Knowledge and stewardship are essential factors in developing perceptions of the environment. This research determines if gaps in environmental knowledge and concern exist between genders as well as students majoring in science and those seeking non-science degrees. Approximately 1,229 first-year university students participated in this study.…

This dissertation consists of three chapters exploring the role that information plays in strategic situations. The first two chapters are devoted to modeling a decision maker's reasoning (knowledge, beliefs, and unawareness) about those of other decision makers in strategic environments. The third chapter, in turn, studies how information and…

The purpose of this research was to identify the competencies of educational technologists by surveying the professionals within the field. The Educational Technology Competency Survey (ETCS) developed in this research was based on a conceptual framework that emphases the definition of educational technology and associated knowledge, skill, and…

While research in teacher professional development (PD) has focused on numerous topics, not much is known about how teachers understand the notion of PD. Studying this topic is important because, for PD to be effective, all parties involved in its design and implementation need to have a common understanding of the scope and purposes of PD. We…

Understanding ideas in a discourse is challenging, especially in textual discourse analysis. We propose using temporal analytics with unsupervised machine learning techniques to investigate promising ideas for the collective advancement of communal knowledge in an online knowledge building discourse. A discourse unit network was constructed and…

The purpose of this study is to examine the characteristics of US schools associated with two measures of scientific literacy (content knowledge and "procedural and epistemic" knowledge) using the 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data. Because outcomes are nested within students, and students within schools, a…

The "expert blind spot" (EBS) hypothesis implies that even some experts with a high content knowledge might have problems in science communication because they are using the structure of the content rather than their addressee's prerequisites as an orientation. But is that also true for students? Explaining science to peers is a crucial…

Since knowledge and skills related to curriculum content and pedagogy are crucial for teachers, it is of interest to explore the research relating to what preservice teachers know and can do. Refereed journal articles published between 2005 and 2015 that reported on the assessment of the knowledge or skills of Australian preservice teachers are…

Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education is a critical component of federal policymakers' agendas. Out-of-school time (OST) programs are designated as an important venue to teach STEM to K-12 students. Using a sample of OST direct staff in Pennsylvania (n = 133), the present analysis examines instructional methods used for…

Knowledge about different health-related attitudes, beliefs, and risks is of significant interest to scholars in different Social Science disciplines. Usually knowledge is collected in a form of multiple variables and then constructed as a composite indicator. The question any researcher working with knowledge-related variables faces is: what is…

This study refined the "Multicultural Counseling Knowledge and Awareness Scale" (MCKAS; Ponterotto et al. "Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development," 30, 153-180, 2002) in response to concerns in the literature (e.g., Constantine et al. "Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology," 8(4), 334-345,…

High human papillomavirus (HPV) prevalence and low HPV vaccine uptake are significant public health concerns. Disparities in HPV-associated cancers and HPV vaccine uptake rates suggest the need for additional research examining factors associated with vaccine acceptance. This study assessed HPV awareness and knowledge and identified…

The advent of the social web brought with it challenges and opportunities for research on learning and knowledge construction. Using the online-encyclopedia Wikipedia as an example, we discuss several methods that can be applied to analyze the dynamic nature of knowledge-related processes in mass collaboration environments. These methods can help…

Background: Significant progress has been made in the identification of language impairment in children are bilingual. Bilingual children's vocabulary knowledge may be distributed across languages. Thus, when testing bilingual children it is difficult to know how to weigh each language for diagnostic purposes. Even when conceptual scoring is used…

In the present study we aimed to develop a multidimensional test assessing high school students' knowledge about triangles, and then to determine the validity evidence for it based on the internal structure and relations to another variable and its reliability. The test developed was administered to 557 tenth grade students. To assess the validity…