Purpose: Fostering the skills necessary for self-directed learning (SDL) competence could be considered the most essential goal of formal education, especially due to uncertainty and changing conditions -- exampled by the COVID-19 pandemic. Importantly, SDL competence can afford a person the ability to adapt to changing social contextual…

Blended learning, which has emerged as a mainstream approach for bridging onsite and online learning, promises flexibility to stakeholders in the educational process. This paper argues that blended learning can be understood as a process that combines onsite and online learning by blending the strengths of one modality and neutralizing the…

"Micro-analysis of noticing" is introduced as a method to analyze prospective teacher noticing, one that privileges the high variation exhibited by novice learners. The intent was to understand how prospective teachers' noticing moments suggest trajectories within and across whole-class discussions. We also focused on how prospective…

Previously applied research has shown independent manding is not likely to emerge when functional communication training (FCT) is implemented in conjunction with dense schedules of noncontingent reinforcement (NCR) but does emerge when it is implemented after NCR schedules have been leaned. One interpretation of these data may be that participants…

With the Maker movement increasingly adopted across K-12 schools and non-formal makerspaces, students are being given more opportunities to engage in Making activities using tools such as robots, electronics, arts, and crafts. Making activities are thought to help students develop twenty-first-century skills, especially communication and…

Reflective learning has been considered an important learning experience in higher education because of its value for personal and professional self. Despite the potential benefits, there is diverse interpretation of the meaning and process of reflective learning. Theoretical frameworks and models that purport to explain what it entails abound;…

Background: Intergroup dialogue (IGD) is a prominent social justice pedagogy that engages diverse groups of students in sustained, facilitated dialogues on social issues. Decades of IGD research have informed the development of the critical-dialogic theoretical framework of intergroup dialogue, which describes how IGD engages students in…

The objective in the current paper is to examine the processes of how our research team negotiated meaning using an iterative design approach as we established, developed, and refined a rubric to capture comprehension processes and strategies evident in students' verbal protocols. The overarching project comprises multiple data sets, multiple…

Instructor feedback strategies play a key role in the learning acquisition process, especially in online environments. In addition, educational improvement and reform cannot occur without timely and effective assessment approaches. This study, grounded on Bandura's 1967 "self-efficacy and social cognitive theory," focused on identifying…

In this thesis, we incorporate information theory into statistical signal processing and machine learning in order to achieve robust learning in presence of outliers (or generally in environments with non-Gaussian structure). In other words, by incorporating information theory especially when structure of environment is non-Gaussian, the…

Digital phenotyping is defined as the "moment-by-moment quantification of the individual level human phenotype in situ using data from personal digital devices". The passive data collected by smartphone devices, including GPS, accelerometer and communication logs, can provide insights on users' behaviors that could be related to various…

We are currently in a century of data where massive amount of data are collected and processed every day, and machine learning plays a critical role in automatically processing the data and mining useful information from it for making decisions. Despite the wide and successful applications of machine learning in different fields, the robustness of…

Although the educational potential of social media has been widely acknowledged, it remains unclear whether social media use might present opportunities for the development of math identity. This study drew on the socialization framework of math identity to examine the relationships between social media use for math learning, bicultural identity…

Purpose: This research aims to identify the intentions behind becoming an entrepreneur and the perception of entrepreneurial failure among different groups of students. There has been significant research discussing the motivations behind becoming an entrepreneur. However, such a research study is often focused on individuals who are already in…

Background: Self-related information is difficult to ignore and forget, which brings valuable implications for educational practice. Self-referential encoding techniques involve integrating self-referencing cues during the processing of learning material. However, the evidence base and effective implementation boundaries for these techniques in…