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The National Writing Project (NWP) conducts four and five-week professional development summer workshops that K-16 expert teachers consistently praise as transformative. The central question posed in this dissertation focuses on whether the NWP workshop, based on a teachers-teaching-teachers design, could also serve as an effective professional development vehicle for transforming and preparing graduate student instructors (GSIs) to teach first-year composition. This question arises out of the need for knowledge-building graduate student preparation programs that keep pace with the increased demands of the first-year composition course and of the first-year composition students. Methods used to explore the feasibility of the NWP to prepare GSIs involve an analytic autoethnography and two survey research instruments. In the autoethnography, the researcher views the various processes experienced throughout the NWP workshop through the twin lenses of Transformation Learning (TL) theory and constructivist learning pedagogy. In the survey research, the researcher investigates the GSI participants' and local site directors' perceptions concerning the value and benefits of the NWP workshop to prepare GSIs for teaching writing. The researcher's analytic autoethnography reveals the transformative effects of the NWP experience on the teacher-frames of the researcher and of those peers attending the same NWP institute, while the surveys of the GSI participants and the local site directors reveal similarly positive effects of NWP pedagogy for preparing GSI for teaching writing. Based on these findings, combined with foundational support from the NWP meta-analysis of student writing outcomes of NWP participating teachers generated by the Local Sites Research Initiatives (LSRI), along with the independent Inverness Associates' studies focusing on the perceptions of teachers involved in the NWP's New-Teacher Initiative (NTI), the researcher recommends a pilot project involving a NWP designed pre-semester workshop for graduate student instructors prior to teaching first-year composition.

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This study sought to form joint conceptions of success by creating a habits of mind orientational framework drawn from university administrative and practitioner scholarship and theory. Previous literature directed at university writing higher-level administrators and practitioners in first-year writing programs and writing centers was largely engaged in battle for control of determining what success means for incoming writers and how programs can support this version of success. This framework served as the basis for this study’s methodologies for the collection as well as analysis of data. Data was collected from twelve university stakeholders who support freshmen writers through first-year writing programs and writing centers at a small Catholic university in the Northeast. These data were collected using three different methods: semi-structured interviews, ranking activities and retroactive reflections. I found that the members from the three groups of university writing stakeholders shared either cognitive, interpersonal or intrapersonal orientations when conceiving what habits make writers successful and what programmatic mechanisms can help writers form these habits. These three groups did not, however, largely prioritize writers possessing or learning the same habits within each domain. The main commonality between groups sharing a cognitive domain orientation are that the habits they privileged look to preserve conventions grounded in a white Western rhetorical tradition. Yet, writing instructors and tutors mostly do not explicitly teach these conventions because they are expected to have been acquired in high school. Thus, students of color and/or from low income backgrounds are pushed to prepare themselves to meet these conventional expectations and abandon their own culture’s priorities and conventions if they are to succeed. Groups that had inter - and intrapersonal domain orientations privileged addressing each incoming writer’s individual needs through collaboration or teaching them an actionable process that can be continuously used in each new writing context. Based on these findings, I assert that utilizing a habits of mind orientational framework can benefit transitioning writers because university writing stakeholders can identify a single set of habits from each domain that can be consistently emphasized and reinforced through programmatic mechanisms. / English

Traditional measures of student success like retention and graduation rates are dismally low among community colleges. One of the most commonly used strategies to increase these bleak success rates is through the incorporation of first-year experience (FYE) courses. However, data indicate that their impact on such measures of student success are mixed and what’s more, many of these studies are limited by their use of predominantly quantitative methodologies that aggregate outcomes across students, masking the features of the FYE that may be more and less effective in promoting academic success among diverse students. Application of identity theories can help to fill this gap in understanding by offering theoretical frameworks from which to study this diverse population and deepen our understanding of their experiences. However, studies of identity with community college students are even fewer in number and often focus only on one narrow aspect of identity, such as racial and ethnic identity or age. Thus, they fail to fully capture the dynamic, complex, multifaceted, and context-dependent construct of identity. In this dissertation, I explore the unique experiences, challenges, and needs of four community college students taking the same FYE course at a large metropolitan community college in the Northeast United States and offer information about the course's features that most promoted development adaptive college student role identities (CSRIs) among participants. In this study, I conceptualize students' experiences in the FYE course as based in their emerging identities as community college students and adopted two theoretical frameworks to guide this study. The PRESS model designates the professor as an agent for prompting identity exploration among her students by creating triggers the students designate as self-relevant, creating a sense of safety in the classroom, and scaffolding exploratory activities while the Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity (DSMRI) explicates the content, structure, and formation processes of identity and how they relate to experiences and actions. Utilizing a case study approach, one section of an FYE course was selected, and from it, four participants, and the professor, were interviewed. Course artifacts, such as homework assignments, were also used for data analysis. The findings from the PRESS analysis showed that many aspects of the course organically promoted many of the model's four principles; however, some were observed more often than others and they were not as meaningful for all participants equally. The findings from the DSMRI analysis revealed some commonalities among the four components of the model across participants but more so, the data revealed variations and divergence in their CSRI exploration and formation in the FYE context. The study ends with implications for theory, practice, and future research. / Educational Psychology

Many institutions of higher education offer first-year seminars; academic courses designed to help new college students successfully transition to the rigors and demands of life inside and outside the classroom. There is a substantial body of research that validates first-year seminars as successful in accomplishing this goal. There are also numerous studies that have investigated what in the literature is termed a “sense of belonging.” This research demonstrates that college students who experience a sense of belonging feel welcomed, included, connected, and part of the community. These students are more likely to succeed and be retained at their institution. While there is extensive literature examining both of these areas separately, there is limited literature that connects them. This dissertation aimed to fill that gap in the literature by investigating synergies between first-year seminars and sense of belonging at a 4-year, private, liberal arts university. Results of the study showed that first-year students experienced sense of belonging through developing relationships with peers and faculty, through being informed about institutional resources and policies, and by feeling part of a supportive community. The first-year seminar program did have a positive effect on first-year students’ desire to graduate from the institution. An implication for practice includes faculty development centered on fostering a sense of belonging, facilitating opportunities for students to form relationships with their peers and faculty, ensuring that classrooms and institutional environments are inclusive and welcoming, and by informing first-year students about the resources and supports available to aid in their transition and retention. / Educational Administration

<p>  </p> <p>First-Year Engineering (FYE) programs are a critical part of engineering education, yet they are quite complex settings. Given the importance and complexity of FYE programs, research to better understand student learning and inform design and assessment in FYE programs is imperative. Therefore, this dissertation showcases various uses of data analytics and educational theory to support decision-making when designing and assessing FYE programs. Three case studies shape this dissertation work. Each study encompasses a variety of educational data sources, analytical methods, and decision-making tools to produce valuable findings for FYE classrooms. In addition, this dissertation also discusses the potential for incorporating data analytics into FYE programs. A more detailed description of the research methods, a summary of findings, and a list of resulting publications for each case study follows.</p> <p>The first case study investigated the relationship between two related Computational Thinking (CT) practices, data practices and computational problem-solving practices, in acquiring other CT competencies in a large FYE course setting. This study explored the following research questions: (1) What are the different student profiles that characterize their foundational CT practices at the beginning of the semester? and (2) Within these profiles, what are the progressions that students follow in the acquisition of advanced CT practices? To answer these questions, N-TARP Clustering, a novel machine learning algorithm, and sound statistical tools were used to analyze assessment data from the course at the learning objective level. Such a hybrid approach was needed due to the high-dimensionality and homogeneity characteristics of the assessment. It was found that early mastery of troubleshooting and debugging is linked to the successful acquisition of more complex CT competencies. This research was published in an article in the journal <em>IEEE Access</em>.</p> <p>The second case study examined self-regulation components associated with students' successful acquisition of CT skills using students' reflections and assessment data. This research was grounded in three subprocesses of the Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) theory: strategic planning, access to feedback, and self-evaluation. This study responded to the following research question: What is the relationship between SRL subprocesses: access to feedback, self-evaluation, strategic planning, and the acquisition of CT skills in an FYE course? Results from a structural equation model, which reflects the complexity and multidimensionality of the analysis, provided evidence of the relevance of the three subprocesses in the acquisition of CT skills and highlighted the importance of self-assessment as key to success in the acquisition of programming skills. Furthermore, self-assessment was found to effectively represent the task strategy and access to feedback from the students. This analysis led to the understanding that even though the three SRL subprocesses are relevant for the student's success, self-evaluation serves as a catalyst between strategic planning and access to feedback. A resulting article from this case study will be submitted to the <em>International Journal of Engineering Education</em> in the future.</p> <p>Lastly, the third study aimed to predict the students' learning outcomes using data from the Learning Management System (LMS) in an FYE course. The following research questions were explored in this case study: (1) What type of LMS objects contain information to explain students' grades in a FYE course? (2) Is the inclusion of a human operator during the data transformation process significant to the analysis of learning outcomes? Two different sections of a large FYE course were used, one serving as a training data set and the other one as a testing data set. Two logistic regression models were trained. The first model corresponded to a common approach for building a predictive model, using the data from the LMS directly. The second model considered the specifics of the course by transforming the data from aggregate user interaction to more granular categories related to the content of the class. A comparison was made between the predictive measures, e.g., precision, accuracy, recall, and F1 score for both models. The findings from the transformed data set indicate that students' engagement with the career exploration curriculum was the strongest predictor of students' final grades in the course. This is a fascinating finding because the amount of weight the career assignments contributed to the overall course grade was relatively low. This study will be presented at the 2022 American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) national conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota.</p>

In Spring 2020, East Tennessee State University, along with colleges and universities around the world, was forced to abruptly transition from face-To-face, on-campus courses to online courses in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. This contribution reflects on the faculty and student experience of transitioning general chemistry lecture and laboratory to an online format.

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