Learning in adulthood should be a meaningful experience through which adult learners are able to re-examine their values and beliefs acquired over the years. Mezirow (1978a, 1978b)stated that learners' engagement with this process of reflection and making meaning leads to a change in one's perspective. To facilitate such a transformational…

Given the immense challenges of the principalship and the high turnover of school principals, school districts--and other organizations--have looked to assistant principals as a major source of leadership talent to take up the role of principal. In this qualitative dissertation, I explored how eight principals--from different USA…

This dissertation explores the role of social media use in the social development of "at-risk" youth in Los Angeles, CA and Lafayette, IN, with a major goal of identifying beneficial ways to address the social support needs of youth and adolescents to aid in their successful assimilation into adulthood. This study employs ethnographic…

This qualitative study explores the correspondence between contemplative practices and "orders of consciousness" from a constructive-developmental perspective, using Robert Kegan's approach. Adult developmental growth is becoming an increasingly important influence on humanity's ability to deal effectively with the growing complexity of…

The symptoms, assessment, and treatments of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) have been empirically investigated to the extent that there is a breadth of valid and reliable instruments investigating this psychopathological syndrome. There, too, exists a substantial evidence base for various treatment models demonstrating effectiveness in…

This research concerns the potential of online teaching to prompt university faculty members to reflect on the essence of good teaching, and as a result enhance their pedagogy in both online and face-to-face courses. Ideas of developmental psychologists melded with related concepts from online-learning theorists were used as a theoretical…

In three experiments I sought to experimentally test a source of emergent relations defined as transitivity by Stimulus Equivalence theory or as combinatorial entailment in Relational Frame Theory. In Experiment I, the participants were 4 children diagnosed with autism who also demonstrated significant cognitive and language delays, who were…

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to elicit the subjective experience of and personal meaning found in the process of first using literal expressions and then creating metaphors to describe a past meaningful experience. Six coresearchers in the field of psychology were selected for a one-time, 90- to 120-minute, one-on-one interview…

This dissertation investigates clitic doubling of both dative and accusative objects in adult and child language. It reports on three experimental studies designed to discover the specific distributional properties of this phenomenon, with particular attention to the effect of "rheme" and "kontrast," two distinct concepts often collapsed as…

This study tracks changes in three primary characteristics of Early New High German (ENHG) publications from 1499 to 1710: the complexity of the syntactic system of the language, the pictorial saturation of the publications, and the relationship between verbal text and illustrations on the ENHG printed page. Drawing on findings from literary…

Although attention to the effects of child-animal interactions on children's development has increased in the last three decades, developmental psychology has not attended to the importance of the effects of animals on children's development. There is a need to consider the possible impacts of animals as significant social partners for children's…

Early lexical acquisition is affected by biases and constraints within learners, but also by patterns and statistical regularities within a learner's environment. Much of the previous work examining the effect of statistical regularities on word learning has been directed at phonological regularities. Particularly, research has focused on the…

The study examined the effects of formative assessment on community college students' content-specific vocabulary skills, academic achievement and academic self-efficacy. Sixty-one community college students who were enrolled in Developmental Psychology took part in formative assessment only (N = 24), formative assessment in conjunction with goal…

Joint attention (JA), which occurs when two individuals focus on the same object or event, plays a critical role in social and language development. Two major kinds of joint attention have been observed: response to joint attention (RJA), in which children follow the attentional focus of their social partners, and initiation of joint attention…

There are currently 22 available models pertaining to counselor development, but their research focus has been on community counselors and it is assumed these models apply to school counselors. Counselor educators are charged with training competent professional counselors. A challenge to meeting this expectation arises due to school counselor…