Occupations in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) are growing faster than all other fields in the United States. While this is exciting, there is concern that many of these positions will go unfilled, as students in STEM are leaving their educational pursuits at an alarming rate. The following two studies provide an in-depth…

Most institutions maintain institutional guidelines based on specific professional beliefs in order to establish social order within the setting and accomplish their institutional goals (Heritage, 2005; Heritage & Clayman, 2010). Therefore, a key research issue in institutional Conversation Analysis (CA) is to examine how institutional…

Heavy metals are a recognized toxic environmental contaminant, even at very low concentrations. There have been well-known events in the last decade within the US of high amounts of lead in the drinking water supplies of cities, leading to detrimental effects within its population. Ways have been found to remove this metal, and others, from water…

Institutional assessment in higher education often restricts measurement of learning to outcomes that elide the complexity of learning processes and contexts in favor of data that is tidy and manageable. Moreover, such outcomes are frequently written to express an economic value for the learning to justify the purpose of education as a personal…

This IPA study examines how professional college writing tutors feel their role is understood and appreciated (or not). While writing tutoring is a hallmark service at many undergraduate institutions, there remains an incongruence between what tutors, professors, students, and administrators expect from the role. In order to bring more clarity to…

Public-facing statements about anti-racism and linguistic justice have become common tools for educational organizations to promote values of criticality and openness. Such statements often explicitly reject practices that equate language difference with deficit and continue to harm marginalized groups that speak languages or use pronouns that…

Play has been discussed by mathematicians and mathematics educators as essential to mathematical progress and has been widely acknowledged to have a role in learning. Yet, play is rarely acknowledged, leveraged, or studied for mathematics learners beyond early childhood. Moreover, there are theoretical and empirical challenges with designing for…

Postsession narrative notes written by professional tutors in a health sciences university writing center had never been analyzed to identify the most common elements noted as subpar in graduate students' scholarly writing. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to examine these notes to identify the most common elements noted as subpar…

This dissertation investigates the experiences of multilingual writers in a writing center at a major research university based in the United States. It includes interviews with the writers and with the tutors who serve multilingual writers, to understand if these writers are getting what they need in the writing center to be successful in their…

The purpose of this case study was to evaluate how community college IT students interact with and succeed in virtual labs to determine the impact of these digital environments on learning outcomes. The research employed a comprehensive range of data collection methods, including pre-interview questionnaires, interviews, and observations, to…

Hands-on laboratory experiences are a key part of all engineering programs. Currently there is high demand for online engineering courses, but offering lab experiences online still remain a great challenge. Remote laboratories have been under development for more than 20 years and are part of a bigger category, called online laboratories, which…

Open educational resources (OER) are digital and non-digital resources for teaching, learning, and research that are available for no cost and licensed with various open licenses, permitting their widespread modification and use. While these resources afford benefits to post-secondary students in terms of reduced cost, ease of access, and…

Institutions of higher education have a unique opportunity to support their students' holistic development by incorporating elements of high-impact practice into campus jobs. High-impact practices ask students to dedicate significant time and energy to meaningful work, which channels students' efforts toward productive activities that deepen their…

The purpose of this study was to discover what defines a writing center by interviewing directors of writing centers in the Southern Appalachian area. This qualitative study was based on a single round of recorded telephone interviews with 13 writing center directors who meet the criteria for inclusion in the study. Many researchers have written…

In this dissertation, I explored students' expressed emotions as they worked on a problem-solving lab contextualizing the local lead poisoning issue in the city in which they attended college. I identified students' expressed emotions and their reasoning for expressing those emotions. I also looked at the change in students' emotions as they…