This capstone provides college students a virtual open-access library resource that focuses on effective listening practices in academic, professional, personal, and community settings. A review of related literature was conducted to identify research into various listening dimensions and to recognize listening leaders who have an exceptional way…

The focus of this study is on enhancing cultural competency and increasing an ethnorelative worldview perspective among instructional designers through an innovative approach that integrates global professionals and reciprocal learning. The study is grounded in the context of Arizona State University's mission to create inclusive learning…

Noise is a common impedance to easy and accurate speech understanding. In the presence of noise, speech processing mechanisms proceed with partial or ambiguous inputs, and listeners will engage additional cognitive resources to make sense of what they hear. The extent to which this is situation is affected by diminished exposure to a language is…

A descriptive case study approach was utilized in a southeastern United States Catholic Diocese to gain a better understanding of the conflict competency of eight ministry leaders to explore their competence in dealing with conflict pre and post education intervention. Participants were provided with a conflict scenario in a preliminary interview…

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine teacher mentor actions, specifically through the conversations between early career teachers and their mentors within a mentoring program in one Georgia metropolitan school system. The researcher sought to explore the meaning that early career teachers made of these conversations.…

Purpose: The purpose of this explanatory mixed methods study was to identify and describe what exemplary female presidents in California community colleges do to stay grounded and maintain physical, emotional, intellectual, social, vocational, and spiritual health. Methodology: This mixed methods study identified and described the perceptions of…

Code-switching (switching between languages) is a common linguistic behavior in bilingual speech directed to infants and children. In adult-directed speech (ADS), acoustic-phonetic properties of one language may transfer to the other language close to a code-switch point; for example, English stop consonants may be more Spanish-like near a switch.…

This dissertation explores the relationship between quantitative phonetic measurements and listener identification of accents of English, focusing on phonetic distance and its perceptual correlates across various English accent varieties. The Levenshtein distance (LD) measure, which quantifies string similarity by calculating the minimum cost of…

Over the last decade, STEM education research has reflected a turn towards framing disciplinary development in STEM as the repetition and stabilization of situated practices. In this dissertation, I turn further: towards "disciplinary relationships" as a potential focus of analysis. To centralize disciplinary relationships, I use a…

Generic statements are a fundamental linguistic tool for efficiently passing along information. Yet they can leave a lot unsaid, such as how broadly they apply. In this dissertation, I examine how generic statements work as a pedagogical tool. To do so, I use the esport "League of Legends" as a naturalistic experimental setting in which…

Across three separate investigations, this dissertation documents work examining the role of higher-order processes and cognitive effort during the top-down compensatory repair of degraded speech, specifically perceptual restoration. Perceptual restoration is a phenomenon where a listener can perceptually restore or repair speech…

This study used a hermeneutic phenomenology methodology to determine whether the faculty participants at a Midwestern community college used servant leadership (SL) during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown of March 2020. The goal was to see how well the participants, through SL, addressed and supported their students' online learning needs and…

Children who speak non-standardized language varieties are at risk for both over- and under-referral to speech-language and special education services (e.g., Morgan et al., 2016; Pearson et al., 2014). Extensive research with bidialectal (Craig, 2016; Kohn et al., 2021) and bilingual (Goldstein, 2022; Paradis et al., 2021) children has shown the…

Because Western art music is harmonically more complex than popular music and because it is written with musical notation, it may be challenging for certain people with no music training (non-musicians), those who did not grow up with Western art music, or those who did not choose to listen to this type of music for enjoyment to understand and…

The local problem addressed in this study was that students at a community college are experiencing stress levels that may impede their ability to learn. The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine student perceptions of self-selected music listening as a strategy for learning under stress. The theory of emotional intelligence by Goleman…