Higher education (HIED) presidents face a wide variety of competing demands and pressures. High emotional intelligence (EI) has been found to be effective in good leadership, but few studies exist which examine HIED presidents' EI. This quantitative growth model study attempted to expand the understanding of EI and its source of change among HIED…

Bullying, a complex phenomenon impacting virtually every school, can be damaging both in the short term and long term (Nansel et al., 2001; Solomontos-Kountouri et al., 2017; Wolke et al., 2013). About 20% of students aged 12 to 18 years old report having experienced bullying while 20-25% of college students report having experienced bullying…

Confirmative evaluation is often noted as an important element of models of Human Performance Technology and Performance Improvement, but there exists confusion around what is and what is not confirmative evaluation. A significant issue limiting the use of confirmative evaluation is the Performance Improvement field's inability to clearly classify…

The purpose of this study was to determine if there is a predictive relationship between the number of years a student is enrolled in an elementary school with a campus-wide character education program (CWCEP) and their academic achievement, attendance, and behavior during their high school years. This study examined whether students enrolled in…

Many researchers will comment on how vital parent engagement and participation is for student achievement, but there is limited research on this field in the online realm (Borup et al., 2019). This dissertation examined parent engagement at Indiana Connections Academy over the course of the spring semester of 2023 at the school. Since parent…

Novice teachers often report feeling unprepared for their teaching positions, even after completing a real-time student teaching experience. Novice teacher efficacy has been found to decrease over the course of the first year of teaching, and does not return to its pre-teaching level for three years. The purpose of this sequential mixed methods…

The science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) sciences play a pivotal role in developing nations, both in terms of developing newer and better solutions to problems and also in the approach used to solve those problems. An excellent predictor of future success in the STEM sciences is the ability to mentally manipulate shapes, also…

This critical qualitative study explores refugee women and higher education (HE), an understudied area, to establish a foundation within HE to trouble refugee women's educational exclusion. Despite 79.5 million refugees globally (UNHCR, 2020), mixed responses persist, particularly amid authoritarianism in the U.S. evidenced by decreased…

People segment their continuous stream of experience into events, or temporal segments that have a beginning and an endpoint. But how are such event boundaries defined? Linguistic theories of event encoding draw a distinction between bounded events that are non-homogeneous, structured temporal developments leading to an inherent endpoint (e.g.,…

The COVID-19 global pandemic has surfaced glaring racial disparities and multiple epidemics. The exacerbated anti-Asian racism and the reemergence of "yellow peril" and "perpetual foreigner" stereotypes has resulted in many Asian international students' increased awareness of race and racism. However, for far too long,…

Several daily phenomena around us can be modeled as time-evolving networks. Working with expressive and tractable models for the evolution of such networks can improve different prediction and decision-making tasks. While the literature has studied many approaches to model such networked phenomena partially, multiple gaps remain. This thesis is an…

This qualitative collective case study aimed to explore that attitudes and perceptions of alumni engagement at a private women's college in the Southeastern United States. A total of thirteen alumni from one of two generational cohorts: baby boomers or millennials, were interviewed and six participated in two focus group sessions. Interviews and…

The purpose of this qualitative transcendental phenomenological study was to examine the lived experiences of female elementary school principals as they navigate workplace stress and personal well-being. Work intensification and subsequent stressors for school principals are not a recent phenomenon; however, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on…

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) have emerged as valuable systems to promote active learning. It is critical to build accurate student models to support the learning process. In order to provide efficient and effective personalized instructions for students, tracking a student's time-varying knowledge state is essential to an ITS. Prior…

Disabled individuals in Western history have encountered barriers, both physical and attitudinal, that limit their potential in society. These barriers are both constructed intentionally and unintentionally, according to disability studies. They have been unintentionally built as the disabled have been specifically excluded, making the need for…