This study explored how a private, southeastern college of education (COE) supported students in passing the Praxis II examinations. Using Knowles' (1988) adult learning theory and Bandura's (1977) self-efficacy theory, the researchers examined students' experiences with various COE-provided resources and their impact on Praxis II scores. A…

This study explored how a private, southeastern college of education (COE) supported students in passing the Praxis II examinations. Using Knowles' (1988) adult learning theory and Bandura's (1977) self-efficacy theory, the researchers examined students' experiences with various COE-provided resources and their impact on Praxis II scores. A…

Few students in the United States of America are proficient readers and reading achievement has worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially for minority groups and struggling readers. Many students who struggle with reading also have problem behavior and need supports that can help them engage across various academic settings. Because of the…

Article 1: One-on-one tutoring is the most effective teaching arrangement. Most schools and families, however, cannot afford to provide each child with a tutor. Peer tutoring in classrooms, a more feasible and scalable learning arrangement, increases learning for both tutors and tutees, but peer tutors' efficacy is often limited by their didactic…

Research shows that the at-risk population entering college dropout or land on probation within their first year in college. Through a longitudinal comparative research design, this study examines at-risk students' academic standing, retention, graduation, and tutoring usage within a cohort program compared to a non-cohort initiative at a…

The efficacy of intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) for undergraduate college level courses was not well established and specifically, the Pearson Dynamic Study Modules (PDSM) program had not been investigated locally. The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine whether the use of an ITS designed with a cognitive learning approach; the…

Students who do not read proficiently by the end of first grade are likely to remain poor readers and suffer academic difficulties across all subjects during their school career (Moats, 2017). Therefore, early identification and intervention of reading difficulties are essential for students' academic success (Partanen & Siegel, 2014; Vadasy…

Pedagogical agents, virtual avatars that are often included in online training or educational modules, have been studied in a variety of disciplines to determine the extent to which their inclusion in online or multimedia learning environments may influence both cognitive and affective outcomes in learners. The present study examined the effect of…

In educational measurement, Item Response Theory (IRT) provides a means of quantifying student knowledge. Specifically, IRT models the probability of a student answering a particular item correctly as a function of the student's continuous-valued latent abilities [theta] (e.g. add, subtract, multiply, divide) and parameters associated with the…

This dissertation consists of three papers. In each paper, I leverage a different quantitative method to study a downstream effect of technology on educational outcomes. In the first paper, I study the impact of an online math learning program on 3rd through 5th grade math achievement in Louisiana. Employing Zearn Math usage metrics and…

New educational technologies present an opportunity to help teachers monitor and support their students remotely in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). However, most technologies do not have the capacity to comprehensively assess and report on students' critical 21st century practice competencies (such as those described in…

This experimental research study examined the effects of using a mobile learning environment (MLE) that provided scaffolded assistive tutoring on student achievement in a Circuit Analysis (Network Theory) course. It also aimed to examine the relationships between students' user learning analytics and their learning outcomes. The design and…

The purpose of this mixed methods study was to investigate relationships between students' ALEKS usage, teachers' implementation of ALEKS, and student performance on the 2017-2018 LEAP 2025 mathematics assessment. The quantitative portion of the study involved district-level analyses and teacher-level analyses that explored relationships between…

The increasing amount of available subjective text data in internet such as product reviews, movie critiques and social media comments provides golden opportunities for information retrieval researchers to extract useful information out of such datasets. Topic modeling and sentiment analysis are two widely researched fields that separately try to…

In this multiple-case study, the author investigated fully online students' perceptions of and experiences with asynchronous and synchronous writing support options of an institutional writing center and a commercial tutoring service. This dissertation used a multiple-case study design (Merriam, 1998, 2009; Yin, 2009) to ascertain which features…