Nonacademic staff in higher education, also known as support staff, is a necessary and under-researched workforce essential for the success of higher education institutions. The higher education needs emphasized by the COVID-19 pandemic, state budget cuts, and increasing levels of turnover from the nonacademic population highlight the need for a…

Feedback has great influences on student retention and completion, especially on the minority students in higher education. However, the debates on the paradoxical difference between feedback's theoretical potential and its effect in actual practice remain unsettled. This study seeks to address some primary issues in feedback research by…

This dissertation comprises three cross-disciplinary essays on information systems, marketing, and financial outcomes research for nonprofit service organizations. In our first essay, we explore service quality impacts on the constructs of positive and negative word of mouth, developing and validating a new measurement scale, testing it…

The purpose of this three-manuscript dissertation was to examine the construct and predictive validity of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework (i.e., teaching, cognitive and social presence) through a confirmatory factor analysis, meta-analysis, and qualitative synthesis. The first paper was a confirmatory factor analysis study that…

In 2008, Winston et al. published "An Instrument to Measure the Impact of Hope in Strategic Plan Implementation." Snyder (2000) suggested that hope is the only factor that influences positive outcomes related to employee expectations. Other theories, such as expectancy theory, value chain theory, and faith, were thought to influence…

Higher education institutions face heightened accountability for student success. As such, higher education relies heavily on big data to predict student outcomes. This process is problematic because predictive models are developed on historical data, are deficit based, and are focused on student factors, neglecting institutional factors. The…

Teaching effectiveness in higher education has been studied for a long time. The widely used student evaluation of teachers has limitations on measuring teaching effectiveness by directly assessing teacher-centered practices. Additionally, there is little evidence to support the usefulness of student evaluation data to improve and shape the…

The purpose of this study was to examine the digital literacy of Gen Z employees in higher education and provide implications for HRD research and practice and contribute to the HRD literature on Gen Z employees in the 21st century workforce. Three research questions guided my study: How do Gen Z employees in higher education experience digital…

Although temporal issues affecting organizations and leaders have been researched, time orientation (preference for one or more of the present, past, and future time frames) and visioning ability of change agents within organizations remain open for additional investigation. This exploratory survey study compared self-reported time orientation…

Crisis necessitates society to renew itself, frequently in a disruptive manner. The recent pandemic is accelerating the transformative modalities of learning, working, and relating with one another, both abruptly and radically. This paper examines the area of online education and attempts to show the effects of how institutions of higher education…

Concerns surrounding subscore use, which have traditionally been examined in large-scale educational testing programs (e.g., SAT, GRE)--namely, that "information obtained from subscores that seems intuitively useful may not contain additional information over and above the total score" (p. 2)--have been argued to apply equally to…

The purpose of this study was to develop a reliable and valid survey instrument that would prove useful in identifying faculty with the capacity and inclination to succeed in team-taught, hands-on, transdisciplinary course programming. Using an exploratory, mixed-methods design, the qualitative component consisted of semi-structured interviews of…

Crisis management is a critical issue facing higher education. Higher education leaders and campus safety advocates agree that the Virginia Tech massacre changed perceptions and approaches to campus safety at colleges and universities nationally. In the University of North Carolina System, it was the two murders of University of North Carolina at…

Housing professionals are increasingly compelled to consider hiring resident assistants (RAs) from a pool of applicants that includes students with less college experience than has traditionally been expected. The purpose of the study is to determine if the success of first-time sophomore RAs differs from that of first-time upper-class RAs…

The problem observed in this study is the low level of compliance of higher education website accessibility with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The literature supports the non-compliance of websites with the federal policy in general. Studies were performed to analyze the accessibility of fifty-four sample web pages using automated…