This dissertation examines the effectiveness of machine learning algorithms and feature engineering techniques for analyzing process data and predicting test performance. The study compares three classification approaches and identifies item-specific process features that are highly predictive of student performance. The findings suggest that…

This dissertation examined classification outcome differences among four popular individual supervised machine learning (ISML) models (logistic regression, decision tree, support vector machine, and multilayer perceptron) when predicting minor class membership within imbalanced datasets. The study context and the theoretical population sampled…

Every year, the national high school graduation rate is declining and impacting the number of students applying to colleges. Moreover, the majority of students are applying to more than one college. This makes a lot of colleges to be highly competitive in student recruitment for enrollment and thus, the necessity for institutions to anticipate…

Recently, Bayesian diagnostic classification modeling has been becoming popular in health psychology, education, and sociology. Typically information criteria are used for model selection when researchers want to choose the best model among alternative models. In Bayesian estimation, posterior predictive checking is a flexible Bayesian model…

This research explores the use of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in Educational Data Mining (EDM) to improve the performance and explainability of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models predicting at-risk students. Explainable predictions provide students and educators with more insight into at-risk indicators and…

Though efforts have been made for centuries, how concepts are represented in the brain is still elusive. The embodiment view claims that the sensory, motor and other brain areas through which people acquire concept information during life experiences represent this information during concept retrieval. Some compelling neurobiological evidence…

Adequacy of funding for public institutions of higher education in the United States is significantly important to an array of stakeholders, including, state legislative bodies, decision-makers in the arena of higher education, and notably, consumers of higher education. State allocation of resources for higher education demonstrates variability,…

The United States higher education institutions' mission is to support students' academic success and career development goals by preparing them to become globally competent citizens and workforce-ready graduates. With student workforce preparation at the core of their mission, there is concern that colleges and universities are not adequately…

Dialogue act (DA) classification plays an important role in understanding, interpreting and modeling dialogue. Dialogue acts (DAs) represent the intended meaning of an utterance, which is associated with the illocutionary force (or the speaker's intention), such as greetings, questions, requests, statements, and agreements. In natural language…

The current exploratory study used data on students in grades six through 12 in North Carolina to examine the effectiveness of their mathematics teachers. Its purpose was fourfold: (1) to identify teacher qualification indicators that are most important for predicting students' math scores; (2) to empirically identify teacher qualification…

Multilayer perceptron neural networks, Gaussian naive Bayes, and logistic regression classifiers were compared when used to make early predictions regarding one-year college student persistence. Two iterations of each model were built, utilizing a grid search process within 10-fold cross-validation in order to tune model parameters for optimal…

Prospective memory (PM) refers to memory for future intentions (e.g. remembering to press a button when you see an animal word). Researchers classify PM intentions in the laboratory as focal or nonfocal primarily in two ways. One way, task-appropriateness, refers to how the processing for the intention relates to the processing required for an…

Data science is a broad, interdisciplinary field concerned with the extraction of knowledge or insights from data, with the classification of data as a core, fundamental task. One of the most persistent challenges faced when performing classification is the class imbalance problem. Class imbalance refers to when the frequency with which each class…

Subject-verb agreement constitutes a robust characteristic of French. However, especially at beginner and intermediate levels, second language (L2) learners might substitute or fail to recognize an infinitive for a conjugated verb, or a 3rd person singular form for a plural form, as "Les enfants mangera" (The children will eat--3rd…

In this dissertation, I investigated how cognitive resources as well as formal, and informal language experience impact language learning in two studies. In the first study (Chapter 2), I examined the learning of Spanish grammatical gender by Chinese international students who were studying abroad in the US. The goal of that study was to uncover…