This thesis consists of two projects I worked on simultaneously throughout my PhD. Although neither project builds on the other, both investigate social systems as networks, and draw on a common set of statistical tools and methods.In the first project, I analyse the academic employment and doctoral education of tenure- track faculty at all…

Built environment research has long been interested in understanding the complexities of transitional spaces by investigating their hosted interactions. One approach used in efforts of this kind is actor-network theory (ANT), which conceptualizes built spaces as networks of relations that allow for certain interactions but not others. Previous…

The main goal of this article is to analyse the Non-Partisan School movement (EsP, or Escola sem Partido) which articulates social and political actors around a conservative agenda for education in Brazil. Based on Ball's studies, this article analyses political governance networks using a free software, GEPHI, using a qualitative network…

Background: Learner profiles detected from digital trace data are typically triangulated with survey data to explain those profiles based on learners' internal conditions (e.g., motivation). However, survey data are often analysed with limited consideration of the interconnected nature of learners' internal conditions. Objectives: Aiming to enable…

The present study explored the public conceptualization of creativity on Twitter through co-listed hashtags associated with #creativity in a million tweets. Exploratory Graph Analysis was used to identify a network of semantic clusters, and a pre-trained language model yielded the sentiment of the underlying tweets. The semantic clusters reflect…

Transforming schools through mastery learning may solve education's existential crisis, offering today's learners the relevance and individualization they need while returning to the most ancient form of assessment, proving that learning has occurred. Mastery learning requires significant change to all the norms and practices of school, altering…

The purpose of this dissertation is to study the consistency of the structures and the centrality of mathematics courses in the curricula of the universities in the Minnesota State University system. This research will be based on the curriculum prerequisite networks for the seven universities in the Minnesota State System. These networks will be…

Online laboratories have been widely used in education, research, and industrial applications. For online laboratories, various architectures have been constructed to provide good user experience and powerful capabilities for online experimentation, in which the controller is a crucial part to connect the server with a controlled test rig.…

Bridging gaps between educational stakeholders at the classroom, school, and system levels is essential to achieve sustainable change in primary and secondary education. However, transferring knowledge or building capacity within this network of loosely coupled stakeholders is demanding. The "brokerage" concept holds promise for studying…

This is the second article in a series of three in this special issue on establishing a boundary object to foster network health and development. The first article laid out the theoretical rationale for an Improvement Network Health and Development Framework. This article details the efforts to develop a set of practical measures tied to this…

Since 1997, the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network has hosted the Institute for New Educational Developers (INED), a multi-day event intended to help people just entering the field. While each iteration of the INED is enacted in a highly localized and contextualized fashion, each seeks to address the needs of the intended…

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges and opportunities for knowledge management systems (KMS) in various domains and sectors. This research explores the strategies to manage expectational knowledge in higher education after the COVID-19 pandemic. This study employed a qualitative research method with a case study design to…

Students employing problem-based learning (PBL) face complex problems admitting multiple solutions. Knowledge maps are an effective tool to support students in PBL to represent, analyze, and guide their knowledge structure. Previous studies have examined the use of knowledge mapping techniques in both individual and collaborative learning process.…

Checking for possible inconsistency between direct and indirect evidence is an important task in network meta-analysis. Recently, an evidence-splitting (ES) model has been proposed, that allows separating direct and indirect evidence in a network and hence assessing inconsistency. A salient feature of this model is that the variance for…

Background: Collaborative learning can effectively promote the development of higher-order competencies, where learners collaborate via social interactions to explore and solve complex problems. It has been found that the effective occurrence of collaborative learning requires appropriate external guidance and support. In particular, collaborative…