Modern classrooms are increasingly diverse. Students vary in their academic abilities, personal interests, cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and previous experiences (Allen et al., 2013). To meet the varied needs of students, educators must adapt their instruction so all are able to find success. Modifying lesson plans and changing instruction…

Little was known about the experiences of K-5 online tutors. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences of online tutors regarding their pedagogical practices and digital tools used when tutoring students in Grades K-5. The community of inquiry model served as the conceptual framework. Data included online…

Programming skills are a vital part of many disciplines but can be challenging to teach and learn. Thus, the programming courses are considered difficult and a major stumbling block. To overcome these challenges, students could benefit from extensive individual support such as tutoring, but there are simply not enough qualified tutors available to…

Implementing ambitious teaching practices is a student-led teaching style that emphasizes being student-centered instead of a teacher-centered teaching approach. This qualitative descriptive study looks at how special education teachers describe their use of authentic activities, social context, and classroom culture in the implementation of…

Pedagogical agents, virtual avatars that are often included in online training or educational modules, have been studied in a variety of disciplines to determine the extent to which their inclusion in online or multimedia learning environments may influence both cognitive and affective outcomes in learners. The present study examined the effect of…

Problems with literacy exist in schools. Children in American public-schools continue to struggle to be successfully identified as proficient readers. Educators need detailed descriptions of how student and teacher interactions aimed at developing positive literate identities impact the literacy development and achievement of struggling readers in…

From an early age, we engage in building our narrative language through social interactions. These narrative language skills influence academic success. Many educational establishments focus solely on academic achievement. A focus on supporting emotional intelligence that can support narrative language development is imperative. In this…

Adaptive tutoring systems often model student knowledge in ways that break away from a "one size fits all" approach to learning. Nonetheless, the strengths of these systems can often be limited, as knowledge representations are not easily interpreted by teachers, which make these systems difficult to integrate into pedagogical practices.…

This dissertation consists of three papers. In each paper, I leverage a different quantitative method to study a downstream effect of technology on educational outcomes. In the first paper, I study the impact of an online math learning program on 3rd through 5th grade math achievement in Louisiana. Employing Zearn Math usage metrics and…

Multilingual college students often struggle with writing and revising for academic purposes. This dissertation explored the effectiveness of a Concept-Based Language Instruction (C-BLI) approach to teaching revision processes to college-level multilingual writers. Although a significant body of research exists on effective feedback on…

This phenomenological study research presents an option to use both discourse in the native language and technology as an alternative to improve the understanding of mathematics in secondary education. 13 students whose native language is Spanish attended a high school in a large urban school district in the Southwest of the United States,…

Quantitative learning centers (QLCs) have emerged on undergraduate around the globe in an attempt to provide necessary support to students enrolled in undergraduate courses that address quantitative literacy. QLCs often provide support through peer tutoring to students in mathematics or related courses. Since QLCs are prevalent on undergraduate…

Mandarin Chinese verbs are composed of one to four characters that function together as a conceptual unit. However, in modern spoken Chinese, most of these verbs are two-character compounds. This dissertation is focused on adult second language (L2) learners' acquisition of these two-character verb compounds. Specifically, the acquisition of a…

In this dissertation, the author presents two projects regarding teaching strategies that apply to an intelligent tutoring system (ITS). The author applied multiple-solution teaching methods to the ITSs. The first project is an ITS that aims to help college students learn how to use Computer-Aided-Design (CAD) software, FreeCAD ITS. The second…

In order for teachers to support students' mathematical thinking, Battista (2004) believed they must identify core mathematical concepts, recognize conceptual frameworks for understanding children's thinking, and use appropriate assessment tasks. In his view, learning trajectories provide teachers with information on children's cognitive abilities…