Collaborative Video Viewing (CVV) transforms passive video-based learning into an engaging, active process. While collaborative modes have different affordances that could potentially influence knowledge co-construction, no study has directly assessed the impact of collaborative modes in CVV activities. Therefore, this current study seeks to investigate how collaborative modes influence learning outcomes, learning engagement, group interaction and the co-construction process.The study utilized a within-subject, counterbalanced experimental design, in which each participating undergraduate student was paired in dyads. These dyads were assigned to engage in two separate CVV sessions: one using synchronous voice-based collaborative mode (SV) and the other using asynchronous text-based collaborative mode (AT). After each session, participants completed a test consisting of retention and application questions. ANCOVA was utilized to analyze the test scores. To ascertain if the different scores were a result of varying levels of learning engagement, dyad discussions were coded using ICAP coding (Chi & Wylie, 2014). Furthermore, to delve deeper into the group interaction mechanism in SV and AT, a codebook was developed to analyze the discourse that occurred during dyad interaction. Sequential analysis and thematic narrative analysis were employed to visualize interaction patterns and the co-construction process. The findings indicated that, generally, SV dyads performed better on application scores and have significantly higher interactive learning engagement than AT dyads. In line with ICAP predictions, the higher-score groups in both SV and AT engaged in more generative processes, leading to more constructive and interactive comments than lower-scoring groups. In terms of group interaction, both SV and AT primarily use descriptive discourse for co-explanation. However, the SV groups exclusively introduce discourse expressing uncertainty, which subsequently leads to group negotiation. The study identified distinct knowledge co-construction phases, including (a) co-explanation, (b) negotiation, and (c) application. Although the co-explanation phase is the most frequent in all dyad scores in both SV and AT, the negotiation phase appears to differentiate low-high score dyads from high-high score dyads. These findings hold research implications for understanding learning engagement and group interaction in various online collaborative modes, as well as for the instructional design of active video-based learning through collaborative video viewing.

Mentoring programs are not uncommon. In fact, they are more common than we think. Most mentoring programs and/or mentorship opportunities are informal and happen daily. While mentorship programs are common, some programs, specifically Pre-Pharmacy related, are overlooked. The lack of formalized opportunities impacts prospective students’ understanding of the profession and connection-building and limits accessibility to resources. This study explored the role of participation in the Mentoring Aspiring Pre-Pharmacy Mentorship Programs (MAPPS) on the mentees' self-efficacy, belonging, and decision to pursue pharmacy. I conducted this four-week study at UC San Diego Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences (SSPPS) in collaboration with the undergraduate campus. To support self-efficacy, belonging, and the decision to pursue pharmacy, MAPPS incorporated didactic and non-didactic activities, group conversations, reflections, and much more. To foster belonging, mentees were provided opportunities to participate in Pharmacy and Faculty meet and greet events, choose their mentor groups, and engage with one another. To develop self-efficacy, mentees were encouraged weekly to step outside their comfort zone by completing reflection activities that challenged them to learn more about the profession and engage with their mentors. The theoretical perspectives that guided this research project were the identity theory, self-efficacy theory, and sense of belonging. Furthermore, I used the parallel mixed design approach, which allowed me to use a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods simultaneously or with some time-lapse. The data collected in this study showed that participation in the MAPPS mentorship program heightened the mentees' sense of belonging, developed a deeper understanding of the profession, and resulted in the mentee feeling empowered to pursue the profession.

Transitioning adult education students to post-secondary programs and community college requires deliberate intervention and support services. This dissertation study was part of a larger action research study aimed at increasing transitions to college for non-traditional adult students by providing support and resources to adult education providers and staff. Earlier cycles of the study examined student and institutional barriers to participation and revealed missing college bridge activities. This specific cycle of research addressed one of these barriers, the need for increased access to transition information, through the creation of an online resource toolkit for students and staff. This study explored the affect of the toolkit on staff attitude and motivation related to campus transition activities, their use of the online toolkit, and the need for additional resources and strategies to better implement transitions programs. The data for this project was collected through pre- and post-intervention surveys, technology acceptance model (TAM) questionnaire, semi-structured interviews, and website analytics. It included a concurrent mixed methods quantitative and qualitative approach to analysis. Overall, the resource toolkit was well received, useful, and easy to use. Staff attitude and motivation shifted toward stronger support and intention to participate in transition activities like college-talk and campus culture. Considerations moved away from perceived obstacles related to college transitions. As part of this study, participants shared strategies for further development and expansion of the toolkit, ideas for promoting equity and access to transition services for all students, aligning staff vision and institutionalizing practices, and building college-going cultures and student college identities through counseling and curriculum. All of these efforts are designed to have adult students see themselves as successful learners and provide the support necessary to make college a real opportunity for all.

Integrating agent-based models (ABMs) has been a popular approach for teaching emergent science concepts. However, students continue to find it difficult to explain the emergent process of natural selection. This study adopted an ontological framework–the Pattern, Agents, Interactions, Relations, and Causality (PAIR-C)–to guide the design of learning modules. This pre-posttest experimental study examines the effects of the PAIR-C module versus the Regular module on fostering students’ deep understanding of natural selection. Results show that students in the PAIR-C intervention group performed better in answering deep questions assessing the understanding of inter-level causal relationships than those in the Regular control group. Although students in both groups did not show significantly improved abilities in explaining the natural selection process for other contexts or significant differences in their abilities to explain other emergent phenomena, students in the intervention group demonstrated system-thinking perspectives and fewer misconceptions in their expressions compared to the control group. A close analysis of student misconceptions consolidates that the intervention group demonstrated drastically fewer categories and numbers of misconceptions while those in the control group did not show such drastic changes before and after the study. To precisely address misconceptions and further improve students’ learning outcomes, Epistemic Network Analysis was adopted to capture students’ misconception characteristics by examining the co-occurrences of different misconception categories as well as the relationship between misconceptions and PAIR-C features. The results of student learning outcomes and misconception characteristics collectively provide directions for improving the instructional design of the PAIR-C module. Furthermore, findings on student engagement levels during learning can also inform future design efforts. Overall, this project sheds light on applying an innovative framework to designing effective learning modules to teach emergent science concepts.

As colleges and universities across the United States continue to grapple with enrollment challenges, many are embracing the concept of customer service as way to improve the student experience and positively impact retention. However, as many institutions of higher education begin to evaluate their own organizational structure, the notion of combining cross-functional departments is one strategy that more intuitions are exploring in an effort to improve communication, collaboration, and efficiencies. This qualitative dissertation study sought to understand the ways in which communication challenges for disconnected, yet cross-functional, departments can impact the ability of individual employees to properly execute the core functions of their individual positions. Utilizing semi-structured interviews, I explored how two previously disconnected departments interacted with each other on a daily basis, including the understanding of communication distribution. Employees were then physically relocated into one physical unified student services department, called Student Financial Services, and provided a structured schedule of professional development and cross-training activities. Participants were then interviewed about their experiences after the transition was completed. The four major themes that emerged through the data analysis were: improved communications equal improved customer service, enhanced professional development identifies and minimizes gaps, cross training leads to innovation, and policies and procedures are best developed by those within the organization.

College athletes experience college in a way that is different than their non-athlete peers. Practices, travel time, study hall, and other athletic obligations place strenuous demands on the lives and time of college athletes. As a result, college athletes have less flexible time and are often unable to engage in educationally purposeful activities including high impact practices, that promote their personal growth and development. Using Astin’s Student Involvement Theory and Rendon’s Validation Theory as frameworks, this mixed methods study examined the impact that participating in a high-impact practice activity had on the personal growth and development of college athletes. To examine how personal growth and development was impacted by participation in a high impact practice activity, National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I college athletes at the University of California, Riverside (UC Riverside) participated in the Leadership for Social Change seminar. To measure personal growth and development, the participants completed the Personal Growth Initiative Scale - II (PGIS-II) as a pre- and post-seminar survey. A sample of participants was also interviewed after completing the seminar to further explain the survey results. The results of the study suggest that seminar participation led to personal growth and development for college athletes. Institutions and athletic departments should promote college athletes’ personal growth and development by incorporating high impact practices into the college athlete experience.

Second Language Learners face a unique set of challenges when it comes to the learning process. This dissertation study specifically focuses on those challenges and how to train teachers working within a co-teaching model in an international school in Bangkok, Thailand. Using the ideology proposed by Stephen Krashen as a part of his Input Hypothesis Theory and framing the results through the lens of Albert Bandura’s Self-Efficacy Theory, I studied the effects of a professional development model that focused on phonemic awareness, comprehensible input, and a collaborative teaching approach. Using this as my methodological framework, I found that teachers were able to improve their teaching skills and become more confident in their approach when provided with training that gave them specific responsibilities to address within the process of teaching. Through the use of pre-post surveys, interviews, and observations, I was able to examine how resource sharing and collaborative lesson planning allowed teachers to be more confident in their approach to teaching and their abilities to support students that were attending an international school that was a part of one of the most successful and academically rigorous networks of schools in the United States of America. It was through an intentional designation of tasks and a collaborative training approach that teachers were not only able to better understand the needs of their students but also find ways to work with and learn from one another in the training process. Ultimately, I discovered that allowing teachers to share resources and best practices allowed them to build quality and far more engaging lessons for their students.

Distributed self-assessments and reflections empower learners to take the lead on their knowledge gaining evaluation. Both provide essential elements for practice and self-regulation in learning settings. Nowadays, many sources for practice opportunities are made available to the learners, especially in the Computer Science (CS) and programming domain. They may choose to utilize these opportunities to self-assess their learning progress and practice their skill. My objective in this thesis is to understand to what extent self-assess process can impact novice programmers learning and what advanced learning technologies can I provide to enhance the learner’s outcome and the progress. In this dissertation, I conducted a series of studies to investigate learning analytics and students’ behaviors in working on self-assessments and reflection opportunities. To enable this objective, I designed a personalized learning platform named QuizIT that provides daily quizzes to support learners in the computer science domain. QuizIT adopts an Open Social Student Model (OSSM) that supports personalized learning and serves as a self-assessment system. It aims to ignite self-regulating behavior and engage students in the self-assessment and reflective procedure. I designed and integrated the personalized practice recommender to the platform to investigate the self-assessment process. I also evaluated the self-assessment behavioral trails as a predictor to the students’ performance. The statistical indicators suggested that the distributed reflections were associated with the learner's performance. I proceeded to address whether distributed reflections enable self-regulating behavior and lead to better learning in CS introductory courses. From the student interactions with the system, I found distinct behavioral patterns that showed early signs of the learners' performance trajectory. The utilization of the personalized recommender improved the student’s engagement and performance in the self-assessment procedure. When I focused on enhancing reflections impact during self-assessment sessions through weekly opportunities, the learners in the CS domain showed better self-regulating learning behavior when utilizing those opportunities. The weekly reflections provided by the learners were able to capture more reflective features than the daily opportunities. Overall, this dissertation demonstrates the effectiveness of the learning technologies, including adaptive recommender and reflection, to support novice programming learners and their self-assessing processes.

Research suggests there is no significant difference in outcomes for online learners and on-campus learners. Several decades of online learning have also consistently demonstrated online students are less likely to persist than those students attending on campus. The Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework describes social presence, teaching presence, and cognitive presence as components of a quality online learning experience, and research links these three constructs to student retention. Using the lens of the CoI framework, this mixed methods action research study sought to increase social presence and teaching presence in asynchronous online courses at Davenport University using embedded video feedback mechanisms, in support of student persistence and retention. The Community of Inquiry survey instrument was used to quantitatively measure the changes in social presence and teaching presence between courses with and without the video feedback mechanisms. Qualitative research interviews were conducted to probe for meaning and a greater understanding of both student and instructor experiences in the courses. Results of the study indicated small but significant gains in teaching presence, but other quantitative measures showed no changes with the introduction of the videos. Qualitative analysis suggests that students who watched the instructor videos reported higher levels of teaching presence for several subconstructs of teaching presence and social presence. However, the qualitative analysis also suggested that many students did not watch the instructor videos, and thus did not benefit from any increased presence. Student discussion response videos yielded similar results qualitatively, with benefits demonstrated by those students who watched the videos but none by those who abstained.

Typical programming languages involve complex syntax and structure which can be daunting to first-time programmers. Particularly, elementary-age students may not be able to understand the relationship between a mathematical-looking program and its output. Thus, I created Engram, which teaches both English syntax as well as a version of typical functional programming language syntax. Young English speakers can learn Engram to familiarize themselves with simple English sentence structure and critical programming concepts. This project has three parts: a parser & compiler, an Integrated Developer Environment (IDE) for the compiler, and lesson plans. The lexer, parser, and compiler were created using the C++ programming language. The IDE was created using C#, .NET Framework, and Windows Forms.