sample of 33 preservice teachers and 46 mentor teachers…

Reading engagement is an essential component of children's reading achievement. This three-chapter dissertation considers a new approach to conceptualizing reading engagement through the lens of children's immersion, or absorption, in a text. Chapter 1 examines the theoretical underpinnings of story world absorption, sometimes known as…

Using narrative inquiry, this study investigated the lived experience of embodied cognition--the integrated emotional and intellectual functions "of" cognition--in transformative learning in the context of a disorienting dilemma. These two fundamental "conscious" experiences of embodied cognition are preceded by three…

New teachers enter the classroom with high hopes and expectations, only to feel defeated by the end of their first few years of teaching. There can be many variables that affect a teacher's self-efficacy. This study aimed to determine if the teachers' self-efficacy correlates with new teachers' emotional competency. This quantitative study…

Missing data are a pervasive problem in data analysis. Three common methods for addressing the problem are (a) complete-case analysis, where only units that are complete on the variables in an analysis are included; (b) weighting, where the complete cases are weighted by the inverse of an estimate of the probability of being complete; and (c)…

Grouped and right-censored (GRC) counts have been used in a wide range of attitudinal and behavioural surveys yet they cannot be readily analyzed or assessed by conventional statistical models. This study develops a unified regression framework for the design and optimality of GRC counts in surveys. To process infinitely many grouping schemes for…

Purpose: This study aims to consider the role of emotions, especially those related to empathy, in promoting a more humane education that enables students to reach out across kinship chasms to promote the development of communities predicated on a shared value on mutual respect. This attention to empathy includes a review of the rational basis for…

This phenomenological qualitative study explores how public school pre-kindergarten teachers in Florida perceive their principals' understanding of early learning standards and developmentally appropriate practices. The problem addressed is that prekindergarten teachers are evaluated by their principals using state-approved evaluation rubrics…

Feedback on student assignments plays a crucial role in steering students toward academic success. To provide feedback more promptly and efficiently, researchers are actively exploring the use of large language models (LLMs) to automatically generate feedback on student artifacts. Although the generated feedback is highly fluent, coherent, and…

We investigated the influence of family alliance on infants' vagal tone. Physiological studies have shown that the quality of mother-infant interactions can influence infants' vagal tone, which is an important indicator of emotion regulation. Although research has shown that family-level relationships have a unique impact on child development,…

Students' emotional responses often provide valuable indicators of whether they are languishing or flourishing in their first-year classes, including introductory communication courses. Grading often exerts a strong influence on students' emotions. However, though students generally have positive moods after receiving high marks and negative ones…

Technology advances have changed the way faculty teach and students learn. The classroom has evolved from students listening to their faculty lecture to convey their knowledge to students utilizing interactive electronic resources that can take students worldwide in milliseconds. Tools in the classroom have also allowed faculty to quiz students…