Contemporary education research seeks causal inferences in order to guide policy and practice. Often well-controlled quasi-experimental and experimental designs are used as they are very useful for supporting and contextualizing causal inferences. Nevertheless, individual studies, even high-quality, resource-intensive randomized controlled trials,…

In randomized control trials (RCT), the recent focus has shifted to how an intervention yields positive results on its intended outcome. This aligns with the recent push of implementation science in healthcare (Bauer et al., 2015) but goes beyond this. RCTs have moved to evaluating the theoretical framing of the intervention as well as differing…

This dissertation study, which comprises a series of three articles, addresses the following overarching research questions: 1. How have reading motivation and engagement been conceptualized in the research literature? 2. How do educators, particularly teachers of the primary grades, conceptualize reading motivation and engagement? What sources of…

This study is composed of several projects in the field of physics education research. First, investigations into flipped physics classrooms at the senior and graduate level show that students uniformly agree that the active learning techniques (peer instruction, group problem solving, etc.) were beneficial to their learning regardless of their…

This study explored student agency in an active-learning business calculus course. The lecture-style instructional practices typically used in this course at this institution allow few opportunities for students to interact with their peers, interface with the instructor one-on-one, or do mathematics during class time. Additionally, this course…

Recent years have shown a rise in the application of serious games used by organizations to help trainees learn and practice job related skills (Muntean, 2011). Some sources have projected a continued growth in the development and application of video games for novel purposes (Sanders, 2015). Despite the increasing use of video games for workplace…

The purpose of the study was to gain an understanding of how novice science teachers transferred the inclusion of the Project-Based Instruction (PBI) pedagogy learned during an undergraduate course on PBI to teaching in the high school science classroom. PBI units in science courses are framed by a driving question, which students answer through a…