Christian higher education has always been a developing enterprise, and leaders predict an unprecedented rate of change in the near future. Such scale of change poses an existential threat to modern Christian higher education efforts, heightening the value of crisis leadership and related competencies. These institutions and the leaders who guide…

Experiences of social rejection can impact individual development in a severe and enduring manner, including significant academic and psychological challenges that span time, relationships, and circumstances. As a result, capacity to assess for social rejection is important to inform early identification and subsequent intervention (McKown et al.,…

Background: In recent years, the examination of the impostor phenomenon (IP) has expanded to Black doctoral student populations; however, studies have only sampled Black students attending predominantly white institutions (PWIs). To date, an exploration of IP in Black students attending historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) is…

This study examined the contribution of several risk and protective factors to the development of anxiety, depression, and somatic problems among college students in Ukraine. A cross-sectional survey (N = 997) was conducted to determine the extent to which various predicting factors such as family communication, family satisfaction, social…

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…

The main objective of this dissertation was to investigate factors that affect decision-makers' trust in and reliance on algorithmic predictions as decision aids in the context of college admission prediction tasks. College admission officers often made predictions about the applicants' future success based on multiple pieces of available…

Response style, one common aberrancy in non-cognitive assessments in psychological fields, is problematic in terms of inaccurate estimation of item and person parameters, which leads to serious reliability, validity, and fairness issues (Baumgartner & Steenkamp, 2001; Bolt & Johnson, 2009; Bolt & Newton, 2011). Response style refers to…

Psychology doctoral students face high demands with academics and clinical work, while balancing responsibilities with relationships, finances, and health concerns (Myers et al., 2012). Psychologists in training experienced heightened anxiety and are at greater risk for burnout during the COVID-19 pandemic (Norcross & Phillips, 2020). Research…

For many people, learning a second language as an adult is a challenging endeavor. Much interest in the study of adult second language learning has concerned the type of input that learners receive in their second language, with findings suggesting that second language learners are often exposed to a register of speech called 'foreigner talk' that…

The digital transformation in educational assessment has led to the proliferation of large-scale data, offering unprecedented opportunities to enhance language learning, and testing through machine learning (ML) techniques. Drawing on the extensive data generated by online English language assessments, this dissertation investigates the efficacy…

Since the world has faced the COVID-19 pandemic there has been a workforce shortage in many professions, and education is among those professions. Even before the global pandemic, education was seeing worrying levels of shortage, stress, burnout, and attrition. Teachers feel stress from the growing list of different roles and responsibilities they…

Duckworth and Quinn (2009) identified grit as an influencing factor that could be connected to a principal's self-efficacy. The researchers defined grit as "trait-level perseverance and passion for long-term goals" (Duckworth & Quinn, 2009, p. 166) and suggested that grit predicted achievement in challenging domains over and beyond…

Skill acquisition theorists conceptualize second language (L2) learning as the acquisition of a set of perceptual, cognitive, and motor skills. The dominant view in skill acquisition theory is to regard L2 skill acquisition as a three-stage process "from initial representation of knowledge through initial changes in behavior to eventual…

The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to determine if faculty trust in principals and collaborative leadership behaviors predicted teacher job stress in K-12 public education settings. The study consisted of 141 certified teachers from one large K-12 school district in Texas. This research sought to answer four research…

This dissertation presents various machine learning applications for predicting different cognitive states of students while they are using a vocabulary tutoring system, DSCoVAR. We conduct four studies, each of which includes a comprehensive analysis of behavioral and linguistic data and provides data-driven evidence for designing personalized…