The project, Seeking Work in Southern New Jersey, set out to explore the economic landscape, identify barriers and opportunities to finding and securing a job, and outline challenges to connections between job seekers and employers in Southern New Jersey and the City of Camden. The project's goal was to illuminate the story behind traditional…

The first part of this dissertation conducts a large-scale study comparing general and usage-based indices of syntactic complexity in L2 Mandarin writing samples across a wide range of proficiency levels. To do this, the Tool for the Automated Analysis of Syntactic Sophistication and Complexity (TAASSC; Kyle, 2016) was adapted for Mandarin by…

This study aimed to investigate the influences instructional coaching had on middle school math teachers. Accountability demands have impacted teaching and learning, and the push to use high stakes tests to measure teacher quality and effectiveness has limited teacher autonomy, agency, and efficacy. Teachers need professional learning that…

This work focuses on simulation, design, development, and evaluation of a visual Learning Analytics (LA) tool -- Real-time Educational AI-powered Classroom Tool (REACT) -- to support educators' data-driven decision-making. The educational institutions face one of the biggest challenges, such as predicting student performance, detecting undesirable…

The fit of an item response model is typically conceptualized as whether a given model could have generated the data. We advocate for an alternative view of fit, "predictive fit", based on the model's ability to predict new data. We derive two predictive fit metrics for item response models that assess how well an estimated item response…

The purpose of the study was to investigate if commonly collected data correlates with student success at week eight of the first term for first time, full time, students. This is an ex-post facto study of student data. A Spearman's rho test was used to analyze the data for correlational analysis to determine if variables contained within…

Technology and data have become integral components of the higher education landscape. These tools and stores of information are readily available to staff, administrators, and faculty. Despite this permeation of technology and data, there remains opportunities for growth and gaps in usage, particularly in the critical work of academic advising.…

Financial Aid Awards for first-time college students include a variety of offerings, including scholarships, grants, and loans. One award of financial assistance, Federal Work-study, is different from other types of financial aid awarded in that students must work to earn the funds. Yet, it is included as estimated financial assistance (EFA) and…

A significant share of education and development research uses data collected by workers called "enumerators." It is well-documented that "enumerator effects"--or inconsistent practices between the individual people who administer measurement tools-- can be a key source of error in survey data collection. However, it is less…

Feedback is an essential part of the educational assessment that improves student learning. As education changes with the advancement of technology, educational assessment has also adapted to the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Despite the increasing use of online assessments during the last decade, a limited number of studies have…

Objective/Research Question: Community college graduation rates are typically quite low, and developmental mathematics enrollment and coursetaking patterns may constrain academic outcomes. To identify ways in which community college graduation rates may be improved, decision trees were utilized to examine the STEM coursetaking patterns of N =…

Minimal research has been conducted regarding success factors of high school students in rural districts. Through archival data retrieval, student interviews, and observations, this mixed methods study sought to identify success factors of juniors and seniors enrolled at one rural public school in South Texas. The impact of support systems, the…

Special educator shortages have threatened the provision of services U.S. to students with disabilities since the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975, since reauthorized as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. We conducted a systematic review of studies that used administrative data to study the special…

Understanding how students with low socioeconomic status finance their tuition over time can help us comprehend the impact of students' decisions on their subsequent curricular progress, graduation, or dropout. This work presents a curricular analytics approach using process mining techniques to study educational funding trajectories as processes.…

This paper presents an innovative teaching approach that integrates photoelectric technology with analytical chemistry instruction through inquiry-based learning (IBL), using cerium as a selected analyte. With the advancement of science and technology, a strong foundation of basic knowledge and methodologies is crucial in analytical chemistry…