Traditional lecture continues to dominate undergraduate instruction in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) despite the decades-long call to alter teaching to include more student-centered, evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs). While researchers have done some exploration of barriers to change, a need exists for…

In their seminal 1995 article, Barr and Tagg encouraged higher education to think differently about undergraduate education and suggested that a new paradigm be adopted that focused less on what is taught and more on what is learned. Dubbed the learner-centered paradigm, this reframing of education challenges long standing practices and removes…

This dissertation uses data from the evaluation of a Striving Readers project to examine the associations between levels of implementation of different components of Scholastic's "READ 180" and student achievement as measured on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) reading assessment. The approach was hierarchical linear modeling using…