In higher education research, staff is an overlooked group -- especially staff that support academic areas of the university, such as advising, finance, IT, athletic academics, and libraries. Though institutions could not operate without these people, those individuals may feel like they do not matter to their work peers, department, institution,…

Background: Service learning is an educational pedagogy that provides students with an opportunity to apply classroom knowledge to real-life situations. There are three components of service learning: course outcomes, service, and reflection. One barrier to incorporating service learning into nursing curriculum is the lack of a standardized…

Student surveys have gained prominence in recent years as a way to give students a voice in their learning process, and teacher self-reports have always been an effective instrument for revealing the planning, intentions, and expectations behind a given lesson. Though student and teacher surveys are widely used, extant research in education has…

Scope and Method of Study: The purpose of the study is to use an empirical approach to identify a simple, economical, efficient, and technically adequate performance measure that teachers can use to assess student growth in mathematics. The current study has been designed to expand the body of research for math CBM to further examine technical…

Students must be sufficiently motivated in order to achieve the intended learning outcomes of their college courses. Research in education and psychology has found motivation to be context-dependent. Therefore, students' motivation is likely to differ from one semester to the next according to which courses students are taking. However, there are…

This dissertation establishes the utility and reliability of a statistical distance measure for syntactic dialectometry, expanding dialectometry's methods to include syntax as well as phonology and the lexicon. It establishes the measure's reliability by comparing its results to those of dialectology and phonological dialectometry on Swedish…

Next to leisure, sport, and household activities, the most common activity resulting in medically consulted injuries and poisonings in the United States is work, with an estimated 4 million workplace related episodes reported in 2008 (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2009). To address the risks inherent to various occupations, risk…

Little is known about students' perceptions of online enrollment processes. Student satisfaction is part of the assessment required for accreditation, but evidence suggests that college administrators are oriented to retention and graduation rates rather than to consumer perception. The purpose of this descriptive quantitative study was to develop…

The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of cognitive curiosity through the development and validation of items that identify specific-epistemic, diversive-epistemic, specific-perceptual, and diversive-perceptual factors of curiosity. The instrument was based on existing research that identifies each of the four hypothesized…

Item response theory scaling has been well established in achievement testing, but the practice has seen limited use in student development research. The purpose of this study was to explore the reliability and validity of a graded response model scaling of an existing college student satisfaction survey. The existing survey was found to measure…

The Substance Abuse Subtle Screening Inventory-3 (SASSI-3; Miller & Lazowski, 1999) is a popular screening instrument used to assist professionals in the assessment of individuals who may be substance dependent. Many researchers have reported reliability and validity results on this instrument with mixed results, which at times have…