The purpose of this action research study was to improve the implementation of a large-scale redesign of teacher preparation programs at Arizona State University. This was a highly complex redesign that impacted over 150 courses across 27 programs, involving more than 200 faculty and 2,500 students annually. As a result, implementing the redesign posed significant challenges for supporting fidelity and agency across all faculty involved, including many part-time faculty and new hires with no prior knowledge of the redesigned program curricula. While this challenge was not unique, I approached it in a novel way in this action research study by creating course “fact sheets” that provided simple, visual representations of each course’s intended purpose within the program’s context to solve what was fundamentally an information transfer challenge. To study the effects of this intervention, I used a convergent mixed methods approach to address three guiding research questions aimed at exploring (1) how faculty used the course fact sheets, (2) how that use related to differences in outcomes related to implementation fidelity and sense of teaching agency, and (3) how those differences compared to an online orientation module as a more traditional form of professional development. Results showed that a majority of the 122 faculty members surveyed used the course fact sheets and, on average, found them highly usable for the purpose of gaining knowledge about their courses as part of the redesign. Furthermore, those who used course fact sheets had significant increases in their knowledge and confidence of implementation fidelity practices and significant increases in their sense of teaching agency. The results also showed more positive outcomes for those using the fact sheets than those who participated in an orientation module. However, interview results suggested that the fact sheets may not have been enough to address all the factors that influence faculty agency. Nevertheless, this study has important implications for faculty development initiatives in higher education, demonstrating the potential of course fact sheets as a scalable solution to improve the implementation of large-scale redesigns.

Statistics is taught at every level of education, yet teachers often have to assume their students have no knowledge of statistics and start from scratch each time they set out to teach statistics. The motivation for this experimental study comes from interest in exploring educational applications of augmented reality (AR) delivered via mobile technology that could potentially provide rich, contextualized learning for understanding concepts related to statistics education. This study examined the effects of AR experiences for learning basic statistical concepts. Using a 3 x 2 research design, this study compared learning gains of 252 undergraduate and graduate students from a pre- and posttest given before and after interacting with one of three types of augmented reality experiences, a high AR experience (interacting with three dimensional images coupled with movement through a physical space), a low AR experience (interacting with three dimensional images without movement), or no AR experience (two dimensional images without movement). Two levels of collaboration (pairs and no pairs) were also included. Additionally, student perceptions toward collaboration opportunities and engagement were compared across the six treatment conditions. Other demographic information collected included the students' previous statistics experience, as well as their comfort level in using mobile devices. The moderating variables included prior knowledge (high, average, and low) as measured by the student's pretest score. Taking into account prior knowledge, students with low prior knowledge assigned to either high or low AR experience had statistically significant higher learning gains than those assigned to a no AR experience. On the other hand, the results showed no statistical significance between students assigned to work individually versus in pairs. Students assigned to both high and low AR experience perceived a statistically significant higher level of engagement than their no AR counterparts. Students with low prior knowledge benefited the most from the high AR condition in learning gains. Overall, the AR application did well for providing a hands-on experience working with statistical data. Further research on AR and its relationship to spatial cognition, situated learning, high order skill development, performance support, and other classroom applications for learning is still needed.