This dissertation examines the academic status of dance as a discipline of higher education through the lens of the Western mind-body problem. Such an examination is pursued based on arguments suggesting dualism obscures the significance of the body, art, and aesthetics for educational ends. The primary interpretative lens used to explore the…

This dissertation consists of a literature review and two empirical studies that focus on the forethought phase of self-regulated learning. The overall goal was to provide a more thorough understanding of the processes students engage in prior to initiating their academic tasks. This dissertation is composed of five chapters. Chapter One…

The human brain is a flexible information processing system. Across a range of simple and complex tasks, such as walking across the street to playing basketball, the brain transforms sensory information from the environment into corresponding motor actions. This sensory input to motor output transformation likely requires a sequence of complex…

This dissertation explores how items encountered in the comprehension of language are stored in memory and subsequently accessed. Processing and comprehending language frequently requires the retrieval of items in memory so that a current linguistic element can be assigned an interpretation. For example, in a sentence such as "Miles loved his…

European American teachers' race-consciousness influences whether their pedagogical and content choices are non-racist and color-evasive or social justice-oriented and anti-racist. This narrative inquiry qualitative research analyzed the race-consciousness of European American teachers who self-identify as social justice educators. As the…

Broad exploration is often the best way to solve complex problems because the best solution might not come to mind first. Consequently, creative thinking, like simulated annealing, begins with a "hot" exploratory phase of broad solution search and gradually "cools" to exploitation and narrowing the search space. In solving…

Community college completion rates are critical metrics that need attention to improve the lives of the millions of students who attend community college annually. Many college administrators have instituted a highly structured student experience using the guided pathways framework to help students get and stay on a path to degree completion. In…

Our visual system samples external information, adjusts its sensitivity and constructs a stable representation of the world that allows us to perceive and interact with objects in our environments. Visual information with different levels of complexity is processed through the hierarchically organized visual cortical areas. This dissertation…

The purpose of the present study was to develop a knowledge translation (KT) activity for educators about the brain in children and adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The goal was to increase our participants' knowledge about ADHD and its brain basis. In addition to neuroscience content, the KT activity included the…

This dissertation studied the effects of Teacher Directed Games (TDGs) on student vocabulary development and student engagement in a second language. Achieving automaticity with vocabulary is crucial to mastering a second language. A sample of 40 first grade students in a Jewish Day School participated in the study. Students learned their…

Background: This study examines the relationship between adolescents' biophysiological stress (i.e. cortisol, alpha-amylase and oxidative stress) and the development of grit and school engagement over one school year. Aims: The study aims to identify how objective stress affects grit and three dimensions of school engagement. Based on the…

Recent advances in sensor technology, including eye-gaze tracking, have introduced the opportunity to incorporate gaze into student modelling within an embodied learning context. The produced multimodal data is used to uncover cognitive, behavioural, and affective processes during the embodied learning activity. However, the use of eye-tracking…

This research examines the effect of having a tracking technology in a learning management system (LMS) that reports the effect of perceiving other students' interactions on a learner's intention to keep using LMS in the future. The main underlying theory is herd behaviour theory which argues that crowd behaviour affects the perceptions of the…

This study reviewed conceptualizations and operationalizations of second language (L2) listening constructs. A total of 157 peer-reviewed papers published in 19 journals in applied linguistics were coded for (1) publication year, author, source title, location, language, and reliability and (2) listening subskills, cognitive processes, attributes,…

Purpose: An analysis of the relationship between discourse and cognition in the context of middle school science teaching is provided in this study. Teacher-led questions, cognitive demands and patterns of interaction were analysed for the discourse side of the study. The students' argumentation quality was explored for the cognition side of the…