This dissertation follows a manuscript-style format, beginning with an introduction and literature review, followed by three distinct studies and a concluding section. All three studies use "Lucky Codes," an educational board game designed to foster computational thinking skills in elementary students, as the intervention. The first…

Within the field of K-2 computer science (CS) education, unplugged computational thinking (CT) activities have been suggested as beneficial for younger students and shown to impact young students' skills and motivation to learn about CS. This study sought to examine how children demonstrate CT competencies in unplugged sequencing tasks and how…

Completion of remedial mathematics has been identified as one of the keys to college success. However, completion rates in remedial mathematics have been low and are of much debate across America. This study leverages machine learning techniques in trying to predict and understand completion rates in remedial mathematics. The purpose of this study…

As part of the effort to develop an improved oral reading fluency (ORF) assessment system, Kara et al. (2020) estimated the ORF scores based on a latent variable psychometric model of accuracy and speed for ORF data via a fully Bayesian approach. This study further investigates likelihood-based estimators for the model-derived ORF scores,…

To address the computational constraints of parameter estimation in the polytomous Cognitive Diagnosis Model (pCDM) in large-scale high data volume situations, this study proposes two two-stage polytomous attribute estimation methods: P_max and P_linear. The effects of the two-stage methods were studied via a Monte Carlo simulation study, and the…

As part of the effort to develop an improved oral reading fluency (ORF) assessment system, Kara et al. estimated the ORF scores based on a latent variable psychometric model of accuracy and speed for ORF data via a fully Bayesian approach. This study further investigates likelihood-based estimators for the model-derived ORF scores, including…

Addressing cognitive disparities has become a paramount concern in computational thinking (CT) education. The intricate and nuanced relationships between CT and cognitive variations emphasize the needs to accommodate diverse cognitive profiles when fostering CT skills, recognizing that these cognitive functions can manifest as either strengths or…

The consequence of a change in school leadership (e.g., principal turnover) on student achievement has important implications for education policy. The impact of such an event can be estimated via the popular Difference in Difference (DiD) estimator, where those schools with a turnover event are compared to a selected set of schools that did not…

Examples of applications of equilibrium-based methods for multicomponent separations usually require the use of simulation packages, which do not allow students to follow the involved algorithms step by step. Excel spreadsheets with examples of six such rigorous methods have been used with MSc students of Chemical Engineering of the University of…

Takers of educational tests often receive proficiency levels instead of or in addition to scaled scores. For example, proficiency levels are reported for the Advanced Placement (AP®) and U.S. Medical Licensing examinations. Technical difficulties and other unforeseen events occasionally lead to missing item scores and hence to incomplete data on…

There is broad consensus on the assumption that adults solve single-digit multiplication problems almost exclusively by fact retrieval from memory. In contrast, there has been a long-standing debate on the cognitive processes involved in solving single-digit addition problems. This debate has evolved around two theoretical accounts. Proponents of…

In this research, we explore the potential for computational thinking (CT) to benefit the spatial reasoning abilities of thirty-three middle-school students (aged 11-13) in grades 6 and 7. There is an increasing focus on the explicit development of spatial reasoning throughout the mathematics curriculum, such as geometry, as students' success in…

Policy-makers, research managers, and donors are interested in knowing the outputs, outcomes, and impacts of investment in agricultural research. Several institutions are engaged in rice research and impact assessment of rice research requires area coverage information for rice varieties. The area coverage information for individual varieties is…

Through a constructivist teaching experiment, we studied how a 6th-grade student (Adam, pseudonym) struggling in mathematics may reorganize his available additive scheme (count-up-to) into a more advanced scheme involving the decomposition of composite units (break-apart-make-ten, or BAMT). First, we posed a task that led us to infer Adam was yet…

Students exhibiting mature number sense make sense of numbers and operations, use reasoning to notice patterns, and flexibly select the most effective and efficient problem-solving strategies (McIntosh et al., 1997; Reys et al., 1999; Yang, 2005). Despite being highlighted in national standards and policy documents (CCSS, 2010; NCTM, 2000, 2014),…