Over the last decade, policymakers have been experimenting with competency-based education, an instructional reform that relies on flexible pacing to enable students to achieve content mastery at their own pace. In this paper, we draw on mixed-methods data from teacher surveys and interviews to examine the use of flexible instructional pacing in…

Purpose: This study investigated the effects of previous exhaustive upper body exercise on performance and neuromuscular fatigue following a 4-km cycling time-trial (4-km TT). Methods: Eight recreational cyclists performed a 4-km TT with (ARM[subscript PRE]) or without (CONTR) a previous arm-crank maximal incremental test. In each experimental…

The University of North Georgia's division of Distance Education & Technology Integration, DETI, developed a series of self-paced workshops to assist faculty in professional development as a response to faculty inquiries and the pandemic. The pandemic changed the way we look at our professional development opportunities. DETI concluded that we…

Higher education institutions have recently increased the number of online courses offered to students. A need exists to understand student success within asynchronous self-paced online education programs. This study explores the factors that impact student success in the Independent Study Program (iStudy) at the University of Mississippi,…

Adult education instructors are as diverse as the students they teach. Their professional backgrounds, training, licenses, and modalities of teaching (online, in person, open vs. closed enrollment, etc.) vary widely, which can make the planning of meaningful, effective professional development challenging. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a…

Background: Mind wandering--that is, a shift in the contents of thought away from an ongoing task--can have detrimental consequences for students' reading comprehension. To date, no evidence is available on the effects of text-to-speech solutions on rates of mind wandering during reading. Objectives: The study aimed to evaluate the effects of…

Purpose: Stuttering is characterized by intermittent speech disfluencies, which are dramatically reduced when speakers synchronize their speech with a steady beat. The goal of this study was to characterize the neural underpinnings of this phenomenon using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Method: Data were collected from 16 adults who…

Temporarily ambiguous sentences that are disambiguated in favor of a less preferred parse are read more slowly than their unambiguous counterparts. This slowdown is referred to as a "garden path effect." Recent self-paced reading studies have found that this effect decreased over the course of the experiment as participants were exposed…

This study aimed to develop and validate a scale of agentic engagement in massive open online courses (MOOCs). Initially, 14 items were derived through a literature review, from which 7 items were drawn through a Delphi survey. Sample sets were used to develop and confirm the constructs of the new scale proposed in this study. To examine…

This dissertation is about implicit prosody, the prosodic structure that readers assign during silent reading. The dissertation has several goals: determining which reading tasks are appropriate for studying implicit prosody, establishing how grammatical principles could guide incremental assignment of prosodic structure, and investigating how…

The existing literature on study time allocation has primarily focused on how people regulate their study time allocation across different items and conditions. However, these studies rarely investigated how self-regulated study time allocation affects later retention. In this review, the effectiveness of self-regulated study time allocation on…

The MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) forum carries rich discussion data that contains multi-level cognition-related behavior patterns, which brings the potential for an in-depth investigation into the development trend of the group and individual cognitive presence in discourse interaction. This paper describes a study conducted in the context…

The pandemic prompted Courtney Lewis and her fellow school librarians to dig deep and acknowledge that their information literacy instruction followed a just-in-time philosophy. Essentially, limited just-in-time information literacy instruction is like teaching a kid how to play soccer for seven days out of each year and expecting them to be a…

Pacing guides are commonplace yet controversial in American public schools. For teachers who question their usefulness, one means to circumvent them is to exercise autonomy in pedagogical decision-making, though doing so comes with challenges. Through interviews, we examined how 87 gifted and general education 4th and 5th grade math and…

This paper introduces a project to develop a digital academic writing tool at Leeds Beckett University (LBU). Essay X-ray is an interactive online tool designed to help students get to grips with the structure and style of academic writing and was developed using the Articulate Storyline 360 platform. The aim was to expand LBU's academic skills…