Spatial thinking is important in predicting students' success in STEM fields. However, there is limited knowledge about "how" students learn spatial skills during classroom instruction by using strategies that support their cognition. This dissertation addresses this gap as I explored "spatial sensemaking practices" that…

Heath advocacy (HA) remains a difficult competency to train and assess, in part because practicing physicians and learners carry uncertainty about what HA means and we are missing patients' perspectives about the role HA plays in their care. Visual methods are useful tools for exploring nebulous topics in health professions education; using these…

This article reports on meta-synthesis research that examined contemporary scholarship on global citizenship for the purpose of identifying a possible alignment with Daisaku Ikeda's views on global citizenship. Thirty relatively contemporary scholarly articles on the subject matter were examined using a qualitative meta-synthesis methodology.…

Learning History in upper primary requires the development of at least two key skills: historical perspective and historical empathy. Picture books might offer one approach to supporting the development of these skills with these children. Informational Picture Books (IPB) indicate positive results linking the use of the IPB with improved critical…

Young children excel at pragmatic inferences known as ad hoc quantity implicatures: they can infer, for example, that a speaker who said "the card with apples" meant the card with "nothing but" apples. However, it is not known whether children take into account the speaker's perspective in deriving such inferences, as adults…

In college, reluctant help seeking is one of the challenges that students from foster care face. Avoidant help seeking is a unique risk factor that conventional support systems on college campuses often fail to adequately address. Humanistic coaching has recently been utilized by some universities as a successful alternative to typical student…

This study explored how adopting an empathy education framework and strategies for teacher empathy modeling and student-centered learning experiences cultivates more empathy in middle school classrooms. This study extended the work of Snead et al. (2016) entitled "Challenge Course Work around Teaching Empathy in the Classroom."…

One accreditation-mandated outcome of social work education is to increase students' understanding of social injustice and prepare them to work to reduce such injustices. This has been called critical consciousness (CC). This study explored the relationship between mindfulness as a pedagogical tool to support CC development in social work…

As the coronavirus pandemic unfolded, the use of the term "Chinavirus" to refer to the virus that causes COVID-19 had societal consequences, resulting in discrimination against individuals of Asian descent. In this study of the language used when talking about COVID-19, we used an emergent thematic analysis to explore the potential for…

In this paper, we discuss the historical relationship between empathy and reasoning from a historical and philosophical (continental and Western philosophy) point of view. We explain how empathy has lost its original aesthetic connotations through its journey from one language and culture to another. Nowadays, we often find a quite reduced…

Prior research showed a gender effect on spatial ability, math anxiety, and math achievement. Lacking, however, is a comprehensive study that tested the mediation effects of spatial ability and math anxiety between gender and math achievement in a sequential mediation model. To fill this gap, this pilot study tested two mediation relationships,…

Understanding others' perspectives and integrating this knowledge in social interactions is challenging for young children; even adults struggle with this skill. While young children show the capacity to understand what others can and cannot see under supportive laboratory conditions, more research is necessary to understand how children implement…

Accurately measuring college students' capacities for social perspective taking (SPT), an ability to see others' points of view and incorporate them into one's own worldview, is challenging, forcing researchers and practitioners to rely on assorted approaches to self-assessments. Little has been published about how various self-assessments of SPT…

Family-teacher relationships in early childhood education are recognized as both important and challenging. This qualitative case study used content analysis to examine the impact of infant mental health principles on preservice teachers' communication with the parent of a child in need of early intervention. Analysis of student work suggested…

Proficiencies in global knowledge are essential to student growth and preparation in any career, and individual courses have the capacity to achieve important global learning benchmarks. With international students on the decline at institutions of higher education in the United States, and the predicted delay in returning to study abroad after…