Being uncomfortable by choice as a means of personal growth has been touted for hundreds of years among scholars, philosophers, religious leaders, modern pop culture icons, and more. Yet, research pertaining to the benefits of being uncomfortable by choice is sparse. This qualitative, grounded theory study addressed the first step of…

Continuous improvement is the process of making incremental changes to systems or processes to improve outcomes. The purpose of this dissertation was to conduct a study to learn how continuous improvement might serve as a vehicle for further conceptualizing profound learning theory at the individual learner level. The research began with a…

The past thirty years have shown a rise in models of language acquisition in which the state of the learner is characterized as a probability distribution over a set of non-stochastic grammars. In recent years, increasingly powerful models have been constructed as earlier models have failed to generalize well to increasingly complex and realistic…

The purpose of this quantitative, quasi-experimental study was to determine if, and to extent, there is a statistically significant difference between pre and posttest critical thinking scores of U.S. Navy Operations Specialist A-school participants in an adaptive technology training environment and those in the traditional learning environment.…

The purpose of this study was to replicate Reeve et al., (2023) by applying the newly proposed tripartite model of self-determination theory (SDT to the context of higher education. The study also investigated the validity of the "Three State Questionnaire" (TSQ) as a measurement tool in higher education. The study consisted of 521 first…

Career and Technical Education (CTE) is vital in students' secondary education, vocational skills, and college, career, and military readiness. To determine how CTE affects students' success, Texas CTE teachers were asked about their perceptions of CTE elements to determine how secondary education students are experiencing fundamental knowledge…

Exponential functions are an integral component of the secondary mathematics curriculum with which students struggle. Inherent difficulties students have had around the topic of exponential functions suggested a need for thinking about and examining the teaching and learning related to this content. This study presented the mathematical ideas made…

The problem addressed by this study was the commonly held belief that lack of confidence, preparedness, educational neuromyths, and little or no professional development are factors that impede early childhood teachers' implementation of brain-based learning strategies in the daily curriculum design structure. This qualitative narrative inquiry…

This dissertation is primarily concerned with nature-human relations -- how human people relate with and see themselves in relation to the rest of nature. Nature-human relations are part of how we make sense of the world around us, and these relationships therefore affect our broader reasoning and decision-making. The magnitude of environmental…

This qualitative descriptive design research study aimed to understand how first-year teachers perceive their preparedness for addressing the cognitive, emotional, and social/cultural dimensions of learning for content comprehension of English Language Learners in a large school district in the isolated state of Alaska. This qualitative study…

This dissertation takes up the topic of simulations in social studies education. Though simulations are taken up widely by social studies educators, and though they are described as best practice in social studies standards documents and teacher evaluation rubrics, the term lacks specificity. Additionally, design, research, and implementation…

Virtual Reality and education have been evolving for many years, moving from in-person classroom and online sessions to utilizing Virtual reality for training. Virtual reality allows students to actively engage with training rather than being passive in a classroom. The virtual world has been moving forward as a new tool to assist with…

The purpose of this eight-week study was to analyze how a multi-age primary community utilized the technology available to them from an activity theoretical perspective. In addition, it was aimed at exploring how the technology provided opportunities for second language development. The study relied on Cultural Historical Theory (CHAT) and…

In the broad field of education, studies have been done to understand the ways in which adult learning, development, and transformation are fostered in travel contexts. Such studies mainly used the experiential learning and transformational learning theoretical frameworks to look at participants' lived learning experiences from travel. However,…

This dissertation begins with the observation of a typological asymmetry within phonological patterns related to phonetic naturalness. Patterns that are rooted within existing tendencies of perception and/or production--in other words, patterns that are phonetically "natural"--are common in phonological typology and seen in a variety of…