Spatial skills, which represent the ability to mentally manipulate objects (Schneider & McGrew, 2012; Atit et al., 2020) have been shown to be correlated with entrance, persistence and success in STEM (Shea et al., 2001; Wai et al., 2009). Specifically, these skills have been shown to be necessary to geologists and geoscientists (Hegarty,…

The following exploratory case study is a program evaluation of a certification program for online instructors at a high-enrollment, 4-year research-intensive university in the southeast. Since 2014 the Online Instructor Certification (OIC) has operated as the predominant platform for preparing faculty to teach online at the site of study. The OIC…

This study examined the impact of a newly created Academic Advising Professional Development (AAPD) online program focused on the three major components of the "Concept of Academic Advising" for new and experienced advisors. The four-unit training, created in Blackboard, was designed to educate advisors on the meaning and application of…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether social work educators are conversant with spiritual assessment tools (FICA, HOPE, FAITH, SPIRIT, and CSI-MEMO), whether these tools are taught as part of the social work curriculum, and whether religious and spiritual courses are offered online and face-to-face in religious and non-religious…

Credit recovery in public education has become an intervention used widely in the United States to address the rising number of students who are not meeting with success in the completion of required courses in the traditional education setting. With the passing of the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, public schools sought a method to motivate…

Much research has been conducted to indicate that the freshman year of high school has an impact on a student's potential graduation from high school. Existing literature reveals that through the evolution of education in the United States, schools have been forced to place a strong emphasis on graduation. Many factors, including academic success,…

Higher education is experiencing an era of exponential growth in online doctoral programs and heightened accountability to stakeholders. In this dynamic landscape, the need to improve persistence for online doctoral students, estimated to be 30% to 40%, is imperative. Research has demonstrated that isolation and lack of belonging are contributing…

Experiencing education as an English learner (EL) is challenging and can result in lower persistence and graduation rates for ELs in community colleges. The overall three-year graduation rate in the United States for two-year institutions is low, but graduation rates are even lower for EL learners. One way to support EL students is through an…

In this study, I identified, implemented, and evaluated an appropriate solution set to improve the quality of asynchronous online training (i.e., eLearning) project intake at a research site in a government agency. The current project intake mechanism left eLearning production teams without sufficient information to move forward with educational…

Barriers to education and training can have a generational impact on socioeconomic status and economic development. Post-traditional students have been shown to experience a variety of barriers to education and family-sustaining employment. Social capital has been shown to help alleviate some of the barriers for students, resulting in stronger…

The purpose of this study was two-fold: to assess the current status of ethics education and to create a model ethics education curriculum for dental hygiene programs to address issues with current thinking in ethics education. To this end, the structure and sequence of randomly selected dental hygiene programs' ethics education curricula were…

Current methods to address the shortage of certified orientation and mobility specialists have either not been successful or have not kept up with the needs of students with visual impairments. This study explored the potential of an alternative method of addressing the shortage and gaps in education that it causes: training paraprofessionals to…

This program evaluation of the University of Pittsburgh EdD program was conducted to determine potential changes and modifications to create a more successful EdD program. The study had three purposes. The first was to determine how the Foundations and Practitioner Inquiry courses were structured to accommodate areas of concentration (ARCOs) and…

Improving teachers' content knowledge in mathematics is one way to address the ongoing national concern of poor performance in math. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of self-regulated online professional development for teachers' knowledge of fractions, decimals, and percentages, as well as factors prompting that impact.…

Cultural competence is described as a set of skills, values, and principles that acknowledge, respect, and work toward optimal interactions between the individual and the various cultural and ethnic groups with which an individual might come into contact. Scholars have been critical of cultural competence training because the three-dimensional…