In this dissertation, I report results from a study that investigated the impact of students' engagement in a series of tasks in an introductory proof course that was designed to stimulate their learning of reading strategies to support their comprehension of mathematics proofs. Specifically, I investigated the impact of the design of five…

English listening multimedia teaching courseware has the characteristics of both illustration and text, sound, and shape and provides a variety of possibilities for modern English listening teaching methods. Considering students' unique psychological characteristics such as strong self-awareness, physiological characteristics such as strong…

Professional training for language instructors needs to be more accessible and high-leverage in order to meet the growing demand for proficient users of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese languages. More specifically, teachers of these languages need exposure to effective teaching methods designed to meet the language-specific needs required to help…

The Cognitive Acceleration (or Let's Think) approach to mathematics teaching is a Piagetian programme drawing on Vygotsky's research, developed at King's College London over 30 years ago, along with its associated professional development (PD) programme. This project sought to replicate the original studies conducted 10-15 years earlier and before…

Pioneer Valley Books (PVB) contracted McREL International to investigate the effects of the third grade Literacy Footprints (LFP) guided reading system on English language arts (ELA) performance on state assessments. LFP is a research-based, comprehensive, small-group literacy tool that facilitates explicit and systematic guided reading…

Community college faculty have experienced a shift in focus from access to access and student success. Given this shift in responsibility for student learning, community college faculty should be sufficiently prepared to teach a diverse student body and subsequently uphold beliefs regarding their ability to bring about desired outcomes of student…

The purpose of this study was to make the teachers in a particular private night high school participate in a School Based Professional Development program for their needs in educational technologies and adult learning theory so that the effectiveness of teachers in Private Night High Schools could improve. This was a case study including…

The study aimed to examine the effect of using a program based on the Connectivism theory on developing EFL prep stage students' critical literacy. A one- group pre-post test design along with a mixed research approach incorporating both quantitative and qualitative assessments were utilized in the study. A group of twenty-five second prep stage…

Professional development courses that focus on increasing knowledge and improving skill sets are an integral part of a medical imager's career. This study was a qualitative formative evaluation with purposeful sampling of participants in a professional development webinar course offered to medical imaging professionals in 35 Latin American and…

Service-learning has become a popular pedagogical tool to promote academic and civic learning. One form of service-learning provides physical activity for underrepresented community groups, including children with disabilities. Using experiential learning theory, the purpose of this descriptive case study was to evaluate college students'…

The leadership institute, targeting new and aspiring county Extension directors, was completely revised to reflect face-to-face and online constructivist learning theory and practice. New co-learning and engagement methods were incorporated, and all facilitators and teachers/presenters were trained and coached to use the new methods and…

This study investigated the effectiveness of two remedial mathematics courses that aimed to (a) present topics conceptually, (b) construct adequate schemata, and (c) introduce students to the culture of mathematics. The topics covered during the two courses were word problems, equivalence, variables and expressions, equations and inequalities, and…

The logic model that implicitly drives most professional development (PD) efforts asserts that PD leads to changes in teacher knowledge and beliefs, which leads to improved classroom practice, and ultimately, better student outcomes. However, efforts to study the impacts of PD programs are often hampered by the scarcity of high-quality…

New teachers continue to leave the profession at high rates although retention rates vary from school to school, district to district, and state to state. Many districts have implemented mentoring programs to improve retention of and support for new teachers in their schools. Often these models rely on full-time release mentors, which is…

Short-term study abroad programs currently account for more than 50% of students who study overseas. Using an adaptation of the Value-Belief-Norm theory of proenvironmental behavior (Stern, 2000), we hypothesized that study abroad nurtures global citizenship related to ecologically conscious behaviors by strengthening core relations among…