Student motivation is widely regarded as an essential prerequisite for learning and success. To learn more about biology student motivation and how it changes over time, pre/post-surveys were administered to a large introductory biology course during the fall of 2015. These pre/post-surveys contained motivation subscales from the Intrinsic…

The purpose of this research study was to examine the influence African American students' prior music experiences and peer mentoring relationships had on persistence in undergraduate music programs at Historically Black Colleges or Universities (HBCUs). There is minimal existing research that focuses on African American students from urban music…

"Thermal comfort" (TC) -- how comfortable or satisfied a person is with the temperature of her/his surroundings -- is one of the key factors influencing the "indoor environmental quality" of schools, libraries, and offices. We conducted an experiment to explore how TC can impact students' learning. University students (n = 25)…

Speech remediation by identifying those segments which compromise the quality of speech content can be performed by correctly identifying portions of a recording which can be deleted without diminishing from the overall quality of the speech, but rather improving it. Speech remediation is especially important when it is heavily disfluent as in the…

The aim of this study is to reveal the level of secondary school teachers in participating to the decision making process, organizational cynicism and the relationships between these two variables. The participants of the research, which was conducted in the relational screening model, consisted of 14 secondary schools selected by the random…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the combined effects of two variables, namely, moral disengagement, parental monitoring on one outcome measure, namely, cyberbullying. Moreover, it aimed to investigate the relative contribution of moral disengagement, parental monitoring to cyberbullying among first year secondary school students in…

The purpose of this study was to explore the variables that might affect the learning outcomes of a serious game for disaster preparedness. Literature review in the field has revealed a number of variables that might have effects on the learning outcome with serious games, including: prior knowledge, in game guidance, gaming frequency, and playing…

This study's primary purpose was to identify predictors of response to a multi-component reading comprehension intervention in a sample of poor readers in grades 4-5. Additional study aims were to explore (a) the utility of various methods (e.g., "growth" versus "final status") and measures (e.g., "near-transfer"…

The purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between learning modes and the use of social media for learning in undergraduate college students. Social media use among students has continued to grow for the past 10 years, yet, not many have been exposed to using it in an academic setting. The study was guided by Kolb's (1984)…

Despite the benefits online education provides, some faculty still consider online teaching less effective than traditional teaching and are not convinced they want to be involved in distance education (Blin & Munro, 2008; Bolliger & Wasilik, 2009; Chen & Chen, 2006). In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), the movement toward online…

As higher education continues to integrate technology, the counselor education field has evolved and recognized the importance of graduate students' attitudes towards technology acceptance of a wide array of technology in their training programs (Burt, Gonzalez, Swank, Ascher, & Cunningham, 2011; Kennedy, 2011; Orr, 2011; Sabella, Poynton,…

Word frequency has a long history of being considered the most important predictor of word difficulty and has served as a guideline for several aspects of second language vocabulary teaching, learning, and assessment. However, recent empirical research has challenged the supremacy of frequency as a predictor of word difficulty. Accordingly,…

Online education transforms many aspects of teaching and learning in higher education. International students studying abroad already face considerable stress and negative emotions, and the transition to online learning can further intensify their learning anxiety. This study systematically investigated the factors associated with international…

In this dissertation, I use data from Chile to study the determinants of schooling trajectories. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on higher education, Chapter 3 on secondary education, and Chapter 4 on teachers. Chapter 1 explores the role of a socio-emotional ability, self-efficacy, in understanding why students with comparable qualifications transit…

Although studies have investigated educational attainment of groups of students professing low and high educational self-expectations, groups of noncommittal students, rather than being studied as a discrete group, have been treated as missing and ignored. This study investigated the differences between students of noncommittal, low, and high…