Education Commons^™

A Qualitative Case Study Of Health-Related Baccalaureate And Graduate Web-Based Simulated Clinical Learning Platforms, Kathrine Choura Branch

Dissertations

Simulation has been recognized as a teaching, learning, evaluation, and research strategy based on learning theories, that has come to play a significant role in healthcare education (Beal et al., 2017; La Cerra et al., 2019). Health-related academic programs in higher education have traditionally used simulation to fill gaps in learning and strengthen students’ clinical and critical thinking skills in conjunction with didactic classroom content, laboratory practice, and clinical education in the community setting (Hayden et al., 2014). With the onset and unpredictability of COVID-19, there was almost an immediate need for health-related academic programs across the world to transition …

Instructor Selection And Use Of Virtual Field Experiences In College Geoscience Course, Kristen Foley

Masters Theses

Virtual Field Experiences (VFEs) are a growing supplement and gateway to traditional fieldwork in the geosciences. With VFEs becoming more accepted for use in college geoscience courses, how instructors find and choose VFEs for their students is critical to creating greater accessibility and future resources. VFEs that are not easily accessed by instructors may go unused, and the effort put into making them would have been wasted. This phenomenological descriptive study utilized five focus groups of college geoscience instructors in the United States. Each 1-to-1.5-hour focus group session of 3-7 participants took place on video conferencing software, which was recorded …

Predicting Student Success In Coursework Within A Regional Online School: An Analysis Of Student-Level And School-Level Predictors, Cary J. Stamas

Dissertations

Online education options in the K-12 environment have steadily increased from the infancy of online education at the turn of the millennia. Educators have utilized this format to meet the many different needs that exist for all students. Early research into the academic success of students in these environments prior to 2000 indicated there was no significant difference in student achievement for distance learning as compared to face-to-face learning. Since 2000, there has been increased focus on student performance in higher education online environments, but research is limited for K-12 schools. For the research that does exist, school-level variables and …

How And Why Higher Education Information Technology Professionals Keep Their Skill Sets Current, Vicky L. Deur

Dissertations

The rapid change in technology creates a challenge for universities to understand the importance of why and how IT professionals keep current in their skill sets, as opposed to leaving the profession or becoming obsolete in their position. This study captured information from IT professionals in higher education regarding the learning activities they find useful in maintaining or updating their skills, an estimate of time spent in those learning activities both at work and outside work, and information on what factors contributed to this maintenance.

Previous research on social cognitive theory and locus of control theory supported the conceptual frame …

Adopting Educational Technology: A Study Of Dominican Republic Higher Education Faculty Related To Their Classroom Usage, Attitudes, Barriers, And Motivations, Leipzig Elizabeth Guzmán Mena

Dissertations

Previous research has revealed that the integration of technology in education produces an improvement in the traditional teaching and learning process, but that there is a disconnect between faculty adoption of educational technology and the requirements of our current generation of students (Rhema & Miliszewska, 2014; Selwyn, 2009). While students are now fully immersed in technology, some faculty still do not give adequate significance to its adoption in their classes. This disconnect represents a problem for these students’ learning experiences.

The purpose of this study was to explore faculty experiences regarding the adoption of educational technology within a private HEI …

Design Parameters For Planning Cluster Randomized Trials Of Cognitive Skill Interventions: An Empirical Analysis Using The Collegiate Learning Assessment, Yu Du

Dissertations

Recently, higher education has started to place a premium on rigorous research that uses randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to test the impact of educational interventions. This may be due in part to concerns about a deficiency of high-quality evidence of the effectiveness of programs, policies, and practices to improve undergraduate students’ outcomes. Given the naturally nested structure in higher education, e.g., students nested in colleges/universities, researchers in higher education start considering a specific type of RCT called a cluster randomized trial (CRT), which have been frequently used in K-12 impact research. In a CRT, whole clusters, such as colleges/universities, are …

The Efficacy Actions Of Priority School Leaders During The Dynamic Change Of School Reform, Micole D. Dyson

Dissertations

There are increasing demands and challenges from the state and federal government for continual academic improvement for all schools. Each year, the Michigan Department of Education creates a “Top to Bottom” list of schools, with the lowest-performing schools designated as priority schools. This priority designation invariably creates the need for principals to examine their own self-efficacy beliefs as they work with teachers to improve these schools.

The purpose of this basic qualitative study is to identify and describe principals’ beliefs in their abilities to organize and execute complex actions to achieve changes within priority schools. Identifying and naming a leader’s …

Business-Sponsored Films For Physical Science, Bertha Elizabeth Slye

Masters Theses

For many years business-sponsored films have been used widely in instruction in the science classroom. Because of the potential of the films in helping teachers bridge the gap between the fundamental teaching of scientific principles, and the applications found in the actual experiences of the student's consumer world, requests for them have often exceeded the output of those that are educationally sound. In the last decade in particular, the development of atomic and space technology, as well as the growing interest in science, have made it necessary to teach science beyond the confines of information in the ordinary science textbook. …

How Television Is Affecting The Lives Of Sixth Graders In Kalamazoo – A Report From The Children, Charles R. Calhoun

Masters Theses

The Problem and Its Background

Audio-Visual Aids

The attention of children is attracted greatly to most of the objects and events they see and hear. Hence they become aware of their environments and learn chiefly through the experiences that come to them through the visual and auditory receptors. As a result educational programs are designed to take advantages of these facts. Audio-visual aids have therefore brought reality into the classroom by making maximal use of the audio-visual senses.

The extensive use of audio-visual aids in classroom teaching is in part evident in the number of motion-picture projectors in the high …