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Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is vital to synthesis and provides rich problem-solving opportunities for organic chemistry students. However, little is known about 1H NMR spectroscopy instruction or how students use spectral features in solving. The goal of this dissertation research was to examine how students learn about and solve 1H NMR spectroscopy problems. Organic chemistry textbooks were analyzed for the ways in which spectral features were introduced and incorporated into worked examples and practice problems. Spectral features like the number of signals and chemical shift were covered by problems more frequently, while integration was covered least. Think-aloud interviews were completed to identify the operators students utilized in their problem-solving processes, and extra credit problem sets were designed and administered to students at three different universities to examine whether students could correctly perform each individual type of operator. While students could perform operators, it was unclear if students knew how and when to use the operators. To fill this knowledge gap, multiple choice assessment questions were developed and administered to students at three different large universities. Coding schemes were developed to identify and describe students’ use of task features and inferences, and regression analyses were completed to discern which areas of reasoning led to success in solving. A majority of students did not identify using any critical spectral features in written explanations. Regression analyses revealed that the inferences students made, and not the task features they paid attention to, were most significantly associated with success in structural predictions; a majority of students made solely correct inferences in their reasoning explanations. When a mixture of correct and incorrect inferences were made, a majority of those students were unable to answer the questions correctly. These findings suggest that students may know enough to solve simple 1H NMR spectroscopy problems, but may lack knowledge about specific spectral features which could impact overall solving success. Students may require considerable support in deciphering the critical features in 1H NMR spectroscopy problems and developing robust, correct inferences across all spectral features.

The thesis introduces many examples of outreach activities, primarily from the Czech Republic and other European countries. Various possibilities of measure- ments of factors of their effectivity are discussed in the thesis. The used methods were: literature review, conceptual assessment tests - pre- and post-tests (CCI, PPCI), questionnaires (IMI), data analyses of participants of activities, semi-structured interviews (for validation of concept inventories), and the work also has a glimpse of ethnography because the author has organised outreach activities for ten years. The individual chapters of the work are dedicated to: the overview of outreach activities, research methods, translation of the Calculus Concept Inventory (CCI) into Czech, the first steps for developments of the Particle Physics Concept Inven- tory (PPCI), loyalty of participants of competitions, and description of various metrics which can be used for statistical evaluation of events. 1

This work concerns the inclusive education of children with cochlear implants (CI). The theoretical part is devoted to the introduction to the issue of hearing impairments and their diagnostics. It provides informations on the issue of the cochlear implant and its history. It describes companies producing cochlear implants and implantation of their products in specific hospitals in the Czech Republic. The last theoretical chapter focuses on the education of children with CI, supporting measures and it contains selected studies about teachers' opinions on the inclusion of these children. The practical part of the work was carried out in the form of an online questionnaire survey inspired by one of the studies (Dulčić a Bakota, 2009) mentioned in the theoretical part. The research was enriched by open and semi-closed questions to obtain qualitative data, in addition to the quantitative part. The basis of the research was to find: whether teachers welcome the inclusion of children with CI. Further aims of the research were to find: how teachers are informed about the cochlear implant, what are the opinions of interviewed teachers on the inclusion of children with CI into their schools and how interviewed teachers are experienced with these children. Research has shown that the vast majority of teachers fully...

This study seeks to expand notions of research, what it can be and how it can be conducted, through focusing on children’s approaches to exploring their worlds. The purpose of this study was to examine how children employ literacies of research across spaces. Through this framework, I conceptualize children’s literacies of research to include the social practices children engage in when investigating issues that matter to them. Previous participatory studies with young people have focused on apprenticing youth and children into traditional research practices in order to then conduct studies with them that are relevant to their lives. This study builds on this work but begins by exploring the notion of research itself, seeking to understand children’s perspectives on how they examine topics of interest. Framed by critical and transformative theoretical frameworks, specifically critical childhoods, sociocultural approaches to literacy, and youth participatory action research (YPAR), this study engaged a small group of nine- and ten-year-old children, representing a range of racial, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds, as co-researchers. The following research questions shaped the study: How do nine- and ten-year-old children in a participatory research group engage with opportunities to follow their own lines of inquiry?; What themes do they investigate and how?; What literacy and research practices do they draw on, resist, remix, and/or transform and how?; and How do adults interact with children around child-led research? The findings suggest the playful, relational, dynamic, intertextual, and resistant natures of children’s literacies of research. This study was interrupted by the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and the research group transitioned to a virtual space. The findings also indicate the innovative ways children resisted the isolating circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic through creating and repurposing digital platforms to sustain friendships and connect with classmates. Children’s literacies of research have implications for how research is conceptualized and taught in literacy classrooms and in the academy as well as how researchers engage with children in studies.

<div>Disciplinary perspectives, as a core element of interdisciplinary work, represent the ways individuals may see and approach a situation based on their unique disciplinary background and training. Interdisciplinary collaboration requires individuals to leverage disciplinary perspectives and knowledge from diverse fields to build a shared understanding of the problem situation. However, based on the diversity of background and experiences within a team, interdisciplinary collaboration can be a challenge because collaborators must negotiate disciplinary differences, while also fundamentally experiencing the collaborative situation in different ways. Therefore, it is important to understand how individuals engage and experience disciplinary perspectives in their practice of collaboration. In this study, I investigated the nature of disciplinary perspectives in the context of educational development. </div><div><br></div><div>The profession of educational development broadly aims to support the teaching and learning mission of higher education institutions, where educational developers work with faculty, graduate students, and administration on teaching, instruction, curriculum, and organizational development across disciplines. As such, educational developers play a significant role in engineering education transformation and offer a unique context to investigate interdisciplinary practice. In this work, educational developers bring their diverse disciplinary perspectives to their collaborative interactions. </div><div><br></div><div>In this dissertation, a phenomenographic study was conducted to investigate the following research question: how do educational developers experience disciplinary perspectives in the work of educational development? Phenomenography is a qualitative research approach that focuses on the variation in how a phenomenon is experienced and conceptualized. I adopted a situative theoretical perspective to see disciplinary perspectives in relation to the contexts, social interactions, and activities through which interdisciplinary work is performed. I conducted semi-structured interviews with eighteen educational developers from Centers for Teaching and Learning across the United States and Canada. Participants were recruited from various disciplinary backgrounds and levels of experience. In the interview, participants shared general descriptions about their work, and specific descriptions of an experience where they worked with others who contributed different disciplinary perspectives. Additionally, a scenario-based elicitation exercise was used to frame participants’ description of how diverse disciplinary perspectives appear in their work. The analysis followed an iterative and generative process to discern features and qualities of disciplinary perspectives. </div><div><br></div><div>The findings of this study are presented as a phenomenographic outcome space consisting of five categories of description as distinct ways that disciplinary perspectives are experienced by educational developers. Additionally, the findings illustrate how disciplinary perspectives become externalized as an object that is brought forward and shaped in collaborative interactions. This research contributes to further understanding interdisciplinary collaboration in two ways. First, for interdisciplinary practice, the findings provide an integrated view of the variation in ways of experiencing disciplinary perspectives such that educational developers may attune and attend to different collaborative interactions. Second, with the situative perspective, I provide insight into the situated knowledge that constitutes how disciplinary perspectives become meaningful based on educational developers’ position in relation to different disciplinary spaces. My findings highlight the situative relationships between the individual educational developer, their practice with disciplinary perspectives, and their work tasks in educational development. As educational developers continue to develop their practice to advance teaching and learning in higher education, this research contributes to the professional knowledge of educational developers in support of interdisciplinary collaboration. </div><div><br></div>

Rerandomization (Morgan & Rubin, 2012) is designed for the elimination of covariate imbalance at the design stage of causal inference studies. By improving the covariate balance, rerandomization helps provide more precise and trustworthy estimates (i.e., lower variance) of the average treatment effect (ATE). However, there are only a limited number of studies considering rerandomization strategies or discussing the covariate balance criteria that are observed before conducting the rerandomization procedure. In addition, researchers may find more difficulty in ensuring covariate balance across groups with small-sized samples. Furthermore, researchers conducting experimental design studies in psychology and education fields may not be able to gather data from all subjects simultaneously. Subjects may not arrive at the same time and experiments can hardly wait until the recruitment of all subjects. As a result, we have presented the following research questions: 1) How does the rerandomization procedure perform when the sample size is small? 2) Are there any other balancing criteria that may work better than the Mahalanobis distance in the context of small samples? 3) How well does the balancing criterion work in a sequential rerandomization design? Based on the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class, a Monte-Carlo simulation study is presented for finding a better covariate balance criterion with respect to small samples. In this study, the neural network predicting model is used to calculate missing counterfactuals. Then, to ensure covariate balance in the context of small samples, the rerandomization procedure uses various criteria measuring covariate balance to find the specific criterion for the most precise estimate of sample average treatment effect. Lastly, a relatively good covariate balance criterion is adapted to Zhou et al.’s (2018) sequential rerandomization procedure and we examined its performance. In this dissertation, we aim to identify the best covariate balance criterion using the rerandomization procedure to determine the most appropriate randomized assignment with respect to small samples. On the use of Bayesian logistic regression with Cauchy prior as the covariate balance criterion, there is a 19% decrease in the root mean square error (RMSE) of the estimated sample average treatment effect compared to pure randomization procedures. Additionally, it is proved to work effectively in sequential rerandomization, thus making a meaningful contribution to the studies of psychology and education. It further enhances the power of hypothesis testing in randomized experimental designs.

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