Community colleges are experiencing an influx of online course enrollments. To meet this demand, colleges are hiring adjunct faculty who are experts in their field of study. Unfortunately, most adjunct instructors have no teaching experience or training, especially within online learning environments. To facilitate an effective online learning…

This mixed methods study compared the Community of Inquiry (CoI) presences and student performance between two course sections in a course -- HyFlex vs. online asynchronous. The CoI presences show participants' perception of three important elements -- teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence in a computer-mediated course…

Teachers' individual beliefs regarding the value of the academic material they teach, the nature of the subject, how they should teach it, as well as their assumptions regarding students, classrooms, instructional materials, the nature of learning, and how students construct knowledge can all have considerable influence over their teaching…

Technology is transforming higher education by removing geographic constraints for both students and instructors and increasing learning and cooperation with internet-based applications. Bloom's taxonomy continues to play a significant role in instructional design for both the classroom and online, but other theories that address the challenges of…

National mathematics achievement results show that elementary students in the United States are not increasing in cognitive ability or critical thinking skills (NAEP, 2020). For this increase, mathematically promising students require more opportunities for cognitively demanding mathematics instruction. As a result, this descriptive study focused…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework on students' perspectives of an online Kinesiology course. A Health-Related Fitness and Wellness course, an introductory Kinesiology class in the California State University, was converted to an online format using the CoI framework. Results showed…

This study tested the hypothesis that exploratory learning, with and without analogous problems, would improve students' ability to make connections between conceptually-related topics. In this randomized experiment, undergraduates in introductory physics (N = 171) studied a new topic under three different instructional conditions. Order and type…

This research examined how four different animated pedagogical agent implementations, which focus on perceptual and inquiry arousal conditions of attention as defined in Keller's ARCS model of motivational design (Keller, 2009), impact English language learners' situational interest, cognitive load, and reading comprehension in online readings…

In 2002, Chomsky, Hauser, and Fitch asserted that recursion may be the one aspect of the human language faculty that makes human language unique in the narrow sense--unique to language and unique to human beings. They also argue somewhat more quietly (as do Pinker and Jackendoff 2005) that recursion may be possible outside of language: navigation,…

As part of a collaborative study of the science preparation of elementary school teachers, we investigated the quality of students' reasoning and explored the relationship between sophistication of reasoning and the degree to which the courses were considered inquiry oriented. To probe students' reasoning, we developed open-ended written…

Students' learning in inquiry-based investigations has drawn considerable attention of the science education community. Inquiry activities can be viewed as knowledge construction processes in which students are expected to develop conceptual understanding and critical thinking abilities. Our study aimed to explore the effect of experiments…

This dissertation research examines a teacher educator's instructional practices and preservice teachers' learning in two elementary social studies methods courses. As self-study, it focuses on learning to teach preservice teachers how to select and use visual images to teacher history and social studies. The research uses the Grossman Framework…

Cognitive load theorists claim that problem-centered instruction is not an effective instruction because it is not compatible with human cognitive structure. They argue that the nature of problem-centered instruction tends to over-load learner working memory capacity. That is why many problem-centered practices fail. To better support students and…

The use of audio technology by online nursing educators is a recent phenomenon. Research has been conducted in the area of audio technology in different domains and populations, but very few researchers have focused on nursing. Preliminary results have indicated that using audio in place of text can increase student cognition and socialization.…

Much research in educational technology has focused mainly on how the technology supports student learning. Research on what teachers need to know in order to appropriately incorporate technology into their teaching has been limited because of the lack of theoretical grounding for understanding teachers' cognitive process of technology integration…