Student success is often treated as an observed variable, or something that you can measure directly with a single instrument. Single course outcomes such as final course grade or learning gain on an assessment have become synonymous with success in undergraduate science education research. Continually relying on these narrow course outcomes to…

This is a multi-article format dissertation that explores emotional and cognitive engagement in higher education classrooms. Student engagement in higher education classrooms has been associated with desired outcomes such as academic achievement, retention, and graduation. Student engagement is a multi-faceted concept, consisting of behavioral,…

Research on morphological awareness has shown that it contributes to literacy outcomes. However, because of the way morphological awareness is traditionally measured, there is speculation that tasks may reflect cognitive flexibility, working memory, or some other type of executive processing, versus awareness of morphology. Further complicating…

Over the last decade, mobile communication has become increasingly available, affordable and accessible even to the poor and disadvantaged at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) in developing countries. This unprecedented connectivity at the BOP introduces not only an untapped group of media users for communication researchers, but also a new hope…

A structural model for prior achievement, school integration, and self-efficacy was developed using Tinto's theory of student attrition and Bandura's self-efficacy theory. The model was tested and revised using a sample of 1,452 males and females from single-sex and coeducational parochial high schools. Results indicated that the theoretically…

This study examined the relationships among visuospatial ability, motivation to learn science, and learner conceptions of force across commonly measured demographics with university undergraduates with the aim of examining the support for an evolved sense of force and motion. Demographic variables of interest included age, ethnicity, and gender,…

Psychoeducational assessment, and specifically cognitive testing, is important to the role of school psychologists; however, the utility of such testing has been called into question, and its future is unclear. Researchers are divided into two camps. One side grew disenchanted with cognitive testing after the failure of the discrepancy method to…

Response latency has been widely used as a cognitive method to investigate how respondents answer survey questions and also as a method to identify problems with survey questions (e.g., flawed or poorly worded questions) or errors associated with respondents' behaviors (e.g., faking). However, little attention has been paid to using response…

While several models of adult writing have been proposed and studied, the development of writing skills in young children has only recently garnered attention. Using measures of fine-motor, language, working memory, and attention/executive functions, the current study explored motor and cognitive skills that may contribute to writing skill in…

Social cognitive research has linked students' perceived academic capabilities, or self-efficacy, to academic choices, self-regulation, and performance in diverse contexts from reading comprehension to mathematical problem solving. This study addressed a need to investigate the interactions among prior achievement, self-efficacy, calibration (the…