The topic of this research study is mastery learning, an educational theory that began with the work of John Carrol in 1963. The core principle of this theory is that all students can achieve uniform learning outcomes, but it will take some students longer than others to reach the same performance goals. The problem that this research study…

This research study examined inclusive teaching practices, class policies, and course structures in active learning Calculus classes. Analyzing interview data, along with focus group discussions and classroom observations, obtained from 23 students and 4 instructors, themes were extracted through open-coding methodology, employing scholarly…

The National Science Foundation identified a shortage of STEM professionals in the United States. There is a dire need to promote STEM education to secure high-paying and skilled jobs for the country's residents and the overall healthy economy. This shortage is partly due to students' low retention and persistence to graduate in STEM fields. Due…

This study explored the lived experiences of eleven transfer students as they described their experiences in Calculus 2 at very high research land grant institutions (R1). This qualitative investigation focused on the psychological phenomenon of transition as the transfer students perceived, reflected, made sense, and understood their transition…

University Calculus I courses serve as a means of access into high demand STEM fields and large lecture style passive calculus courses can be difficult for students. A mixed methods research design was used to compare a flipped instructional approach to a traditional lecture approach in large section Calculus I courses. The flipped lecture model…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship among precalculus self-efficacy, grit, and achievement in university Precalculus classes taught with an Online Flipped Model (OFM). The researcher developed the "Precalculus Self-Efficacy Survey" (PCSES) to measure precalculus self-efficacy. For the purposes of validating the…

Technology enables innovation in teaching and learning. Extant educational research has been focused on comparison between learning platforms, namely traditional and blended learning environments. The purpose of this study examined the differences between students' performance in a Blended and traditional college course and it compared the…

This dissertation consists of a literature review and two empirical studies that focus on the forethought phase of self-regulated learning. The overall goal was to provide a more thorough understanding of the processes students engage in prior to initiating their academic tasks. This dissertation is composed of five chapters. Chapter One…

Learning centers offer academic resources to postsecondary students to aid in their success. Despite deep work examining the efficiency of these learning centers, the field still does not know enough about students' experiences with these learning centers' resources. By understanding the mechanisms and experiences of students as they learn about,…

Digital Game-Based Learning (DGBL) demonstrated a positive impact on students' motivation, engagement, knowledge acquisition, and many other areas. However, all the benefits DGBL can offer for the classroom do not seem to be enticing enough to persuade classroom instructors to implement DGBL in their classroom. There is a disconnect between…

This is a study of student engagement with computational labs in Calculus 2. The labs task students with using MATLAB to investigate contexts such as rocket science, disease modeling, and market economics forecasting by modifying and executing provided code, guided by questions that have students report the results of their simulations or…

This descriptive-comparative study investigated the impact of different instructional models on a university level Precalculus course on students' achievement. Participant data (N = 14,993) was collected from Fall 2008 to Spring 2019 and categorized into four different instructional models: traditional, modular, emporium v.1, and emporium v.2.…

There continues to be a national concern about the shortage of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduates needed to fill current and anticipated STEM workforce positions. There is an additional concern regarding attracting and maintaining women in the STEM disciplines. In this study, I investigated one part of the STEM…

Instructional explanations are an ubiquitous component of classroom instruction, but are relatively neglected in science education when compared to other facets of teaching and learning. The ubiquity of instructional explanations and their potential to stimulate learning in students suggests that they should garner more attention from science…

Researchers have documented the importance of seeing a graph as an emergent trace of how two quantities' values vary simultaneously in order to reason about the graph in terms of quantitative relationships. If a student does not see a graph as a representation of how quantities change together then the student is limited to reasoning about…