It is well known that persons with aphasia (PWA) demonstrate deficits in sentence processing. Specifically, many show difficulties with syntactic re-analysis, or the ability to revise one's interpretation of a sentence due to a temporary ambiguity. Emerging evidence suggests that structural priming, individuals' tendency to unconsciously re-use a…

Higher education institutions have recently increased the number of online courses offered to students. A need exists to understand student success within asynchronous self-paced online education programs. This study explores the factors that impact student success in the Independent Study Program (iStudy) at the University of Mississippi,…

This dissertation is about implicit prosody, the prosodic structure that readers assign during silent reading. The dissertation has several goals: determining which reading tasks are appropriate for studying implicit prosody, establishing how grammatical principles could guide incremental assignment of prosodic structure, and investigating how…

The problem to be addressed through this study is the low enrollment and completion rates for the professional development of pastors within the North American Division of the Adventist Learning Community. The study addresses the issue of low enrollment and completion rates in self-paced online professional development courses for pastors within…

Comprehenders encounter a variety of syntactic structures through reading or spoken conversation. In some cases, sentences can be ambiguous and have more than one meaning. In "The spy saw the cop with the binoculars," one interpretation is that the spy is looking through the binoculars, while an alternative is that the cop has the…

Improving instructor and student satisfaction with training in a global semiconductor company was the focus of this dissertation in practice. This study followed the Performance Improvement/Human Performance Technology (HPT) model as the overarching framework (Van Tiem et al., 2012). Fifty students and four instructors participated in this…

The purpose of this quantitative research study is to determine through the foundational lens of the temporal motivational theory, if active procrastinators outnumber passive procrastinators, and outperform them on an online mathematics final exam. Conducted at an associate's degree granting institution in the southeastern region of the United…

With the continual decline of high school graduation rates in South Carolina, there is a need for high schools to look at alternative pathways to graduation. Many of the current alternatives offered to students remove them from the high school setting or interactions with the student body. This study focused on an alternative pathway to…

This dissertation showcases collective sensemaking in action. The study was situated in a larger North Carolina project, in which educators took a systems approach to update the state's instructional guidance infrastructure during content standards reform. Specifically, I investigated how K-5 educators from multiple stakeholder groups--teachers,…

Many districts have adopted social-emotional learning (SEL) curriculum that teachers must incorporate into their lessons. The purpose of this qualitative dissertation-in-practice was to explore teachers' perceptions of the quality of SEL program professional development (PD) for teachers at a small, rural West Texas high school. For this study,…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine any correlations between an increase in knowledge from activities which utilize self-paced learning, inquiry-guided learning, and collaborative learning pedagogical strategies and students' intentions to pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and computer science…

Students with a learning disability (LD) are experts in their lived experiences within the classroom. Yet, little is known about the ways in which students with LD perceive their instruction in mathematics and whether this instruction meets their learning needs. Similarly, the mathematical thinking and content knowledge of students with LD is…

Stuttering is a developmental speech disorder characterized by interruptions of fluency. A large body of research suggests that stuttering occurs due to a reduced ability to generate timing signals in order to sequence speech sounds. One piece of supporting evidence for this is that when speaking along with an external timing source like a…

In 2018, the Honor Society (pseudonym) developed an online, self-paced training module for chapter sponsors to help them coach community college students during the collaborative learning project process. The collaborative learning project is one of the principal ways the Honor Society fulfills its mission to provide opportunities to college…

This research study examines the influence of the pacing condition of massive open online courses (MOOCs), be they self-paced or instructor-paced, on the demonstration of cognitive presence in such courses. The research is informed by the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model of Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2001), a framework that identifies three…