<p> This dissertation examines nontraditional online students&rsquo; perceptions of Tinto&rsquo;s four student success conditions: expectations, support, assessment, and engagement. Expectations include those of the student, the faculty and the institution. Support includes academic, social, and financial support. Providing early and meaningful assessment and feedback to students is crucial during their educational career. The fourth success condition in Tinto&rsquo;s model includes the involvement or engagement of students with their peers (and faculty) in both an academic and social contexts. Nontraditional student perceptions of each of these institutional conditions of success was uncovered through demographic survey, interviews, syllabi and website artifacts.This qualitative study provided a rich, detailed description of the lived experience of the nontraditional online student to add to the paucity of research on this understudied population. The three main themes emerged from the data: (a) nontraditional students identified in an asynchronous environment did not find the success conditions to be consistently present and reported that they would have benefitted from them if they had existed both academically and socially; (b) nontraditional students identified key elements for success, which included flexibility in their schedule and the opportunity to receive a degree from a reputable institution that would lead to career enhancement; (c) students reported developing a strong, positive academic relationship with their advisor. The advisor served as a substitute for faculty-student relationships and was the primary role for providing academic, social and financial support.</p><p>

<p> Calls for educational technology integration over more than thirty years have taken on new urgency in an era of computerized assessments for accountability. As Internet Communication Technology (ICT) becomes more widely available, the digital divide is evolving into a digital use divide, characterized by differences between students&rsquo; productive uses of technology to create and communicate compared with passive uses for entertainment or skills practice. A growing body of research points to the important interplay among teachers&rsquo; frames of reference, school-level context, and alignment of supports in creating conditions for technology innovation. Meanwhile Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) hold potential as leverage points for affecting teacher beliefs and practices regarding technology use. This study analyzes interactions among a group of teacher leaders participating in a tech PLC at a school on the verge of becoming a technology-focused school. Analysis of the group&rsquo;s natural discourse points to important elements of teacher talk and shared resources that contribute to aligning the group&rsquo;s goals and practices when innovating with technology. It also illustrates how alignment between meso-level and micro-level context factors help to facilitate teachers&rsquo; ability to innovate in ways that have the potential to address the digital use divide.</p><p>

<p> The ethnographic study presented here documents emergent behaviors that arose when two multimodal composing and production tools - Collabosphere and Tumblr &mdash; were used in three different college courses (Introductory Psychology, Education 1B, and College Writing 101). The work addresses how conceptions of writing in the college classroom and across disciplines shift, converge, and vary across courses and between disciplines. I use Engestr&ouml;m&rsquo;s (1999) model of activity theory to show how the introduction of new tools pushed both students and teachers to think more broadly and creatively about how they compose and comport themselves in academic settings. Specifically, this work reveals instances of expansive transformation as two activity systems &ndash; academic writing and digital writing &ndash; converged in these classrooms. By documenting new approaches that students and teachers developed when using new tools in an academic setting, I hope to visualize new opportunities for university writing to expand and include new literacy practices.</p><p> This study documents how digital tools in the Academy were perceived, repurposed and used in a variety of different ways. I used a combination of interviews with faculty and students, observations, and analysis of semiotic materials to gain a holistic understanding of the dynamic activity systems at play in each setting, and across the university. Specifically, I endeavored to document the types of expectations placed on undergraduate students and faculty to use digital tools in innovative and compelling ways, and how those expectations informed how both approached composing in their courses. Here I strove to understand the new demands on college writers within different disciplinary departments, new kinds of audiences, and new kinds of texts as students collaboratively composed. This study also conceives to help educators and teaching faculty think about what kinds of methods, rubrics and assessment frameworks would help support students using new tools for writing in college classrooms. </p><p> One of the central findings of this study is that in order to make room for expansive learning and new systems of writing to emerge, teachers must make explicit the course goals and assessment models for grading and evaluating digital and multimodal pieces. Without this framework, students often default to those writing models that were successful for them in the past, which were text-heavy and often discipline-specific. Further, teachers also need to help extend student&rsquo;s notions of communication to include the visual and aural in a way that is both meaningful and critical. This study showed that it was not enough for students to simply present and prioritize multimodal composing, but that students needed a conceptual frame to understand how and why composing in different modes supported their analytic reasoning, and feel confident in their ability to synthesize them into their composing work.</p><p>

<p> At-risk children have demonstrated that the traditional industrial model of education often does not work well for them, yet the majority continue to be educated in this fashion. With the evolving ability to incorporate technology into education, the potential exists to develop innovative, personalized methods to meet at-risk students&rsquo; educational needs.</p><p> This study took place in three public high schools in the western United States for students designated as &ldquo;at-risk.&rdquo; These schools, located in the same public school district, worked together to develop and implement mastery-based, personalized instructional models with blended or hybrid instructional delivery school-wide. The use of teachers as mentors provided the framework to develop student-teacher relationships, while blended delivery provided academic choice over pace, place, time, and path.</p><p> The impact of the introduction of a blended, mastery-based learning model during the first semester of full implementation included a reduction in behavior incidents among students in all three high schools. Four out of five cohort grade level groups across the three high schools experienced a statistically significant reduction in behavior occurrences. While behavioral occurrences reduced, school exclusion rates through suspension were not significantly impacted through initial implementation of the new educational model. </p><p> Student academic achievement data was also collected and demonstrated the difficulty researchers can have comparing a time-based traditional instructional model to a mastery-based model where time is variable. Initial implementation demonstrated a statistically significant reduction in credits earned over the first semester. Grade point averages were not shown to be impacted significantly through initial mastery-based model implementation. </p><p> Student perception was measured through a survey tool developed to gather student input on model transformation and demonstrated that the change to a personalized learning model included the majority of the elements identified as key to developing student engagement. </p><p> The results of this study support and expand the work of other researchers who have demonstrated that implementation of a mastery-based instructional model delivered through blended instruction benefits at-risk students.</p><p>

<p> The purpose of this study was to assess the nature of participation in a hybrid Community of Practice; exploring how teacher efficacy influenced participation; and how participation impacted both technology teacher leadership and technology integration practice. The researcher addressed the following research questions: <i>What is the nature and frequency of the activities and interactions evidenced by participation in a hybrid CoP? What types of knowledge capital were found in a hybrid CoP? Does teacher efficacy influence participation in the online component of a hybrid CoP? How does participation in a hybrid CoP impact teachers&rsquo; technology integration and the development of their technology leadership ability?</i> Participants included 31 teachers enrolled in an Innovative Teacher Leaders (ITL) program. The researcher implemented a mixed methods comparative case study, collecting data via participant observations, monthly self-reports, and semi-structured interviews. A survey instrument was administered to collect data on Teacher Efficacy and Teacher Leadership. Frequency data were collected based on interaction logs and face-to-face training observations of the CoP. Findings of this study pointed to the need for time to practice, implementation support, and peer coaching/discourse as necessary factors for successful professional development. Participation in this hybrid CoP was found to have a positive impact on teacher technology integration and technology leadership ability.</p><p>

<p> Increased access to technology has changed the current educational landscape and, will dramatically affect the future of education. These shifts are redefining the roles of educators and require that teachers have the attributes necessary to legitimately incorporate technology into the classroom.</p><p> The purpose of this study is to examine existing characteristics of teachers employed at Minarets High, which uses a 1-to-1 and project-based curriculum, to determine if there are any relationships between the selected measures. </p><p> The research questions are:</p><p> 1) What teacher and district/school factors allow for effective technology integration? Specifically, a. What relationship, if any, exists between teachers&rsquo; sense of self-efficacy and teachers&rsquo; attitudes toward instructional technology? b. What relationship, if any, exists among the factors of teachers&rsquo; sense of self-efficacy (Student Engagement, Instructional Practice and Classroom Management) and Student Productivity? c. What district/school factors, if any, promotes the use of technology in the classroom by and for students? </p><p> Based on the literature review on the topic of teacher self-efficacy and attitudes toward technology, research was conducted using questionnaires to quantify the existence and extent of any relationships between teachers&rsquo; self-efficacy and attitudes, follow-up interviews were used to identify various school and district factors that promote the use of technology in the classroom. </p><p> The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Pearson-r correlations, and through the coding of interviews. There were 16 surveys and 9 interviews. The study did reveal the high self-efficacy and positive attitude that teachers have towards technology. Through interviews, attributes were identified and the <i>Technology Integration Framework at Minaret</i>s was developed to visualize the creation of an <i>atmosphere</i> of learning at Minarets.</p><p> The outcome of this research suggests that the integration of technology into the modern-day classroom goes much deeper than merely purchasing hardware for the teachers and students to use. The findings show that beyond access there are many other factors that affect the student learning experience. The study revealed an intricate system of <i>Student Experience Influencers </i> that is required for Minarets to provide this unique learning space. </p><p>

<p> Spending limited educational budgets on technology for classrooms is a strategy many school districts have used to increase student achievement (Levenson, Baehr, Smith, &amp; Sullivan, 2014). In recent years, the technology movement allowed for arbitrary purchasing of devices with little to no pedagogical planning for how technology device usage was expected to increase student achievement (Johnston, 2014). The purpose of this study was to analyze the correlation between student achievement and the amount of money spent on technology hardware, technology software, and technology-related professional development. The research design incorporated quantitative methods through collection of test scores and survey data regarding school budgets and educational technology expenditures. The data were analyzed to reveal the strength, if any, of correlations between the amount of money spent on technology hardware, technology software, and technology-related professional development and student achievement among third, fifth, and eighth-grade students. The target population of the study consisted of 23 elementary principals within a Catholic diocese in southwest Missouri. A convenience sampling was conducted with 100% participation. De-identified core battery scores from the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) were provided by the superintendent of the diocese for grades three, five, and eight. The data collected and analyzed in this study revealed weak or no significant positive correlations between the amount of money spent on technology hardware, technology software, or technology-related professional development and ITBS test scores in grades three, five, and eight for the academic years 2011-2012, 2012-2013, and 2013-2014.</p><p>

<p> The fusion of the Internet with instructional design, and curricula delivery methods eliminated transactional distance in online learning. However, distance education (DE) in Nigeria has not aligned its pedagogy to the new reality in technology. The purposes of this non-experimental, predictive, validity study were to determine faculty and administrators&rsquo; perceived barriers and concerns to online adoption and to validate the behavior engineering model (BEM) instrument. Ninety-six respondents from four public universities in Nigeria completed the questionnaires. Descriptive statistics and structural equation modeling (SEM) were used respectively, to assess barriers and concerns militating against faculty and administrators&rsquo; online adoption, as well as validate the survey instruments. For faculty and administrators, incentive, motive, knowledge and skills influenced DE adoption. Except for age, all demographic factors influenced faculty&rsquo;s concerns. Gender was observed to influence administrators&rsquo; concern. &ldquo;Level of online use&rdquo; influenced neither faculty nor administrators&rsquo; concerns. Technographic characteristics influenced faculty, but not administrators.&rsquo; Though the BEM instrument was reliable in measuring faculty and administrator&rsquo;s stages of concern, however, the 6-factor BEM, tested at the 95% significant level, did not give a good fit. The study contributes to positive social change by identifying gaps to effective DE implementation, and recommended the appropriate interventions to transform the DE experience for students and their universities. The study also proposed the framework to fast track Nigeria&rsquo;s vision and mission for DE.</p><p>

This case study instantiates longitudinal change over a two year period by examining the role of School Situated Sustained Professional Development (SSSPD) on the evolution of the participant’s practice. The participant was a secondary science teacher who emerged as an exemplar in integrating Technology Enhanced Formative Assessment (TEFA) pedagogy into her practice, which was facilitated by personal response systems (PRS). The research question was: What could be revealed about the impact of SSSPD by studying teacher learning of a teacher who emerged as an exemplar? The participant was one of ten teachers learning the TEFA pedagogy. Professional development (PD) that facilitates change in teachers’ practice and that sustains those changes over time is critical. Findings were triangulated from seven quantitative and qualitative data sets including monthly surveys, lesson observations, journal entries, interviews and action research sessions. The major findings of the study were: (1) implementing TEFA led to changes in the participant’s practice, and (2) the SSSPD model was instrumental in the participant learning how to implement TEFA. Findings also revealed changes in the participant’s beliefs, teaching strategies and in her modification of TEFA. Eight elements of teacher change were identified which were used to develop the Elements of Teacher Change in Adoption of Pedagogy (ETCAP) model. Gaining a better understanding of the SSSPD model and its potential as an effective model for PD is dependent on proving its effectiveness in promoting teacher change and sustaining that change over time. Key words: professional development, Technology Enhanced Formative Assessment, personal response systems, teacher change, teacher learning

Emotional intelligence has a prominent role in education, health care, and day to day interaction. With the increasing use of computer technology, computers are interacting with more and more individuals. This interaction provides an opportunity to increase knowledge about human emotion for human consumption, well-being, and improved computer adaptation. This thesis explores the efficacy of using up to four different sensors in three domains for computational affect detection. We first consider computer-based education, where a collection of four sensors is used to detect student emotions relevant to learning, such as frustration, confidence, excitement and interest while students use a computer geometry tutor. The best classier of each emotion in terms of accuracy ranges from 78% to 87.5%. We then use voice data collected in a clinical setting to differentiate both gender and culture of the speaker. We produce classifiers with accuracies between 84% and 94% for gender, and between 58% and 70% for American vs. Asian culture, and we find that classifiers for distinguishing between four cultures do not perform better than chance. Finally, we use video and audio in a health care education scenario to detect students' emotions during a clinical simulation evaluation. The video data provides classifiers with accuracies between 63% and 88% for the emotions of confident, anxious, frustrated, excited, and interested. We find the audio data to be too complex to single out the voice source of the student by automatic means. In total, this work is a step forward in the automatic computational detection of affect in realistic settings.