Other Education Commons^™

Embracing Ai-Based Education: Perceived Social Presence Of Human Teachers And Expectations About Machine Teachers In Online Education, Jihyun Kim, Kelly Merrill Jr., Kun Xu, Deanna D. Sellnow

Human-Machine Communication

Technological advancements in education have turned the idea of machines as teachers into a reality. To better understand this phenomenon, the present study explores how college students develop expectations (or anticipations) about a machine teacher, particularly an AI teaching assistant. Specifically, the study examines whether students’ previous experiences with online courses taught by a human teacher would influence their expectations about AI teaching assistants in future online courses. An online survey was conducted to collect data from college students in the United States. Findings indicate that positively experienced social presence of a human teacher helps develop positive expectations about an …

Student Intentions To Engage Instructors In Mental Health-Related Conversations: An Application Of The Theory Of Planned Behavior, Allie White, Hannah Ball, Sara Labelle

Communication Faculty Articles and Research

Objective

Considering that college students experience mental health issues and college counseling centers are overwhelmed, this study identifies instructors as a potential mental health resource for students. This study utilizes the theory of planned behavior to investigate the relationship between students’ attitudes, injunctive and descriptive norms, perceived behavioral control, and their intentions to engage their instructors in mental health conversations.

Participants

Participants were 311 undergraduate students at a small, private university in Southern California.

Methods

Participants were recruited through a Communication subject pool and completed an online survey about engaging instructors in these conversations.

Results

Results of a regression analysis …

Developing Indie Games With Agile, Camden Obertop

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Agile software development has ushered in major improvements to the development of software in the 21st century. Video game development is a form of development that is unique from other types of software engineering, as it can involve work from artists, musicians, voice actors, and others. This paper explores the question whether agile software development as Scrum is an effective tool for creating video games. Ultimately, it can be seen that agile is a very important asset to game developers.

"Ana Yahanu Faqat": A Phenomenological Study On The Performance Character And Life Success, Saiful Amien, Punaji Setyosari, Nurul Murtadho, Sulton Sulton

The Qualitative Report

Everyone can achieve life success if they can fulfil the prerequisites. There is no dominant factor that determines success, but the strength of character can be an essential asset that is not in doubt. This study aims to explore the Yahanu character strengths in the phenomenon of achieving life success of three santri, graduates of the same pesantren (Islamic boarding school) in Indonesia. We design this research with a phenomenological approach. We collected the data through in-depth interviews, then transcribed it verbatim into a solid description, and analyzed it through descriptive-psychological phenomenological analysis procedures. The findings show that: (1) …

Developing Servant Leadership Through A Peer Mentor Program, Michael G. Funfar

Servant Leadership: Theory & Practice

Mentor programs are an important component of transition programs, which help students successfully navigate the shift from middle school to high school. With that being said, little research has examined the impact of participation in a mentor program on the mentors’ servant leadership skill set. Therefore, the purpose of this qualitative case study was to investigate the impact of a peer mentor program and challenge course training component on the mentor’s perceived servant leadership skill-set. This study explored the impact on participants from a high school peer mentor program who graduated in 2018-2019 and had additional life experience from which …

Constructing A Bridge For New Teachers Evolving Schoolwide Communication During Covid, Cecilia Turman

Graduate & Professional Student Association Research Forum

This study investigated novice and veteran teachers' strategies for referring students to seek dean/administrative intervention. Participants included 16 pre-service, and 16 first year, and 16 teachers. The findings show that pre-service and new teachers seek to explore effective approaches rather than refer students to the dean reflecting three reasons: teachers disconnect with school administration, fear of administration's negative evaluation resulting from many referrals, and concerns of referral efficacy. This year, CCSD reported more than 5,000 violent acts, about the same number during 2018-2019, before Covid hiatus. Teachers blame this trend on lack of interaction (Chen for KTNV, 2022).

Justice-Oriented Learning: Reconfiguring Experiential Education With A California Farmworker Community, Judith Hope Munter Dr., Nathan Harkleroad, Manuel Cervantes, Andrea Tinajero

Experiential Learning & Teaching in Higher Education

This community-based research project examines a land-based education program which creates opportunities for contextualized learning, acknowledging the value of immigrant farmworkers’ lived experiences. The study highlights how this culture of learning can be a means for promoting social and environmental justice. Participatory research methods involved collective inquiry in which co-researchers and community stakeholders engaged in all steps of the process with the goals of improving practice and bringing about transformative change.

An Examination Of Mentoring As An Intervention For Students With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Candace Michele Bone

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Despite evidence demonstrating that mentoring may be an effective intervention for neurotypical students, there is limited literature investigating the impact of mentoring on outcomes for those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Using a comprehensive review of the available literature, the present specialist project provides a summary of available mentoring literature which implemented mentoring programs with students on the autism spectrum. After eliminating irrelevant literature from an initial search, a small sample of relevant articles were reviewed (N = 8). These studies demonstrated that ASD mentoring programs are often limited in scope to higher functioning young adults. Additionally, the reviewed articles …

Promoting Impactful Internships With Community Partners, Leeann M. Akers, Samuel L. Stapleton

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

A capstone submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education in the Ernst and Sara Lane Volgenau College of Education at Morehead State University by Leeann M. Akers and Samuel L. Stapleton on April 1, 2022.

Metacognition, Working Memory Capacity, And Recall Performance, Brandi Michelle Glass

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Metacognition is beneficial for helping individuals understand their own learning and retrieval processes. Self-explanation is a metacognitive strategy that uses metacognitive skills to guide students through learning activities. Therefore, I predicted that participants who were more metacognitive during self-explanation would be able to recall more information than those who were less metacognitive. As expected, those who scored high in metacognition also scored higher on a recall test. I also expected those with higher working memory capacity to produce more metacognitive statements. This hypothesis was not supported. There was no difference between those with high or low working memory and the …

The Opportunity To Play, Ezekiel Spieker

Classical Conversations

In many states across America, homeschool students are welcome participants in community activities and school events. From sports, musical recitals, and band, to speech and debate, these students are embraced with open arms and allowed the opportunity to participate in events offered through their local public school. In Missouri, however, this is often not the case once a child ages out of local little leagues. The Missouri State High School Activities Association, otherwise known as MSHSAA, completely prohibits homeschool participation in these activities at the Junior High level. For those in high school, MSHSAA mandates that schools require a homeschool …

Wicked²: The Increasing Wickedness Of Educational Developers As Dei Cultural Influencers, Lauri Dietz, China M. Jenkins, Laura Cruz, Amber Handy, Rita Kumar, Rita Kumar, Julia Metzger, Ian Norris

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

The global pandemic that began in 2020 amplified the chasm between higher education’s stated goals to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and the systemic realities that many students, instructors, and staff grapple with on a daily basis. We contend that attenuating the barriers to DEI outcomes means first acknowledging that DEI is a wicked problem, in that it is impossible to solve because of competing, conflicting, and complex sociocultural forces from within and outside our institutions. We also contend that educational developers (EDs) are particularly well situated within the higher education ecology to be key cultural influencers in how …

Caring For Our Communities Of Practice In Educational Development, Christopher V. H.-H. Chen, Katherine Kearns, Lynn Eaton, Darren S. Hoffmann, Denise Leonard, Martin Samuels

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

Given the backdrop of multiple concurring crises—a global pandemic, political instability and violence, and multiple structural inequalities—we see the problem of now as this: How do educational developers continue to address the wicked problems in teaching and learning when we are simply so exhausted? Our article presents the importance of communities of practice for educational developers, inviting us to witness and name the communities in which we belong; the important functions they engage; who they nurture and how; and what care is undertaken to sustain these groups and ourselves. To help educational developers understand and appreciate the ways that communities …

Contexts For Agency: A Framework For Managing Educational Development Work, Kathleen Landy, Anna L. Bostwick Flaming, Suzanne Tapp, Eric C. Kaldor

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

Often working in multiple roles and operating at multiple scales, educational developers deal with layered tensions and a complex context that can be difficult for an individual or team to reconcile. In May 2020, the authors participated in a cross-institutional scholarly project, the Pandemic Educational Development Research Collaborative (PEDRC), designed to explore the impact of multiple crises (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic and our collective civil and political unrest) and associated large-scale instructional changes on educational developers and their work. The Contexts for Agency framework reflects the project’s emergent theme that the circumstances in which we act have considerable influence on …

Building Resilience In Ctls: Reflections On Practice, Lisa J. Hatfield, Julie Maxson, Jennifer Marshall Shinaberger, Hanna E. Norton, Cynthia (Cia) H. Demartino, Annette Finley-Crosswhite, Gigi Gokcek

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

What are the qualities of the “now” that make teaching and learning an urgent, if not a moral, imperative? A group of faculty, administrators, and educational developers respond to this question with individual narratives bound together by a common theme of reflective practice in times of crises to help faculty become more resilient in preparing for ongoing upheavals and unexpected crises while pursuing more inclusive communities. Our personal narratives reflect on the subjects of flexibility in the face of crises, technology and ethics, study abroad exposure to ethical challenges, students’ growing anxiety and mental health, modeling metacognition with peers and …

Taking Teaching And Learning Seriously: Approaching Wicked Consciousness Through Collaboration And Partnership, Adam H. Smith, Laurie L. Grupp, Lindsay Doukopoulos, John C. Foo, Barbara J. Rodriguez, Janel Seeley, Linda M. Boland, Laurel L. Hester

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has demanded large-scale collaboration within all organizations, including higher education, and taking teaching and learning seriously, in this moment, means leveraging partnerships to address the wicked (large, complex) problems cited by Bass (2020). These problems are not ours alone to solve; rather, we make the case for a “wicked consciousness,” an amalgam of perspectives, in educational development. Guided by intellectual humility, our success as educational developers ought to be measured by the quality of our collaborations as well as our ability to learn with others, form equitable partnerships, and lead others by our example.

Toward Institutionalizing Successful Innovations In The Academy, Sarah B. Wise, Courtney Ngai, Joel Christopher Corbo, Mark A. Gammon, Jaclyn K. Rivard, Clara E. Smith

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

Due to the “wicked problem” of the Academy’s resistance to innovation, new teaching and learning programs struggle to become integrated into the fabric of the Academy, which slows the uptake of evidence-based practices. This wicked problem is rooted in the lack of slow, intentional mechanisms for cultural change in the Academy. In this article, we analyze the institutionalization journey of the Departmental Action Team (DAT) project, which is a model for slow, intentional change. Over the last four years, partnering with two campus centers for teaching and learning (CTLs) allowed the DAT project to make institutionalization progress.

This analysis is …

Contact Sports With Mental Health And Aggression, Jai Alvarez

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

Sports have many benefits that can develop new motivations, drives and goals within a person. Contact sports, specifically, benefit someone's mental health and a healthy mindset by giving people an outlet to take out their aggressions. Being physically active can produce certain parts of the brain being activated and release serotonin, overall affecting someone's mood. Although contact sports such as football have been in a negative light within in society recently, contact sports have improved protection against injuries and research has shown that contact sports can improve your mental health by letting out aggression in a safe manner.

Plastic Pollution’S Affect On Coral Reefs, Alexander Gomez

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

Plastic pollution has been an increasing problem in the world. This is getting worse every year and it is having an impact in our world specifically in our oceans. A big thing in the ocean is coral reefs, coral reefs end up dying by diseases and debris caused from plastic pollution. Coral reefs are important in the lives of humans and fish so if we do nothing about it many will suffer the consequences. With coral reefs gone many fish suffer from change and do not adapt quick enough and later end up dying. Plastic pollution stays on top of …

A Mixed Methods Case Study: Effects Of Instructors’ Beliefs On Incorporation Of Sustainability Curriculum At A Midwestern University, Anna Oetting

School of Natural Resources: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The degree to which sustainability is taught is often varied and inconsistent across colleges, departments, and higher education institutions. However, educating students and future generations regarding the different pillars of sustainability, including economic, social, and environmental topics, is increasing in importance and urgency. A mixed methods case study utilized surveys and interviews to investigate why instructors incorporate sustainability, what impacts course incorporation of sustainability, and barriers that instructors face. This study found that instructors’ beliefs regarding the importance of sustainability relate to the extent to which sustainability is incorporated into their curriculum. Topics of sustainability incorporated into a class are …