Herein I present a comprehensive view of mentoring and professional development programs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) undergraduate education. In CHAPTER 1 I describe a brief outline of this dissertation. In CHAPTER 2 I present a meta-analysis and systematic review of undergraduate mentor programs, where I find an…

Background/Purpose: Over two decades of research has demonstrated that collective teacher efficacy has a significant effect on student learning, and numerous studies have explored environmental variables related to high levels of collective teacher efficacy (Donohoo, 2018, Donohoo et al., 2020; Eells, 2011; Hattie, 2016). Donohoo et al.'s (2020)…

It has been established in prior research that parent involvement and school-family partnerships have the potential to positively impact student achievement; however, creating and maintaining positive and productive parent-teacher communication can be difficult. Since teachers function as the link between school and the home, there is an increased…

The development and deployment of STEM education in every continent and country are different. An instrument to access the current situation of the application, knowledge, as well as attitude towards STEM education, is necessary. This research aimed to design and develop a valid instrument that can be used to assure the quantitative degree of…

Considerable past classroom learning environment research has focused on the primary and secondary levels of education and the subject areas of science and mathematics. The current study is distinctive in its focus on university business statistics learning environments. For the first time, we validated and applied the widely-used What Is…

The discovery and characterisation of planets orbiting distant stars has shed light on the origin of our own Solar System. It is important that college-level introductory astronomy students have a general understanding of the planet formation process before they are able to draw parallels between extrasolar systems and our own Solar System. In…

Parent engagement in schools is often precipitated by a thorough and genuine assessment of parents' needs, priorities, and perceptions of their children's schools. This study reports on the development and validation of the Parent Perceptions of Overall School Experiences Scale. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) examined the factorial validity…

Self-report inventories are commonly administered to measure social-emotional learning competencies related to college and career readiness. Inattentive responding can negatively impact the validity of interpreting individual results and the accuracy of construct validity evidence. This study applied nine methods of detecting insufficient effort…

This study describes the development and validation of the Higher Education Student Engagement Scale (HESES). The psychometric evaluations of the scale included: (i) factor structure, (ii) internal consistency, and (iii) criterion validity. The HESES was developed based on our proposed five-factor model of student engagement, which was evolved…

The purpose of this three-manuscript dissertation was to examine the construct and predictive validity of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework (i.e., teaching, cognitive and social presence) through a confirmatory factor analysis, meta-analysis, and qualitative synthesis. The first paper was a confirmatory factor analysis study that…

Bernstein polynomial is one of the most valuable and attractive method used to develop numerical solution for several complex models because of its robustness to demonstrate approximation for anonymous equations. In this paper, Bernstein polynomial is proposed to present effective solution for the 2nd kind linear Volterra integral equations with…

Citations are increasingly used as performance indicators in research policy and within the research system. Usually, citations are assumed to reflect the impact of the research or its quality. What is the justification for these assumptions and how do citations relate to research quality? These and similar issues have been addressed through…

Teacher working conditions (TWCs) have been linked to teacher retention and student learning. These connections make TWCs important to understand. However, the literature on TWCs lacks cohesiveness, with widely varying definitions, conceptualizations, and measures of TWCs. Contributing to this lack of cohesion is that there is no accepted…

Background: Adolescent-specific ADHD self-report screening measures can greatly increase the likelihood of correct diagnosis and timely treatment of ADHD in adolescents. This study provides preliminary evidence for evaluating the reliability and validity of the Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale-Revised (ASRS-R) in a school-based sample of Chinese…

Given the crucial role of feedback in supporting learning in higher education, understanding the factors influencing feedback effectiveness is imperative. Student feedback literacy, that is, the set of attitudes and abilities to make sense of and utilize feedback is therefore considered a key concept. Rigorous investigations of feedback literacy…