Misinformation is one society's most pressing issues, spreading division and chaos across the globe. Videogames have become one of the more promising mediums for misinformation interventions, teaching players common falsehood indicators and helping them develop their discernment abilities. This thesis details the design, playtesting, and…

Deeply embedded in U.S. higher education institutions is a culture of whiteness that benefits white students, staff, faculty, and administrators through racist policies, structures, and cultural norms designed to uphold whiteness. This culture not only minimizes the presence of racism, but also is pervasive on college campuses, where…

Insufficient effort responding (IER) refers to a lack of effort when answering survey or questionnaire items. Such items typically offer more than two ordered response categories, with Likert-type scales as the most prominent example. The underlying assumption is that the successive categories reflect increasing levels of the latent variable…

The Lognormal Response Time (LNRT) model measures the speed of test-takers relative to the normative time demands of items on a test. The resulting speed parameters and model residuals are often analyzed for evidence of anomalous test-taking behavior associated with fast and poorly fitting response time patterns. Extending this model, we…

The field of Environmental Education (EE) is facing multiple crises around the climate crisis and an overdue recognition of the racist and ableist assumptions within EE spaces (Bang et al., 2014; Miller, Schmidt). These two issues are profoundly intertwined with emotions of anger, fear, shame, and disillusionment. In EE teaching and learning,…

In many large-scale testing programs, examinees are frequently categorized into different performance levels. These classifications are then used to make high-stakes decisions about examinees in contexts such as in licensure, certification, and educational assessments. Numerous approaches to estimating the consistency and accuracy of this…

There has been a particular emphasis on the ways that an individual's concept of self and their own perceived academic competence is influenced by their socio and external environment (Bandura, 1999; Baumeister, 1999). However, existing research has provided little to no focus on how these internalized beliefs of self, and perceived academic…

An accurate self-assessment repertoire is crucial for maintaining high standards of practice, or a scope of competence, among behavior analysts. However, procedural means to achieve this remain underexplored. Medical communities have investigated these effects and largely found that accuracy in self-assessment is poor, with an inverse relation…

Songwriting pedagogy is in its infancy in music education. This article presents a new way to think about pedagogy that utilizes student workgroups that more closely align with the ways songs are written in the real world. Implications for music education's connections to the world of contemporary commercial music are provided.

This study investigated the effects of interdependent group contingencies (IGCs) on teacher behavior in high school classrooms. Interdependent group contingencies, rooted in the principles of applied behavior analysis, have demonstrated to be effective in managing student behaviors. However, their impact on teacher behavior has remained…

This dissertation examines the distinct motivational variables that impact philanthropic contributions among millennial graduates of Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU). This study focuses on examining the philanthropic behaviors of millennial graduates from FAMU, with a particular emphasis on understanding the significant impact…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore teacher candidates' response to young adult literature (prose and comics) featuring fat identified protagonists. The paper considers the textual and embodied resources readers use and reject when imagining and interpreting a character's body. This paper explores how readers' meaning making was…

This study examined patterns of verbal responsiveness in parents of toddlers (M[subscript age] = 20 months) later identified with autism (n = 121), developmental delay (n = 46), or typical development (n = 44) during an hourlong home observation. Parent verbal responsiveness (PVR) was compared using MANOVA across groups and by child expressive…

Utilizing a novel computerized task, we aimed to examine whether social anxiety symptoms would be related to individual differences in facial emotion recognition (FER) in a sample of autistic male adolescents and young adults without intellectual disability. Results indicated that social anxiety and IQ predicted poorer FER, irrespective of…

Sensory Over-Responsivity (SOR) is an increasingly recognized challenge among children with neurodevelopmental concerns (NDC). To investigate, we characterized the incidence of auditory and tactile over-responsivity (AOR, TOR) among 82 children with NDC. We found that 70% of caregivers reported concern for their child's sensory reactions. Direct…