The impact of childhood trauma on students in schools has become a relevant issue for today's school leaders in the United States (Mendelson et al., 2015). The effects of trauma often interfere with students' ability to learn and manage the demands of a school environment. Students are coming into schools with diverse academic, behavioral, and…

Research from the field has indicated that when a multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) is implemented within education settings, these data-driven frameworks can promote positive student academic and behavioral outcomes, as well as safe and optimal school climates (Ockerman et al., 2012, Sugai & Horner, 2009; Ziomek-Daigle, 2016). As school…

How do individuals create a knowledge base over a lifetime? Charles Darwin left detailed records of every book he read from "The Voyage of the Beagle" to just after publication of "The Origin of Species." Additionally, he left copies of his drafts before publication. I use these records to build a case study of how reading and…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of neuroscience instruction on coach self-efficacy and self-reported coaching behaviors within the coaching dyad. This study used a qualitative research design employing in-depth, one-on-one interviews with life coaches. Purposeful, criterion sampling was used to select seven coaches who…

I conduct a study of learning in HMAX-like models, which are hierarchical models of visual processing in biological vision systems. Such models compute a new representation for an image based on the similarity of image sub-parts to a number of specific patterns, called prototypes. Despite being a central piece of the overall model, the issue of…

To best meet the needs of an increasingly diverse student population, we must develop an integrative writing pedagogy that is informed by what the cognitive and neurosciences have uncovered about learning so that our theories of learning and practices of instruction are consistent with our most current and accurate knowledge of the biological and…

Previous cognitive models of memory have not comprehensively taken into account the internal cognitive load of chunking isolated information and have emphasized the external cognitive load of visual presentation only. Under the Virk Long Term Working Memory Multimedia Model of cognitive load, drawing from the Cowan model, students presented with…

Although spoken word recognition is more fundamental to human communication than text recognition, knowledge of word-processing in auditory cortex is comparatively impoverished. This dissertation synthesizes current models of auditory cortex, models of cortical pattern recognition, models of single-word reading, results in phonetics and results in…

This dissertation explores the role that teacher education can play in preparing new teachers to meet the challenges of the profession by offering a more holistic approach to preservice education. Upon entering the classroom, new teachers are oftentimes overwhelmed with the realities of teaching and feel unprepared to handle the challenges they…