Literacy skills are fundamental for all learners. For students who require augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), strong literacy skills provide a gateway to generative communication, genuine social networking, improved access to academic opportunities, access to information technology and future employment opportunities. However, many…

This study examined vocabulary acquisition of elementary students in grades kindergarten through fifth in one rural New Mexico school. The school had 277 students. Hispanic students comprised nearly 80% of the student body. All students received free lunch and breakfast. The 65 students who participated in the study were assessed using the…

This research investigated the role of implicit science beliefs in the gender gap in science aspirations and achievement, with the goal of testing identification with a female role model as a potential intervention strategy for increasing women's representation in science careers. At Time 1, women's implicit science stereotyping (i.e., associating…

This dissertation examined the perspectives of New Jersey public school special education administrators on factors that influenced their decision to use or not use applied behavior analysis (ABA), an educational methodology, for their in-district programs serving children with autism. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention has called…

As a group, children with hearing loss demonstrate delays in language development relative to their peers with normal hearing. Early intervention has a profound impact on language outcomes in children with hearing loss. Data examining the relationship between degree of hearing loss and language outcomes are variable. Two approaches are used in the…

This research explores the role of affect in the domain of human wayfinding by asking if increased motivation will alter the performance across various routes of increasing complexity. Participants were asked to perform certain navigation tasks within an indoor Virtual Reality (VR) environment under either motivated and not-motivated instructions.…

Colleges and universities have embraced the importance of community engagement, not only as a tool for student development but also, as a responsibility of the institution to address societal needs and problems. Research is lacking, however, on how institutions with varying missions, histories and cultures perceive their role in the community,…

Most approaches to argument realization in English are grounded in lexical semantic structure. While it is widely acknowledged that there is an intimate relationship between information structure and grammatical relations such as "subject," there have been few attempts to formalize this observation. This dissertation proposes an "interface model…

This study examined whether a quality professional development course, "Infusing Technology", influenced the use of technology by elementary and middle school teachers in West Virginia. "Infusing Technology" was designed to help school-based team learning communities use technology in their instruction while engaging students in critical thinking,…

The phenomenological study explored the lived experiences and perceptions of a purposive sample of 20 IT professionals (managers, engineers, administrators, and analysts) in the state of Virginia, Texas, and Washington DC. The focus of this research study was to learn the perceptions of IT professionals who are or once were in a decision-making…

The problem addressed in this study focused on the need for more qualitative data on student learning in religious education. The purpose of this collective case study was to discover how BYU-Idaho religion students learn best and to better understand what factors positively and negatively influence their learning. Twelve individual students…

As educational reform looks at students achieving national standards in reading, much of the educational research that has been conducted has been on students in general education settings. Most research conducted on special education students typically does not focus on students classified with autism, and what research is done on these students…

The technological generation gap is a societal phenomenon that also reaches into school classrooms. Typically when the generation gap in technology is discussed it puts students on one side of the gap and teachers on the other, with a clear demarcation implied based on age and assumed experience. This assumption does not account for the emergence…

Evolutionary and revolutionary approaches have dominated the study of scientific, technological and institutional change. Yet, being focused on change within a single field, these approaches have been mute about a third, pervasive process. This process is found in a variety of cases that range from open source software to the Monte Carlo method to…

Online learning offers institutions a competitive advantage provided that faculty members are receptive and supportive of the mission and direction. Traditional faculty members' apprehension and stress comes from the transition to online teaching responsibilities and the oversight of instructional designers and administrators in supporting online…