Language production and the execution of motor acts have long been thought to have similarities in the rules of their execution. Recent studies have begun to directly compare these two processes by measuring certain phenomena found in both. Until now, comparisons have only been made in parallel, with different groups of participants and/or tasks.…

Successful reference relies on being appropriately informative for listeners. What factors influence informativeness? For example, what factors influence the decision to refer to a ball with the less informative phrase "it," as opposed to the more informative phrase "the red ball"? The present dissertation proposes and…

The Every Student Succeeds Act was passed in 2015, requiring schools to choose an accountability measure to accompany standardized achievement assessments. This act charges schools to educate students on academic standards and address the whole student socially and emotionally. One climate variable not widely studied in America is students' sense…

Police misconduct has become an issue of concern among law enforcement officers and other stakeholders. Approximately, 10% of law enforcement officers commit 90% of misconduct problems, and as high as 45% of the misconduct generates citizen complaints. Thus, there has been an increasing debate on whether police officers should attain a college…

Educators often observe differences in students' writing productivity, with some students stopping early while others continue to write for the given time. This study demonstrates how planning and goal setting are related to these written production patterns. A Growth Mixture Model identified three groups of writers: the "Early…

This dissertation explores the relationship between language production processes and recorded typing behaviors among native speakers of English writing in their native language. Typing is quite prevalent in modern societies, as its use is becoming increasingly required in professional and personal settings but it remains largely understudied in…

Through the lens of Maslach's (1995) Multi-Dimensional Theory of Burnout, and Stamm's (2012) Quality of Life Survey (ProQOL), the study examined educators scores regarding various logistics. The purpose of this quantitative, causal comparative study was to test the multi-dimensional theory of burnout by comparing various demographics of school…

Workplace expectations for engineers have changed in the 21st century due to rapid technology advances, globalization, customer centricity, and team-based design practices, which require engineering graduates to have well-developed emotional intelligence (EI) to perform at high levels in the engineering profession. To fill the gap between…

Gamification is a term used to describe the art of taking a process or a task and making it into a game. Using games as a way to make mundane tasks or necessary lessons more fun is used in many aspects of life. Parents often use games to teach children tasks, and teachers use games to enforce learning, and much more. The gamification of Security…

Academic department chairs are key in helping universities achieve student success. To succeed in their decisions and furthering their university's educational mission, department chairs can use institutional data to inform their decision-making. In many cases, however, there are gaps, misalignments, and inefficiencies between department chairs…

Students spend little time completing tasks when deadlines are far off; however, they tend to increase their work amounts as deadline approaches. This phenomenon, which is called deadline rush, can be modeled by exponential distributions. Deadline reactivity, represented by a rate parameter of the exponential distribution, parameterizes individual…

As online learning platforms and computerized testing become more common, an increasing amount of data are collected about users. These data include, but are not limited to, response time, keystroke logs, and raw text. The desire to observe these features of the response process reflect an underlying interest in the cognitive processes and…

The purpose of this qualitative hermeneutical phenomenological study was to understand the mindsets of preservice educators regarding mandatory training in pre-violence indicator patterns at XYZ University. Pre-violence indicator patterns are defined as behaviors symptomatic of violent or aggressive behavior. The theory guiding this study was…

Today's youth have lives dramatically different from the past and face an unpredictable future and challenging job market, thus being entrepreneurial is increasingly more important to cultivate (Ford, 2015). I aim to understand the state and development of being entrepreneurial and its implications for broadly educating young people, as one…

Academic dishonesty remains a pervasive, multi-discipline dilemma which has been reported as having the propensity of resulting in longstanding consequences beyond academic settings. Previous research has suggested that students who participate in dishonest behaviors while attending institutions of higher education have greater tendencies to…