Higher education administrators are tasked with supporting and retaining students with increasing needs. These needs often include emotional and mental health issues but can worsen to include suicidality and violence toward others. Traditional campus approaches for supporting students and intervening for violence, such as counseling and campus…

Developing students' transferable knowledge is a primary goal of education. In complex domains such as statistics, however, students often develop brittle and inflexible understanding that does not transfer successfully to real world problems or new contexts. This dissertation explores one approach to facilitating students' development of…

According to data from U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics in 2018, it is estimated that there are 1,308,100 paraeducators employed in public schools in the United States. Despite the prevalence of paraeducators, these employees receive limited opportunity for training. In addition, there is little guidance from the Department of Education or…

For Schoolwide Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS) to be effective, educators must use the practices as intended. Whether a teacher uses a practice as intended can depend, in part, on how feasible the practice is perceived to be. Identifying malleable factors associated with teachers' perceptions of SWPBIS feasibility can help…

New challenges in today's world have contributed to increased attention toward evaluating individuals' collaborative problem solving (CPS) skills. One difficulty with this work is identifying evidence of individuals' CPS capabilities, particularly when interacting in digital spaces. Often human-driven approaches are used but are limited in scale.…

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the closure of schools impacting over 60 million students worldwide. Previous researchers identified positive social interactions and relationships as critical for a child's healthy development. Unfortunately, when children experience trauma such as the interruption of face-to-face learning, coping behaviors…

For Schoolwide Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS) to be effective, educators must use the practices as intended. Whether a teacher uses a practice as intended can depend, in part, on how feasible the practice is perceived to be. Identifying malleable factors associated with teachers' perceptions of SWPBIS feasibility can help…

The purpose of this quantitative ex post facto research study was to determine if restorative practices, an alternative approach to traditional discipline, reduced behavior incidents, promoted student academic achievement, and increased attendance for African American male high school students. This study involved a targeted population of 730…

Exclusionary discipline in schools has disproportionately impacted Black students for decades. In 1975, just 21 years after the federally mandated desegregation of schools, the disparities in school discipline were documented as a nationwide problem. In the report of 2,862 school districts, Black students were being suspended at two to three times…

Postsecondary education students with intellectual and multiple disabilities are often supported by same-aged peer mentors. A single-subject multiple baseline design was used to examine the relationship between training with and without performance feedback and a peer mentor's fidelity of implementing a student's function-based intervention plan…

Technology-based supports offer promise for helping elementary school teachers implement Tier 2 interventions to address challenging student behavior. The Daily Report Card Online (DRCO) platform is a cloud-based web application designed to support teachers' adoption and implementation of a high-quality daily report card (DRC) intervention through…

Classroom teachers in the United States are absent on average approximately 6 percent of a school year. Despite the prevalence of teacher absences, surprisingly little research has assessed the key source of replacement instruction: substitute teachers. Using detailed administrative and survey data from a large urban school district, we document…

While the development of creativity, or creative thinking, in mathematics is considered important by many researchers, there are several difficulties in implementing creative tasks, especially before secondary school. Within the original context of a mathematical escape game, this paper reports two episodes exemplifying the difficulties met by…

Check-in/check-out (CICO) is an evidence-based multicomponent intervention widely implemented in elementary and middle schools. The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether an adapted CICO intervention, with CICO components designed to be more developmentally appropriate for adolescents and contextually relevant for high schools, could be…

Collaboration is an important aspect of computing. In a classroom setting, working with others can increase a student's motivation to attempt more challenges, reduce the difficulty of complicated concepts, and bring about greater overall success. Despite extensive research in other domains, there has been minimal exploration within computing on…