Middle school students who need help understanding how to manipulate math expressions involving the negative sign have demonstrated difficulty learning pre-algebra content that prepares them for higher-level math courses. This study involved a multimedia intervention to improve student negative sign proficiency and math self-efficacy. The…

This doctoral dissertation explores diverse facets of online research and comprehension among college students with English as a second or foreign language (L2 students). The research involves three distinct investigations within this overarching theme. Firstly, the study delves into the online reading and writing practices employed by Korean L2…

The field of Instructed Second Language Acquisition (ISLA) has expressed interest in pursuing a research agenda that expands the current heritage language (HL) strand of research to investigate how this heterogeneous population re-learns their family language, and how this experience differs from that of second language (L2) learners. This…

Online texts present unique challenges to readers, requiring them to interact with texts in ways that differ from their interactions with static, print texts (Kress, 2003; 2010; McKenna, 2003; Reinking, 1998). Due to the multimodal, multilayered, and nonlinear nature of online texts, readers may also employ strategies when they read online,…

There is a strong push from within mathematics education reform to incorporate representations in math classrooms (Behr, Harel, Post, & Lesh, 1993; Kieren, 1993; NCTM, 2000). However, questions regarding what representations should be used (for a given topic) and how representations should be used (such that students gain a deep understanding of…

This dissertation tests a grammatical structure, differential object marking (DOM), which is particularly difficult for L2 learners to acquire. DOM is a phenomenon in which some direct objects are morphologically marked to distinguish them from subjects (Comrie, 1979). In Spanish, animate and specific direct objects are marked with the preposition…

This dissertation presents an innovative approach to the development and empirical evaluation of Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) technology used for teaching and learning. It introduces IADE (Intelligent Academic Discourse Evaluator), a new web-based AWE program that analyzes research article Introduction sections and generates immediate,…