This phenomenological study sought to understand how members of a special education team account for and navigate successes and barriers faced during the planning and implementation of community experiences for students with severe disabilities. The needs and abilities of this population are vast and often difficult to accurately define, and there…

Reading proficiency levels among elementary-aged students in the United States have been alarmingly unsatisfactory for decades. The absence of basic foundational reading skills will induce struggles in every other subject area, causing students to feel exhausted, defeated, and fall behind. Intervention can be successful when instruction is…

Little evidence exists on how best to support children's alphabet knowledge, which is a foundational early literacy skill. In this study, I investigated the impact of multisensory alphabet instruction on the alphabet learning of English monolingual and emergent bilingual (EB) children aged 3:5 to 5 years old. My primary aim was to examine whether…

This study explores how elementary gifted learners, through the use of fidget strategies, self-regulate levels of attention to increase focus and decrease inattentiveness in the gifted support and general education classrooms. Gifted learners may often be overlooked in areas such as self-regulation and explicitly taught strategies because they…

Within the broad, interdisciplinary field of adult education, affective aspects of experience and the roles they play in learning have, thus far, not been properly theorized or researched. This dissertation first explores how John Heron's whole person theory (WPT) conceptualizes feeling as an expansive affective capacity at the root of all human…

The purpose of this study was to examine how the implementation of the Wilson's Language Training program, Fundations, influences the reading growth of first-grade graders. Reading proficiency at the school in this study was quite low at six percent. During the intervention, emphasis was placed on phonemic awareness. The Wilson's Fundations…

The need for effective reading instruction is of high priority. One of the many ways that students learn to read is through multisensory instruction. Elementary-age students struggle to become proficient readers. This is due to the lack of reading skills. The goal of reading is comprehension. As students learn letter-sound correspondence,…

Interacting with objects in virtual reality can be an exciting experience. Haptic feedback allows virtual environments to appear more immersive. Does this increased immersion bear the potential to enhance learning if used properly in educational VR environments? This dissertation pursued two goals. First, to investigate the relationship between…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the cognitive and multimodal strategies used by adolescent students as they read comic texts and traditional prose texts. This study looked at the strategies employed by adolescents in an eighth-grade English class. The cognitive and multimodal strategies that the participants used while reading were…

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore how K-2 teachers perceive the effectiveness of multi-sensory phonics methods used in conjunction with a standards-based reading curriculum on students' reading acquisition skills, students' decoding abilities, and student engagement in an inclusive classroom at a public charter school in…

The human brain is a flexible information processing system. Across a range of simple and complex tasks, such as walking across the street to playing basketball, the brain transforms sensory information from the environment into corresponding motor actions. This sensory input to motor output transformation likely requires a sequence of complex…

This paper describes a problem of practice that arose from a lack of consistent, systematic phonics instruction within a small rural school with a large percentage of students not mastering skills in a way that builds the needed foundation for reading. To address this problem, action research was conducted through a mixed methods approach to…

This mixed-methods study explored how multi-sensory activities such as the use of the action sensory room affected the instructional practices of special education teachers in elementary settings. The researcher revealed the special education teachers' perceptions regarding changes to student outcomes as a result of sensory integration.…

The purpose of this quantitative, comparative study was to examine if and to what extent, there are statistically significant differences in decoding and oral reading fluency scores between at-risk Title I students who receive multisensory phonics-based instruction in first grade and those who do not in the Western United States. Paivio's dual…

Reading difficulties during childhood often continue during adulthood and result in adverse effects (e.g., unemployment, poverty). A common method to teach early literacy skills is via multisensory instructional programs, which use combinations of mnemonic devices, such as visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic movements. The current…