This dissertation presents three separate essays. The first two essays explore the gender wage gap and its dynamics in urban China from 1995 to 2018. The first chapter decomposes the gender wage gap based on the observed wage for workers with a precise measure of the hourly wages. The first chapter examines the observed average gender wage gap in…

Grounded in Vygotskian sociocultural theory, we propose a novel methodology for second language teacher cognition research called "dialogic restorying." We exemplify this methodological innovation by presenting a qualitative longitudinal project in which we prompted L2 teachers to revisit and restory what Veresov (2017) calls…

Computer vision (CV) is a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI) that trains computers to understand our visual world based on digital images. There are many successful applications of CV including face and hand gesture detection, weather recording, smart farming, and self-driving cars. Recent advances in computer vision with machine learning…

There has been a rise in autistic pupils in the mainstream classroom. Teachers have often reported frustration caused by a lack of training on managing autistic pupils' presentations. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of an online training programme comprising the main paradigms and resources of the Zones of Regulation™…

The increasing demands on faculty members and students to conduct research might result in domination in supervisor-student relations across cultural contexts. This study aimed to explore how students' research relationships with their supervisors are manifested within TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) postgraduate curriculum in Iran's…

Is graduate school worth it? Graduate degrees--including master's, professional, and doctoral degrees--can help individuals boost their earnings and improve career advancement opportunities. But they can also be high-risk investments given rising costs, student debt, and the current lack of transparency about program outcomes. "Graduate…

Despite much research on how multilingual learners view the linguistic properties of language, how they perceive languages as cultural capital has been far less investigated. Drawing on the theories of social cognition, this study explores how multiple foreign language learners' impressions, as a lens to observe their multilingual awareness, are…

Engagement is a critical part of student learning and student success. This is especially true in online classes where students have less interaction with their classmates and instructors when compared to traditional face-to-face courses. Research on engagement has shown that when students are meaningfully engaged it can increase student…

The purpose of this qualitative exploratory single-case study was to examine how school counselors from a master's level counselor education program are trained to work with PreK-12 students with disabilities. Transcripts from semi-structured interviews with nine school counselors-in-training and course syllabi were analyzed using embedded…

The purpose of this study is to make an evaluation on the advantage and disadvantage of Revolution History teaching in Turkey in light of Friedrich Nietzsche's views on the advantage and disadvantage of history for life. In this research, a screening model was used to identify a past or present situation as it exists. The universe of this research…

Disruptions impacting the teaching and learning aspects of instruction have been realized throughout the Twentieth Century as well as the dawning of the Twenty-First Century with the Information Age also referred to as the Digital Age and even the Fourth Industrial Revolution as artificial intelligence and serious gaming are introduced into the…

Positioning and repositioning continue to be critical topics in business strategy, and yet a review of current business research syllabi from several institutions showed that very few institutions teach the analytical underpinnings of how perceptual maps can be created using multidimensional scaling and how they should be interpreted. At the…

A controversial innovation within the rapidly expanding field of teacher education is the relocation of teacher preparation to new graduate schools of education (nGSEs), which are not university based but are state authorized and approved as institutions of higher education to prepare teachers, endorse them for initial teacher certification, and…

With the continued shortage of teachers in agricultural education, the teacher preparation faculty in agricultural education at Texas Tech University began a series of investigations evaluating the teacher preparation program. These evaluations sought to identify areas for improvement and determine if elements of the student teaching experience…

The present study aims to examine the effect of teachers' attitudes towards statistics on their attitudes towards postgraduate education. Accordingly, the "Attitude Towards Statistics Scale" and the "Attitude Towards Postgraduate Education Scale" were applied to 511 teachers working in different fields of primary schools,…