The business model of many U.S. higher education institutions is under serious stress from changing demographics, heightened consumer demands, flagging public confidence, and new competitors for educational credentials. Many institutions are struggling to sustain the suite of amenities and support services that students need or expect given the…

This dissertation presents a novel theory of event memory along with an associated computational model that embodies the claims of view which is integrated within a cognitive architecture. Event memory is a general-purpose storage for personal past experience. Literature on event memory reveals that people can remember events by both the…

Psychology research often focuses on interactions, and this has deep implications for inference from non-representative samples. For the goal of estimating average treatment effects, we propose to fit a model allowing treatment to interact with background variables and then average over the distribution of these variables in the population. This…

The purpose of this grounded theory qualitative research study was to construct a framework that described the informal mentoring processes for Extension educators at a Midwestern land-grant university. The "Mentorship in Extension: An organizational model" explained participants' mentoring experiences, and it provided new understanding…

In ageing societies around the world, the general life experience of 'seniors' (i.e. the elderly, retirees and other 'later' lifelong learners) has become widely devalued and regularly ignored at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This is despite the obvious and growing need for 'tribal elder' knowledge and wisdom to help guide a future…

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…

Limited research has examined the relationship between the Enneagram personality styles of faith-based university presidents/provosts and the institution's student enrollment size. While there are many personality theories, the Enneagram is a sophisticated model that exposes the unconscious predispositions, motivations, anxieties, and behavioral…

This study explored how and to what degree Education Service Agency (ESA) leaders apply business model innovation to promote organizational sustainability and growth. More specifically, this study aimed to unearth the successes, challenges, and outcomes ESA leaders have experienced in applying business model innovation. A basic qualitative…

Response time data from educational and psychological assessments have become more widely available in recent years. Although much research has been done on response time models, there is large variability between assessments and the factors that may affect response times. On the person's side, familiarity with online environments may largely…

Guided Pathways, a student success reform initiative movement, requires institutions to build specific educational plans for students from start to finish of their degree or credential. The purpose of this study was to offer a model for institutions to implement Guided Pathways through the lens and experience of college leaders who have…

A mathematics framework was developed to integrate problem-solving that incorporated simulation of real-life problems in the classrooms. The framework coined as the "RECCE-MODEL" emphasised understanding and thinking with a view on mathematics embedded in real-life. The "RECCE" which stands for Realistic, Educational,…

Learning analytics (LA) is a fast-growing field but adoption by teachers remain limited. This paper presents the results of a review of 18 LA frameworks and discusses how they have tried to address prominent challenges in LA adoption. The results show that researchers have made significant advances in developing appropriate frameworks to…

Does "X" affect "Y"? Answering this question is particularly difficult if reverse causality is looming. Many social scientists turn to panel data to address such questions of causal ordering. Yet even in longitudinal analyses, reverse causality threatens causal inference based on conventional panel models. Whereas the…

Spatial regression models provide the opportunity to analyze spatial data and spatial processes. Yet, several model specifications can be used, all assuming different types of spatial dependence. This study summarizes the most commonly used spatial regression models and offers a comparison of their performance by using Monte Carlo experiments. In…

If cues from different sensory modalities share the same cause, their information can be integrated to improve perceptual precision. While it is well established that adults exploit sensory redundancy by integrating cues in a Bayes optimal fashion, whether children under 8 years of age combine sensory information in a similar fashion is still…