This dissertation investigated relevant issues among undergraduate students at two institutions and how these issues could be incorporated into an introductory personal health course. By illustrating how these issues can attract student attention, relevancy, confidence, and satisfaction, educators can make these introductory personal health courses more responsive, thereby increasing student motivation to learn. This study used a qualitative research design. Focus groups and interviews were conducted in order to gain insight into issues students felt were relevant to their lives, their satisfaction with their personal health course, and how these courses could be updated in terms of content and delivery. The ARCS Model of Motivation was used as a theoretical framework for development of questions as well as to organize emergent themes. This model has been shown to increase student motivation to learn, and the current study aimed to expand this to include health courses, which could lead to an increase in adopting healthier or risk-reductive behaviors. After five focus groups and two interviews, data saturation was met, and analysis was conducted. Findings indicate a strong desire among undergraduate students for a larger focus of content to include mental health issues (e.g., stress, time management, pressure, and healthy coping mechanisms), physical health issues, and harm reductive issues surrounding the areas of sexual health and alcohol and substance use. Additionally, students reported better recall and a preference for active learning over a more didactic method of instruction. By understanding relevant issues facing college students and incorporating those within an introductory personal health course, educators can enhance the responsiveness of these courses by illustrating relevancy of topics and teaching students how they can confidently learn to adopt healthy behaviors and practice harm reduction. This is particularly useful among undergraduate students as they are in a time of transition and emerging adulthood and are willing to learn and establish new patterns of behaviors. If educators can balance what they as experts want students to know and what students say are relevant to their lives and what they want to know, these introductory personal health courses could be an effective tool for increasing overall health and wellness of students.

ABSTRACT This is a quantitative methods study investigating the perceptions that teacher trainees at a tertiary level educational institution have of the evaluation process for courses and lecturers. Student evaluation of courses and lecturers is mandated by the standards of the University Council of Jamaica (UCJ) and the University of the West Indies (UWI), and hinges on the quality of educational experiences within tertiary level educational institutions. Teacher trainees are vested with the responsibility to be engaged in the exercise which must be afforded by the respective institutions. The primary sources of data were generated from the responses to a Likert-type questionnaire administered to teacher trainees (TTQ). The results indicated that the teacher trainees were generally supportive of the evaluation process. Moreover, these positive results were not related to the trainees’ age, gender, or area of specialization. There were, however, some areas of concern noted. In particular, the trainees believe that the evaluation process should be conducted online since there is concern about anonymity. The implications of these results for the Ministry of Education were listed and suggestions for future research were provided. Keywords: Perceptions, Evaluation Process, Courses, Lecturers, Teacher Trainees / Educational Administration

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of completing online diaries with specific topics on students’ self-regulated behavior in online courses. Also, this study sought to determine the impact of completing online diary topics with different topics (content-based or experience-based) on students’ self-regulation in online courses. The participants’ use of learning strategies was assessed to aid in this investigation. The research design utilized for this study was a quasi-experimental pretest/posttest design. The participants of this study included 30 undergraduate students from a variety of majors who were enrolled in one of two online courses. Of the 30 participants, 15 of the participants were in the content-based treatment group while the other 15 were in the experience-based treatment group. Convenience sampling was used to recruit participants for this study. Using data collected from the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) and the diary entries submitted by the participants, the researcher did not find associations between completion of online diary topics and participants’ self-regulated behavior within the online courses. However, results did indicate that the content-based group reported higher levels of critical thinking usage than the experience-based group after the treatment was administered.

Many postsecondary institutions have implemented summer bridge programs as a way to assist underprepared students in achieving academic success during the summer prior to their freshman year. The research on these programs is limited and even more limited on programs in the community college ranks. This study examined participants in a summer bridge program from 2015-2018 and compared them to nonparticipants with similar ACT subscores in math and English. This quantitative study answered six research questions about the institution’s summer bridge program. Results showed there was no significant difference between participants and nonparticipants in grade point average (GPA), grades in English Composition I and College Algebra, retention, credit hours earned, and graduation rates. However, the results showed that participants in the program were involved in more discipline issues when compared to nonparticipants. These findings are consistent with some of the literature presented and not consistent with others.

No description available.

A team of graduate students from Brigham Young University under the supervision of the main author, Dr. Henrichsen, collaborated on creating a book with an accompanying website, Basic Training and Resources for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (BTRTESOL). The entire program consists of 10 main sections with nearly 50 units addressing topics that novice teachers can choose from to help them prepare to teach English to non-native speakers. The BTRTESOL program answers the need for material designed for novice teachers, material that will help them to be better prepared in a minimalistic, non-overwhelming way. The goal of this program is that novice teachers will be more prepared to face the challenges and responsibilities that teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) brings. Each member of the BTRTESOL team created two units of the program. Each unit summarizes the information about each topic into a few pages of text that provides the minimum amount of information novices should know. The units then direct them to other sources in order to learn more. The program is still under development and is anticipated to be completed within the next few years with other TESOL MA students and Dr. Henrichsen completing subsequent units. This selected project details the making of two units of the BTRTESOL program, one in section one, "Basic Concepts," titled "Tutoring Guidelines," and one in section two, "Designing Programs and Lessons," titled "Designing an Overall Plan for a Course." The tutoring unit describes some guidelines for novice tutors, whether or not they have taught larger classes before. The course design unit describes the basics of creating a course curriculum. Novice tutors and teachers are frequently expected to plan everything for the tutoring sessions or courses as soon as they start their assignments. These units are designed to give them a starting point. In addition to an opening scenario, explanatory text, and resource connections, both of these units provide activities (i.e., a video clip or case studies) for visualization, analysis, reflection, and practical application.

The goal of this research study was to investigate the perception of self as learner for students with Specific Learning Disabilities (SLD) or with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Students who had completed at least one mathematics or science course at Florida Virtual School, an online learning environment, were surveyed concerning their perception of self as learner in the online learning environment and in the traditional learning environment in 6 basic areas: feelings of success; level of comfort; relationship with teachers; and access to, communication with and feedback from teachers; and advantages and disadvantages of each learning environment. Results of parent interviews and anecdotal evidences were also included as data informing the results of this study. The results of this study showed that 1) a greater number of students reported feeling successful in the online environment. 2) the majority of students in all groups reported feeling comfortable in the online learning environment, 98% as compared to 65% in traditional environment. Student comfort in both environments was most frequently related to some element of the environment with a high percentage of mention of disruption caused by peers. 3) Students reported having positive relationships with their online teachers to a higher degree than with their traditional teachers. 4) Students generally felt that access to, communication with, and feedback from instructors, in the online environment had the greatest impact on them and the impact was positive. 5) The most frequently mentioned advantage of the online environment were, flexibility of time, pace and place of learning. Students liked being in control of the time, place, and pace of their learning in the online environment. Students perceived issues with socialization as the greatest disadvantage of the online environment. For the traditional environment, students indicated that the presence of their peers for social interaction and academic interaction was the greatest advantage. The disadvantages in the traditional environment disadvantage in the traditional environment were issues with time, place, and pace of learning, class size, and disruptions caused by other students. 6) Overall, the majority of students indicated that they felt the online learning environment provided them, as a learner, with the greatest number of advantages.

The purposes of this study were to: (a) determine, for General Education Program (GEP) courses, what individual items on the student form are predictive of the overall instructor rating value; (b) investigate the relationship of instructional mode, class size, GEP foundational area, and GEP theme with the overall instructor rating value; (c) examine what teacher/course qualities are related to a high (Excellent) overall evaluation or a low (Poor) overall evaluation value. The data set used for analysis contained sixteen student response scores (Q1-Q16), response number, class size, term, foundational area (communication, cultural/historical, mathematics, social, or science), GEP theme (yes/no), instructional mode (face-to-face or other), and percent responding (calculated value). All identifying information such as department, course, section, and instructor was removed from the analysis file. The final data set contained 23 variables, 8,065 course sections, and 294,692 student responses. All individual items on the student evaluation form were related to the overall evaluation item score, measured using Spearman's correlation coefficients. None of the examined course variables were selected as significant when the individual form items were included in the modeling process. This indicated students employed a consistent approach to the evaluation process regardless of large or small classes, face-to-face or other instructional modes, foundational area, or percent responding differences. Data mining modeling techniques were used to understand the relationship of individual item responses and additional course information variables to the overall score. Items one to fifteen (Q1 to Q15), class size, instructional mode, foundational area, and GEP theme were the independent variables used to find splits to create homogenous groups in relation to the overall evaluation score. The model results are presented in terms of if-then rules for 'Excellent' or 'Poor' overall evaluation scores. The top three rules for 'Excellent' or 'Poor' based their classifications on some combination of the following items: communication of ideas and information; facilitation of learning; respect and concern for students; instructor's overall organization of the course; instructor's interest in your learning; instructor's assessment of your progress in the course; and stimulation of interest in the course. Proportion of student responses conforming to the top three rules for 'Excellent' or 'Poor' overall evaluation ranged from 0.89 to .60. These findings suggest that students reward, with higher evaluation scores, instructors who they perceive as organized and strive to clearly communicate course content. These characteristics can be improved through mentoring or professional development workshops for instructors. Additionally, instructors of GEP courses need to be informed that students connect respect and concern and having an interest in student learning with the overall score they give the instructor.

This study enhances student acceptance of career investigation and contains extensive lesson plans for each day of the school year, plus one copy of each handout to be duplicated. The classroom is run as a business where students work for the instructor and are paid by check at the end of each week. Money is deposited on account and used to purchase course grades. The more money the student earns, the higher grade he can purchase. The findings show that students learn more about careers. Students became aware that the higher paying career fields required more schooling and/or training, resulting in changed attitudes about school. They were able to see how the relationship of the learning process could determine their future.

<p>Persistence and graduation rates continue to be important student success outcomes for engineering programs. In part, these outcomes reflect the effectiveness of the educational experience that has been delivered to the students. This educational experience is shaped by three main factors: 1) the organizational context, 2) the peer environment, and 3) the individual student experience. Prior research on student persistence in engineering has primarily focused on peer interactions and individual student experiences, while the organizational context has not received as much attention. Yet, engineering colleges and departments have a large degree of control over their organizational contexts which can be strategically managed to promote student success.</p> <p><br></p> <p>This work investigated the relationship between organizational features of engineering programs and two student success outcomes: 1) program persistence after one academic year and, 2) engineering graduation. Student data included sociodemographics and academic records for the 2011 and 2012 engineering cohorts at a single institution. Organizational features that were evaluated included compositional diversity of students and instructors, gateway courses, program size and scale, and the curriculum. To operationalize the organizational features of the curriculum, the curricular complexity framework was used (Heileman et al., 2018). To enhance this framework, a novel method to measure the instructional complexity of a curriculum was proposed. This method determined the difficulty of a course using a performance metric called grade anomaly rather than the traditional DFW rate (the percentage of students who earn grades of D, F or withdraw). A student’s grade anomaly in a specific course is calculated relative to their performance in their other courses. A course grade anomaly is the mean grade anomaly of students in a course, and a curricular grade anomaly is the mean course grade anomaly across a curriculum. Results showed that course grade anomaly measured a different aspect of the curriculum than DFW rate and was more robust.</p> <p><br></p> <p>Multilevel models were used to determine which organizational variables influenced a student’s likelihood of program persistence and engineering graduation after accounting for individual-level factors. Program size was positively associated with both outcomes, but class size</p> <p>had no effect. Gender and racial diversity in the student population had positive effects as well. More gateway courses in the curriculum had a negative impact on both outcomes, and a larger curricular DFW rate had a negative impact on engineering graduation only. The structural complexity of a curriculum had no influence on either outcome. Lastly, curricular grade anomaly had a negative effect on both outcomes, meaning students in more difficult programs were more likely to persist in the program and graduate from engineering.</p> <p><br></p> <p>These results indicate that organizational features can affect student success, and engineering faculty should consider these features when evaluating their students’ outcomes. Gender and racial diversity should be prioritized because it is beneficial for all students. The number of gateway courses should be minimized, and students should be given proper academic support to pass their difficult courses. The finding that students in more difficult programs had higher likelihoods of program persistence and engineering graduation was unexpected, and it</p> <p>raised questions about the properties of curricular grade anomaly and the cultural influences of engineering education. In this work, this finding was interpreted as evidence for the meritocracy of difficulty in engineering, where students place value on academic hardship which can affect their motivation to succeed. This interpretation raises further questions about how cultures in engineering education impact the organizational features of engineering programs. Furthermore, it invites scholars to investigate other organizational features that may play a role in student persistence.</p>