Writing practices are seen to be essential for professional engineers, yet many engineering students and academics struggle with written communication, despite years of interventions to improve student writing. Much has been written about the importance of getting engineering students to write, but there has been a little investigation of…

The benefits of studying topics accompanied by adjunct displays are well established in the literature; however, less is understood about the durability of these learning benefits. Therefore, in the current study, we investigate the cognitive benefits of causal diagrams over time. Undergraduate participants (N = 194) recruited from teacher…

Motivation cannot be measured directly but has to be evaluated through other indirect measurements, of which questionnaires are the most common. This chapter presents the results from the development and use of a model to approach motivation in the science classroom from multiple theoretical and methodological perspectives. The model emerged from…

These are the appendices for the technical report, "An Investigation of the Comparability of Commission-Approved Teaching Performance Assessment Models." California's Commission on Teacher Credentialing (Commission) requires all programs of preliminary multiple and single subject teacher preparation to use a Commission-approved Teaching…

In 2018, the Lumina Foundation appointed and convened a Quality Credentials Task Force comprising 22 leaders in education, policy, and workforce development. The task force had two charges. First, it was to explore new ways to assure the quality of a college education and other forms of learning beyond high school. Second, it was asked to develop…

School innovation expert John B. Nash demonstrates how design thinking can be adapted successfully by busy school leaders seeking student-centered solutions to a range of challenges. Based on a decade of work teaching school leaders nationally and internationally, "Design Thinking in Schools" shows how leaders can adopt a design thinking…

Historically, the purpose of apprenticeships has been to provide structured high-value training, resulting in transferable skills and knowledge for young people seeking to enter work-based learning. Apprenticeship training was enabled by linking industry with local technical colleges and professional engineering institutions. The apprenticeship…

The evaluation of text complexity is an important topic in education. While this objective has been addressed by approaches using lexical and syntactic analysis for decades, semantic complexity is less common, and the recent research works that tackle this question rely on machine learning algorithms that are hardly explainable and are not…

Developing students' creative problem solving skills should be one of the top goals in general education. One teaching model that was developed to increase students' creative problem solving abilities is the Real Engagement in Active Problem Solving (REAPS) model. This model was used as an intervention in classrooms in many studies. However, the…

In this report, Joel Rose describes his experience leading a nonprofit organization called New Classrooms Innovation Partners that works to develop a more modern and impactful classroom experience. New Classrooms developed an innovative learning model called "Teach to One: Math" that integrates live, collaborative, and independent…

This paper describes a method for pooling grouped, ordered-categorical data across multiple waves to improve small-sample heteroskedastic ordered probit (HETOP) estimates of latent distributional parameters. We illustrate the method with aggregate proficiency data reporting the number of students in schools or districts scoring in each of a small…

In this paper we compare two approaches to measuring the average rate at which students learn in a given school or district. One type of measure--longitudinal growth measures--relies on student-level longitudinal data. A second type--cohort growth measures--relies only on repeated aggregated, cross-sectional data. Because student-level data is…

Recent research in multidimensional item response theory has introduced within-item interaction effects between latent dimensions in the prediction of item responses. The objective of this study was to extend this research to bifactor models to include an interaction effect between the general and specific latent variables measured by an item.…

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of adaptive learner models that seek to predict student correctness. Improvements on earlier models have shown that separate predictors for prior successes, failures, and recent performance further improve fit while remaining interpretable. However, students who engage in "gaming" or other…

This dissertation investigates the "Competence Model for Environmental Education" (Kaiser, Roczen, & Bogner, 2008), a theoretical environmental-behavior change model, for use in the United States with elementary-aged students. Paper #1 tests two new instruments developed for use with the "Competence Model," the Expanded…