As educators, our goal is to help our students be successful, but in order to accomplish this, we need to understand what factors contribute to student success. One factor, small-group active learning, has been correlated to improved academic outcomes; however, the magnitude of this improvement can vary across different courses, different types of…

Affirmative action is a topic that has been a flashpoint amongst policymakers, lawmakers, and the public since President Kennedy introduced the phrase in 1961. Within education, a legal status quo has been in place since the Supreme Court's ruling in "Regents of the University of California v. Bakke" (1978), banning strict racial quotas…

The employment of genre-based pedagogy and Task-Based Language Teaching in second language education is representative of a paradigmatic shift towards a focus on meaning-making. Despite this shift, second language acquisition (SLA) research continues to predominantly rely on complexity, accuracy, and fluency metrics to assess learner production…

Leadership represents an abstraction of human thought. While functionalist theories propose leader-centric models, contemporary leadership theories embrace a postmodern paradigm acknowledging ontological and epistemological assumptions of qualitative study. This ideology suggests a multi-dimensional model of leadership that reflects the complexity…

School and university classrooms remain the standard around the world for second language instruction. However, over the past 20 years various methods of language learning have permeated the educational landscape to include self-study textbooks, language learning software and online teachers. Some models are evidence based while others lack…

This dissertation will broaden the purview of recent scholarship pertaining to socially just writing assessments by making connections among assemblage theory and materialism, studies of ecological and anti-racist assessments, and studies of writing center work, to ground theoretical conversations in everyday practices. Focusing on systemic…

The purpose of this explanatory case study was to elaborate on Desimone's professional development framework which holds that effective professional development should include five core features: content focus, active learning, coherence, duration, and collective participation. It did so by investigating the perceptions, professional learning, and…

Writing Studies has flourished as a field in Latin America during the last two decades. Its development has been fostered by an exponential growth of college enrollments and processes of expansion and democratization of the educational offer in the region. The renewed attention received by higher education writing has fueled new research efforts…

This study was designed to understand how ACSI certified Christian School leaders in Arizona lead their schools. There are a variety of leadership models available. Servant leadership, being a fairly recent phenomenon has been studied and implemented by numerous organizations and leaders with great organizational success and buy in. One area of…

Although response scholarship has continually called for a greater emphasis on context when analyzing instructors' written commentary on student writing, textual analysis of written comments remains a primary direction for response research. Additionally, when context is accounted for, it is oftentimes done so in a rather reductive fashion, with a…

The field of expertise studies offers several models from which to develop training programs that accelerate the development of novice performers in a variety of domains. This research study implemented two methods of expertise-based training in a course to develop undergraduate peer academic coaches through a ten-week program. An existing…

This sociolinguistic study examines the functions and motivations of code-switching, which is used here to mean the use of more than one language in the same conversation. The conversations studied here take place in a very particular context: one-on-one speaking sessions in a study abroad program in Morocco where English is the L1 and Arabic the…

This study examined the basic utility of topic models, a computational linguistics model for text-based data, to the investigation of the process of couple therapy. Linguistic analysis offers an additional lens through which to examine clinical data, and the topic model is presented as a novel methodology within couple and family psychology that…

Protecting children online from sexual predators has been a focus of research in psychiatry, sociology, computer science, and information systems (IS) for many years. However, the anonymity afforded by social media has made finding a solution to the problem of child protection difficult. Pedophiles manipulate conversation (discourse) with children…

Diversity is valued and promoted in contemporary public discourse, but on the other hand, there is a strong tendency to homogenize differences in society. The tension between diversity and homogeneity is palpable on U.S. college campuses as the number of international students has been ever-increasing. A more nuanced approach is needed to grapple…