With the latest advances in conversational agents like Siri and Alexa, and Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and PaLM, Question Answering (QA) systems have become more important. Users submit millions of queries per day and it is up to the system to provide reliable, to-the-point answers. In this dissertation, we explore various aspects to…

To remain competitive in an innovative world, American classrooms are promoting careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by utilizing the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Students are engaged in inquiry by applying scientific practices like argumentation. However, science teachers are finding it difficult to…

The semantics and pragmatics of polar questions remain undertheorized. Standard proposition-set accounts (Hamblin, 1976; Groenendijk and Stokhof, 1984), which take question meanings to be identifiable with the (appropriately defined) set of their answers, have been developed mostly for wh-questions; when applied to polar questions, they predict…

This convergent parallel mixed methods study with qualitative and quantitative content analysis was conducted to analyze and describe the cognitive complexity of the publicly released Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles Exam questions compared to the language of higher-order thinking found in research literature. Hess' Cognitive Rigor…

Modeling with mathematics (MP4) is a mathematical practice standard that can be used to engage students in mathematical content standards as well as additional mathematical practice standards. Research has shown the benefits of mathematical modeling (e.g., Aguirre et al., 2019; Cirillo et al., 2016a), but also the challenges teachers can face…

Teachers' questioning is a key practice that influences student learning, yet not all teachers' questioning is equally effective, and fine-grained analyses uncovering the details of teachers' questioning are scarce. My study investigated the types of questions asked by three in-service elementary school math teachers, the associated levels of…

The current study employs a qualitative, exploratory case study method examining the classroom practices of three 5th grade science teachers from two intermediate campuses within a school district in the Southwest. The study explores opportunities and barriers to high level questioning by teachers leading to critical thinking. Qualitative data…

While evidence suggests PBL teachers' roles support higher student learning outcomes, there was a general lack of data that explores how PBL teachers describe their roles in teaching (Kaplan & Garner, 2017; Leng et al., 2018). The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore how high school teachers, who used project-based…

COVID-19 exacerbated a pre-existing and well-documented mental health crisis on college campuses in the United States. During COVID-19, more college students than ever before in recorded history reported feelings of anxiety and depression, among other mental health issues. There are myriad possible causes for the decline in mental health among…

The development of clinical judgment is an important topic in nursing education, and various teaching strategies have been proposed to improve this skill among nursing students and new graduate nurses. However, the effectiveness of these strategies is not well-researched. One promising approach is using higher-order questions to guide and develop…

This dissertation explores the implementation of classical education in a non-classical charter high school, with a focus on science education using classical methodologies. Employing techniques like copy work, history-based science teaching (HBST), the Socratic method, and the Progymnastmata, astronomy, and chemistry were taught. To identify…

Online courses include the design for student interaction to support effective learning. Studies have shown that online discussion boards are a useful option to engage students. However, with new emerging digital technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR), the question remains to what extent or in what ways these immersive technologies can be used…

Asynchronous online discussions have the potential to facilitate meaningful learning activities, such as ill-structured problem-solving, due to their asynchronicity and connectivity. However, the literature identifies two significant challenges in effectively supporting students' ill-structured problem-solving in these environments --…

Socratic seminars are active learning opportunities for students that create a classroom atmosphere building upon the foundational knowledge and experience of the students in the room. The teacher acts as a facilitator of learning, and students research, create questions, and converse to create a deeper understanding of learning. The purpose of…

We study how to automatically generate cloze questions from given texts to assess reading comprehension, where a cloze question consists of a stem with a blank space holder for the answer key, and three distractors for generating confusions. We present a generative method called CQG (Cloze Question Generator) for constructing cloze questions from…