This qualitative narrative research study explores the reasons that undergraduate transfer students make college and career planning decisions. The insights of community college students who expressed interest in completing a bachelor's degree but did not enroll at a university were compared with the perspectives of university students enrolled in…

The fastest-growing student population (ages 5-17) in U.S. schools today is children of immigrants, half of whom do not speak English and are labeled English language learners (ELLs) by the National Center for Education Statistics (2011). Despite this growing demographic shift, very little is known about their college going experiences and the…

The purpose of this non-equivalent control group design, quantitative quasi-experimental study with a qualitative component is to compare the stress levels of nursing students who have a peer mentor to stress levels of nursing students who do not have a peer mentor while taking an Introduction to Nursing Course in a Bachelor of Science in Nursing…

The credibility of unsupervised exams, one of the biggest challenges of e-learning, is currently maintained by proctoring. However, little has been done to determine whether expensive and inconvenient proctoring is necessary. The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine whether the use of security mechanisms, based on the taxonomy of…

Preschool children hold immense writing potential that is rarely realized in traditional classrooms. This mixed-methods, quasi-experimental study focused on how best to teach these emergent writers. By comparing the effects of interactive writing, writing workshop, and traditional instruction, the study provided a clearer picture of how these…

Academic advising for online learners has been identified in prior research as an important student service. However, little research exists to assist advisers in knowing how best to serve this growing group. The purpose of this study is to close that research gap by determining if and how online and on-campus learners differ in how they rate the…

The performance measures from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study revealed no measurable growth in the U.S. average reading scores of 4th graders for the period between 2011 and 2016. Therefore, the diverse learning needs of students need to be customized if the education system is to accomplish its goal to graduate well-informed…

Education researchers have documented that first-year teachers are often less effective at reading instruction than their more experienced peers. Accordingly, this qualitative, comparative case study was designed to assess the instructional skills and strategies utilized by first-year and experienced teachers using Danielson's Framework for…

This dissertation consists of three manuscripts. The manuscripts contribute to a budding "methodological reform" currently taking place in quantitative second-language (L2) research. In the first manuscript, the researcher describes an empirical investigation on the application of two well-known effect size estimators, eta-squared (eta…

In this technical report, we present results of classification accuracy analyses to identify cut scores to optimize sensitivity and specificity for the easyCBM literacy assessments in Kindergarten through Grade 2. In conducting these analyses, we used the following approach: We kept sensitivity above 0.80 and maximized specificity from there. If…

Flipped instruction is being implemented in an increasing number of mathematics classes but the research base is not yet well developed. Many studies of flipped instruction involve a small number of flipped classes being compared to non-flipped classes, but this methodology fails to account for variations in implementations. To aid in the…

The relatively unfamiliar pedagogy of Soka (value creating) education is analysed for its capacity to promote well-being and social justice, using the well-known Capability Approach (CA) as a comparator. Various aspects of Soka education correspond favourably with the CA, indicating its potential as a credible and constructive approach for…

Purpose: One aspect of morphosyntax, finiteness marking, was compared in children with fragile X syndrome (FXS), specific language impairment (SLI), and typical development matched on mean length of utterance (MLU). Method: Nineteen children with typical development (mean age = 3.3 years), 20 children with SLI (mean age = 4.9 years), and 17 boys…

In three experiments, we compared the effectiveness of rainbow writing and retrieval practice, two common methods of spelling instruction. In experiment 1 (n = 14), second graders completed 2 days of spelling practice, followed by spelling tests 1 day and 5 weeks later. A repeated measures analysis of variance demonstrated that spelling accuracy…

In this study, equating methods for random group design using small samples through factors such as sample size, difference in difficulty between forms, and guessing parameter was aimed for comparison. Moreover, which method gives better results under which conditions was also investigated. In this study, 5,000 dichotomous simulated data…