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Writing proper English sentences poses a significant challenge for Arabic-speaking postsecondary students studying English as a Foreign Language (EFL) due to substantial differences between Arabic and English syntactic structures. This basic qualitative study explored the perceptions of Arabic-speaking EFL learners at an Arabian university regarding the challenges they faced in mastering English sentence structure, especially after analyzing errors in their written assignments. The conceptual framework for the study used Corder's error analysis model and Selinker's interlingual theory to guide students in revising their errors. The research questions focused on students' perceptions of learning English sentence structure and identifying syntactic errors in their writing. Data were collected through interviews with 10 Arabic-speaking English majors at an Arabian university and analyzed using thematic analysis, including NVivo coding of students' responses and second-level category coding. The findings were verified for trustworthiness through member checking and detailed descriptions. Results indicated that Arabic-speaking EFL learners struggle with English sentence structure due to grammatical differences between Arabic and English, causing anxiety and reduced confidence. Common errors included incorrect verb tenses, punctuation, and word order, often due to direct translation. Learners employed digital tools, self-reviews, and instructor feedback to overcome these issues, underscoring the need for educational methods tailored to these linguistic challenges. These findings could foster positive social change by enhancing English mastery for academic and professional success. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Intelligence tests have been used in the United States since the early 1900s for assessing soldiers during World War I (Kaufman & Harrison, 2008; White & Hall, 1980). Presently, cognitive assessments are used in school, civil service, military, clinical, and industry settings (White & Hall, 1980). Although the results of these assessments can significantly impact an individual, a large number of administration and scoring errors occur. The rate of errors is so high that researchers have called errors in assessment "the norm" (Oak et al., 2019). Many evaluators are trained in intelligence assessment via their graduate school training. This study focused on the errors graduate students commit on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Fifth Edition (WISC-V) and Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV). The researcher examined WISC-V and WAIS-IV protocols from masters' and doctoral students to determine if there are differences in errors between the groups. Additionally, the study reviewed the trickle-down errors made by graduate students on the WISC-V and WAIS-IV. Results suggest that master's student commit more initial item-level and trickle-down errors than doctoral students. The error pattern for initial raw, scaled, and standard score errors is similar based on degree program. One error has the potential to cause an average of 3-5 trickle-down errors. No index score was immune from graduate student errors. The FSIQ was altered by up to 62 points. Graduate training programs, graduate students, and practitioners should make efforts to reduce errors in their administration and scoring procedures. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Discourse markers (DMs) are linguistic forms characterized by their use as conversation organizers or pause fillers (Fox Tree, 2010). Although used frequently in both speech and writing, DMs are not often taught in L2 classrooms, despite incorrect usage causing potential misunderstandings (Polat, 2011). Additionally, L2 learners have been observed employing DMs in their L2 either incorrectly or not at all (Vazquez Veiga, 2016). Notably, DMs used in L2 Spanish incorrectly are often false cognates with English DMs (Vazquez Veiga, 2016).This dissertation explores how speaker language similarity affects how "appropriately" first language (L1) French and English speakers use DMs in Spanish, their second language (L2), specifically to determine if the effects of false cognates are equally as present with typologically similar languages. In addition, this dissertation aims to determine if teaching DMs in a Spanish course can mitigate misunderstandings caused by inappropriate use and create more cohesiveness. This is measured by testing if a lesson on Spanish DMs is beneficial to students' performance on written assessments in a Spanish course. Both facets of this dissertation are carried out in two related, yet distinct studies.Using two learner corpora, L1 (French or English), cognate status, and proficiency level, as well as age and gender, as these can create differences in the frequency and patterning of DM use (Troncoso, 2022), were used to code data from the "Corpus Escrito del Espanol L2" (Lozano, 2022) and the "Corpus de Aprendices de Espanol" (Rojo & Palacios, 2016). To determine which of these has the most influence on DM appropriateness, statistical analyses were performed in RStudio (RStudio Team, 2020). Data suggest that while L1 and cognate status are important factors in determining whether a learner of Spanish will use a DM appropriately, a general linear model found that the only statistically significant predictor of DM use was proficiency level (p < 0.05), where less proficient speakers had fewer appropriate uses of DMs. This suggests that proficiency level is more influential than L1 similarity, but more data are needed to solidify this claim. I recruited participants from two sections of a fourth-semester, intermediate-level Spanish course at a university in New York State to test the second goal of this dissertation. One section served as a control group, and the other as an experimental group. Both groups took an identical pretest, and the experimental group received an explicit lesson on Spanish DMs that I designed. After, both groups took an identical posttest, which was a written assessment. Observations from the participants' responses suggest a positive correlation between the lesson on DMs, DM use, and performance on the assessment. However, statistical analysis did not yield any significant results. Therefore, more data are needed to make a definitive claim on whether teaching DMs can positively increase student performance in L2 (Spanish) classes.This dissertation offers considerations for how students acquire DMs in L2 Spanish, as well as implications for including them as language taught in an L2 Spanish class. Although no definitive claims can be made, this dissertation aims to contribute to discussions in the field about whether instructors should include DMs in world language curricula. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Personality has been found to have significant connections to language. Ranging from impacting narrative style, to informing expectations about others based on linguistic factors such as accent, personality affects both language comprehension and production (Oberlander & Gill, 2004; Van den Brink et al., 2012). However, research in this area primarily focuses on offline measures. Online measures, such as EEG or pupillometry, have not been included until recently. Pupillometry, which involves measuring the size of the pupil, is considered a reliable indicator of cognitive effort during language comprehension. Hubert-Lyall and Jarvikivi are unique in their research studying the possible relationship between personality and online language comprehension due to their use of pupillometry (Hubert & Jarvikivi, 2019; Hubert-Lyall & Jarvikivi, 2021). They showed that several of the Big Five personality traits are related to the processing of errors during language comprehension. Unfortunately, theoretical explanations of the language-personality link are undeveloped. One theory, presented by Hubert and Jarvikivi (2019) and Jimenes-Ortega et. al. (2022) posits that perhaps for Neuroticism, anxiety may be the connecting factor between personality traits and language comprehension. The current studies had two goals. First, we aimed to replicate the findings of Hubert-Lyall and Jarvikivi (2021) using the same methodology but in a new population and culture. Second, we aimed to address a more specific hypothesis -- does Anxiety, through its connection to Neuroticism, predict cognitive load in response to errors in sentences? Overall, we found mixed results. While we did not replicate the findings from Hubert-Lyall and Jarvikivi (2021), nor did our results replicate from our own Experiment 1 to Experiment 2, we did find possible support for the connection between anxiety and language processing. However, it does not seem as though anxiety alone can account for the Neuroticism x language comprehension connection. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Medication administration errors (MAEs) present a significant risk for harm to patients and healthcare providers alike, yet little is understood about how nursing students conceptualize MAEs. Similar risks for harm are faced in the aviation industry, yet they have transformed into a highly reliable organization (HRO) using the threat and error management (TEM) framework. The purpose of this study was to apply concepts of the TEM framework to MAEs and identify what students believed to be threats, threat management interventions, errors, and error management interventions in the process of medication administration. Nursing students have not yet entered the professional practice environment and must be competent for safe practice upon their arrival. This qualitative study utilized semi-structured interviews. Participants were in their final year of nursing school. IRB approval was obtained. Participant responses reflected the trends of current nursing literature. More emphasis was placed on validating medication rights, utilizing technology, and following hospital policy and procedures. Little attention was given to medication dosage calculation, their lack of experience contributing to errors, or using a second nurse to validate a drug before administration. Participants expressed concern about a lack of exposure to errors while in school. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This study explores using transfer learning in machine learning for natural language processing (NLP) to create generic automated essay scoring (AES) models, providing instant online scoring for statewide writing assessments in K-12 education. The goal is to develop an instant online scorer that is generalizable to any prompt, addressing the current limitations of online writing practice tests for operational assessments, such as those for statewide writing assessment (SWAS). The study leverages Google's BERT, a state-of-the-art NLP transfer learning AI product, to train and build generic essay scoring models which are based on statistical ground of ordinal logistic regression (OLR) via machine learning. Three groups were analyzed: a control group with no additional pre-training, a group further pre-trained on 12,970 ASAP essays (in-domain materials), and a group further pre-trained on 500 SWAS essays (within-task materials). Models were trained with 9th- and 11th-grade SWAS essays and evaluated on 10th-grade essays. Model evaluation metrics included Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK), Mean Absolute Errors (MAEs), accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. Results indicated that further pre-training does not necessarily enhance scoring performance. The control group often matched or exceeded the SWAS pre-trained group. In all three groups, the scoring patterns of Language Use are consistent, while the ASAP pre-trained group excelled in scoring the Prompt Task trait. These findings highlight the importance of the pre-training materials' quality and indicate that further pre-training does not necessarily improve model performance for distinct downstream tasks. Future research should use balanced datasets with more essay prompts and explore different experimental designs to find the prerequisites of further pre-training to improve the AES model performance. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Many U.S. students possess only a weak knowledge of fraction arithmetic. I hypothesize that textbooks are a critical reason for students' poor performance on fraction arithmetic. This is not because of what textbooks contain but rather because of what they lack. Distributions of fraction arithmetic problems in textbooks are imbalanced, with certain types of problems almost never presented (Braithwaite et al., 2017). As a result, students often err when they attempt to solve those rare types of problems (Siegler & Pyke, 2013). Two experiments, a pilot study (n = 40 students in grades 5 through 7) and a larger study (n = 127 students in grades 6 and 7), were conducted. These experiments utilized a pretest-intervention-posttest design to empirically test the benefits of providing either a complement of the typical textbook distribution of problems (hyperbalanced practice) or an equal distribution of problems (balanced practice) compared to the benefits of providing a practice set that followed the typical distribution found in math textbooks. A MANCOVA and follow-up ANCOVAs revealed significant differences between students in the textbook condition and students in the balanced and hyperbalanced conditions. For items involving adding fractions with unequal denominators, students who received typical textbook practice showed greater improvement and made fewer strategy errors than students who received hyperbalanced practice. For items involving multiplying two fractions with equal denominators, the opposite was true. Students who received hyperbalanced practice showed greater improvement and made fewer strategy errors than students who received typical textbook practice on items involving multiplying two fractions with equal denominators. Finally, students who received fully balanced practice showed greater improvement and made fewer strategy errors than students who received typical textbook practice on problems involving multiplying one whole number and one fraction. This last finding was of particular interest since none of the practice conditions included practice with that item type. The results of this study demonstrate that even a brief intervention in which students received extra practice with rare item types could improve performance. It also showed that gains in one type of item often resulted in decrements in others, which must be considered when making recommendations to textbook publishers and educators. In sum, this dissertation seeks to make a scholarly contribution to the field by discussing the role that textbooks play in student performance and by analyzing the benefits of supplementing typical textbook instruction with differently balanced fraction arithmetic practice. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Second language (L2) writing has been determined to be influenced by what is read, with language learners tending to borrow words and short phrases from input texts while writing (e.g., Wang & Wang, 2015). This phenomenon is referred to as lexical alignment. Only one empirical study has investigated the influence that the linguistic complexity of reading materials has on L2 written alignment. Peng et al. (2020) found that reading more linguistically complex materials resulted in significantly lower reading comprehension scores, yet it had no significant influence on lexical alignment. Peng et al.'s study also found that participants who had read the simpler version of a text tended to write more words than those who had read the more complex text. While researchers have hypothesized that cognitive individual difference variables may influence L2 written alignment (Wang et al., 2021), no research has empirically investigated the influence that working memory or language aptitude may have on L2 written alignment. This dissertation study builds on existing alignment research by investigating the influence that linguistic complexity of a read text has on L2 written alignment in an integrated writing task, as well as whether and how reading comprehension, working memory, and language aptitude covary and interact with what is read and what is written. Reading comprehension was measured using a 15-question multiple choice test. Working memory was assessed using a 75-item operation span test (Li & Roshan, 2019). Language aptitude was evaluated using individual LLAMA subtest scores (Meara & Rogers, 2019). One hundred thirty-four Colombian undergraduate students majoring in foreign language education were recruited from their English language courses. Participants were assigned to one of three groups using block random assignment to ensure that all groups shared similar English language proficiency. Treatment across groups varied by the lexical sophistication, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity of the text they were assigned to read as part of an integrated writing task. One treatment group read a text that was modified to be linguistically similar to texts encountered in their English textbooks and participants in another treatment group read a simplified version of the text. The control group read a Spanish translation of the simpler text. Participants in all three groups completed a reading comprehension test and then wrote their responses to a prompt relevant to the reading topic. Participants' writing was evaluated for alignment, syntactic complexity, accuracy, lexical complexity, and fluency (CALF). Each of these components of participants' writing was compared using ANCOVA analyses with interaction effects to determine whether and how covariates influenced participants' L2 writing differently in the three conditions. Results indicated that significant alignment occurred in both treatment groups, with 98-99% of the words produced by participants also appearing in the text they had read. No significant between-group differences in alignment or CALF were uncovered. Reading comprehension was found to be a significant predictor of all three measures of accuracy employed in this study. Working memory significantly interacted with the grouping variable with higher working memory scores corresponding with higher alignment in the simple treatment condition and lower alignment in the complex treatment condition. LLAMA D, the aptitude subtest associated with listening for new words, had a significant and negative main effect on error rates in participants' writing, therefore positively influencing written lexical, morphosyntactic, and overall accuracy. LLAMA E by group interaction approaching significance was also uncovered pertaining to written fluency, indicating that participants with higher scores on the sounds and symbols aptitude test who had read the simple version of the test had significantly greater fluency than their peers who shared a similar aptitude score but read the text in Spanish, the participants' L1. LLAMA F, a measure of grammatical inferencing abilities, was a significant negative predictor of lexical and overall error rates. Findings are discussed with consideration for previous alignment research and theories of language learning. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This study examines the impact of the College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP) on upper-elementary students' first draft writing quality, addressing the challenges teachers face in providing timely and effective feedback on extensive student writing, particularly in spelling, grammar, mechanics, and cohesion. The hypothesis posits that C3WP resources will improve students' writing by enhancing lexical cohesion and reducing surface-level errors. Four 6th-grade students with varying reading proficiency levels participated in two C3WP mini-units over a two-month period. First drafts were analyzed using the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Text Cohesion (TAACO) to measure semantic overlap and lexical cohesion, alongside error rates in spelling, grammar, mechanics, and punctuation. Results showed significant improvements in semantic overlap and lexical cohesion, with increased scores in binary adjacent and two-sentence overlaps, and repeated content lemmas (the base form of a word as it appears in a dictionary, used for analysis in linguistics and lexicography). Error analysis revealed a notable reduction in spelling and capitalization errors across all proficiency levels, although grammar and some mechanics errors increased slightly due to more complex writing tasks. The findings indicate that C3WP resources effectively enhance the quality of first draft writing by promoting better coherence and reducing surface-level errors. These results suggest that the program can significantly improve writing skills, providing valuable insights for educators seeking to adopt innovative instructional methods. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This phenomenological study's objective was to review the existing initiatives for cybersecurity awareness and training that are in place for the K-12 education system throughout the United States. Every facet of life is now plagued by the potential, perceived, and real threat of cyber warfare, which includes, but is not limited to, K-12 schools throughout the United States. Massive cascading effects result from cybersecurity breaches, and some are so severe that the targeted organization is forced to shut down. The digital anatomy of these massive hacks' origins is sometimes overlooked in their context. Even if they have the best intrusion detection technologies in place, public and private sectors continue to experience cybersecurity breaches, as reported throughout endless news headlines. In actuality, the human factor, the most disregarded factor of all, is what is widely considered to be the culprit within many of these sophisticated and highly targeted hacks. Cybersecurity training and awareness is a valuable investment for any public or private organization to have. The K-12 system has technological safeguards in place which will continue to evolve over time. The human element will continue to evolve as well, as will the anatomy of a well-orchestrated hack. Even if it is not part of their specific work tasks, staff training is crucial for increasing awareness amongst employees and motivating them to pay close attention to cyberthreats and countermeasures. Cyberattacks often involve human errors, so proper cybersecurity training is crucial for effective security. A security awareness training program enhances employees' cybersecurity awareness, equips them with skills to identify security hazards, and teaches problem escalation. This study highlighted the importance of cybersecurity e-learning solutions within any organization. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

A critical aspect of reading fluently is the ability to respond to sight words quickly and accurately. Current interventions for sight word fluency include flashcards and taped words (TW). While effective, these interventions require extensive personnel resources and one-on-one implementation. This study evaluates a group-wide intervention, the Monitoring While Reading Game (MWRG), that uses modeling, repeated practice, and error detection strategies. The intervention was implemented across four heterogenous 2nd grade students. Results provide preliminary support for the MWRG as a small-group intervention and utility of error detection as a measure of integrity. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The purpose of this mixed methods study was to investigate the implementation of a researcher-created numberless word problem instructional unit designed to introduce second-grade students to word problems in the semantic category of "compare with the word more, smaller unknown." The 10-day instructional unit incorporated three elements: the numberless word problem routine, purposeful questions in five categories, and a six-step framework that included the use of a bar model to visually represent the quantities in a problem. Data were collected from 27 second-grade students using a six-question pretest and posttest that included three word problems in the "compare with the word more, smaller unknown" category and three word problems in the "compare with the word more, bigger unknown" category. Mean scores increased from 2.96 (pretest) to 3.78 (posttest) and the number of correctly solved problems increased in both semantic categories. An error analysis determined that operational errors (e.g., using addition instead of subtraction) were the most frequent errors present but the frequency of those decreased on the posttest. Students showed an increase from the pretest to the posttest in their use of a bar model to solve word problems. A paired-samples t test revealed a statistical significance (t (26) = 3.11, p < 0.01, Cohen's d = 0.599). [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Differential reinforcement of other behavior (DRO) is a reinforcement schedule that commonly includes the delivery of a reinforcer following an interval during which a target behavior did not occur and extinction (i.e., the reinforcer is withheld following any instances of the target behavior). Although interventions using DRO schedules can decrease target behavior when implemented as designed, little is known about the efficacy of DRO interventions when they include fidelity errors. A growing field of literature has demonstrated different ways fidelity errors can affect the outcomes of other interventions (e.g., DRA, response cost, and skill acquisition). One study by Foreman et al. (2023) evaluated how commission errors may change the efficacy of DRO interventions in a human-operant arrangement with college students. For three participants, DRO lost its efficacy at 60% fidelity or lower. However, DRO remained effective in maintaining low rates of target responding at as low as 20% fidelity for the remaining three participants. These results suggest that DRO may have robust effects with commission errors for some but may vary across individuals or other factors. The study of the effects of omission errors during DRO is largely missing from current research. Additionally, the effects of fidelity errors during DRO have not yet been studied in a design arranged to identify potential order effects. Experiment 1 examined effects of DRO implemented with various percentages (100%, 80%, 60%) of fidelity with commission errors in a human-operant arrangement. Experiment 2 systematically replicated Experiment 1 with omission errors. During both experiments, points were delivered contingent on the target response (mouse clicks on a moving circle) during baseline phases, and points were delivered contingent on the absence of the target response during phases with DRO implemented with 100% fidelity. In Experiment 1, DRO was implemented with 60% and 80% fidelity with commission errors, during which DRO was implemented with points delivered on a probabilistic basis contingent on the target response. In Experiment 2, DRO was implemented with 60% and 80% fidelity with omission errors, during which point deliveries according to the DRO schedule were omitted on a probabilistic basis. The results from Experiment 1 suggest that commission errors are detrimental to DRO schedules for some, resulting in increased response rates that often exceeded the levels of responding observed during baseline. Additionally, participants exposed to ascending percentages of fidelity first engaged in more frequent increases in responding during degraded-fidelity phases than participants exposed to the descending percentages of fidelity first. The results from Experiment 2 suggest that omission errors degrade the effects of DRO at 60% fidelity for some, such that response rates increase compared to DRO with 100% fidelity; however, even when responding was elevated during these phases, response rates remained lower than those during baseline phases. The results of the current experiments provide preliminary support for recommendations regarding DRO implementation, training, and fidelity reporting. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Singular "they" is becoming increasingly common and accepted, but many people find it difficult to learn, instead making seemingly-counterintuitive errors like "she uses they/them pronouns." Existing pronoun production models argue that speakers select pronouns based on morphosyntactic information associated with a name, or based on semantic/conceptual knowledge about a person. However, learning to use singular "they" may require a change in production processes. The first three experiments argue for a model where speakers may instead need to retrieve information from episodic memory about a person's stated pronouns or which pronouns other speakers use to refer to them. Experiment 1 establishes a measure for how people learn to associate pronouns with a person, and how they use this information to select which pronouns to produce. Experiment 2 investigates how providing people with information about why paying attention to gendered language is important and how seeing singular "they" modeled can support memory for and production of singular "they." Experiment 3 moves from written to spoken production, testing how including pronouns on nametags and in introductions--common EDI recommendations--affects pronoun choice. Experiment 4 investigates online comprehension, using the visual world paradigm to characterize how singular "they" is being integrated into existing processing mechanisms. The results demonstrate that people can learn that someone uses they/them after only brief introductions, and that a PSA, including pronouns on nametags, and including pronouns in introductions can support accurate production of singular "they." These findings help extend processing models to account for a wider range of people's language use and contribute to evidence-based best practices for creating gender-inclusive environments. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The ability to identify errors by sight and sound--commonly referred to as "error detection"--is a musical ability needed in a variety of music professions. Instructors of undergraduate aural-skills courses often agree that strong error-detection skills are an essential outcome of these courses; however, error-detection activities are given little attention in the most widely used aural-skills textbooks and web-enabled resources, and so they are likely to be omitted from assessment in aural-skills courses. This disparity between the belief that error detection is an important musical ability and the lack of instructional focus on this ability in aural-skills courses raises the following pedagogical question: Why do instructors of aural skills consider error detection to be an essential skill but seem to not provide direct training of this skill in their courses? This dissertation evaluates the learning objectives of the undergraduate aural-skills curriculum and considers the role that error detection plays in serving those objectives. To accomplish this goal, I frame my research around the following questions: What skills do instructors want undergraduate students to learn in aural-skills courses, and how do they teach those skills? The focus of many curricula seems to be on final "products" such as a completely accurate aural dictation, but music also involves many examples of real-time "processes": listening, composing, performing, improvising, and so forth. Although the act of taking down a dictation includes many processes, and there are products of error detection, I argue that the focus of dictation is more about the total product of these musical processes whereas the focus of error detection is more about refining essential musical processes and therefore deserves more attention in aural-skills assessment. To demonstrate the myriad ways that error detection can be incorporated at all levels in the undergraduate aural-skills curriculum, I present several examples of lower-order thinking skills (LOTS)-based and higher-order thinking skills (HOTS)-based activities. As well, I offer a proposed outline of an undergraduate aural-skills curriculum that incorporates these activities, and I conclude with opportunities for future research. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The effects of fluency-based instruction and accuracy-based instruction on contingency adduction were assessed using an alternating treatments design. Stimulus equivalence tasks were used to measure contingency adduction. Stimulus classes were composed of arbitrary visual forms. One treatment condition consisted of teaching fast, fluent responding with mastery criteria that included both accuracy and speed. This condition provided learning experiences similar to those encountered when receiving precision teaching or fluency-based instruction. The other treatment condition consisted of teaching in a manner that required slow, constrained responding, with a mastery criterion that only included accuracy. This condition provided learning experiences similar to those encountered in a traditional classroom educational setting. After mastery criteria were met in either condition, contingency adduction was tested. The dependent variables were number of errors prior to contingency adduction, average errors by adduction complexity, total time in teaching trials prior to adduction, number of teaching blocks prior to mastery of adduction relation, number of adduction testing blocks prior to mastery, number of relations mastered in the first adduction testing block, and number of errors in adduction testing blocks prior to mastery. Results indicated that participants made more errors prior to contingency adduction in fluency-based teaching than in accuracy-based teaching. However, participants also took less total time in teaching trials prior to contingency adduction in fluency-based teaching than in accuracy-based teaching. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The purpose of the current dissertation is to map the relationships between first language (L1), writing quality, and syntactic complexity, accuracy, lexical complexity, and fluency (CALF) in second language (L2) writing. CALF are characteristics of language production that have been of significant interest in L2 writing research for the past few decades. Though they have been extensively studied as dependent variables that may vary as a function of other factors, they have been rarely studied together, much less in relation to L1 as an independent variable. Thus, this study explored the effects of L1 and writing quality, operationalized as score levels, on all four dimensions of CALF and the predictive power of CALF measures on writing quality. Adopting a quantitative, corpus-based approach, I collected 1,683 essays from the Educational Testing Service (ETS) Corpus of Non-Native Written English (TOEFL11) for analysis. The corpus is comprised of essays written by speakers of 11 non-English native languages (Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Telugu, and Turkish) as part of an international test of academic English proficiency -- TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). The selected essays were controlled for topic and collapsed into three score levels: low, medium, and high. They were automatically processed for 14 syntactic complexity measures, five lexical complexity measures, and one fluency measure using different automated tools. Approximately 20% (329 essays) were hand-coded for six accuracy measures. Statistical tests revealed that there were significant differences between L1s in most CALF measures in all score levels. Text length (W/Tx) was found to differentiate score levels in all L1s. Other relatively consistent indicators of score levels across L1s are the total number of errors and lexical diversity measures such as the index of lexical diversity (D) and the measure of textual lexical diversity (MTLD). Multinominal regression models output mean length of sentence (MLS), the number of coordinate phrases per clause (CP/C), lexical density (LD), MTLD, lexical sophistication (LS1), and W/Tx as predictors of high-quality writing. Overall, results showed that CALF measures varied significantly across L1 backgrounds and score levels with several measures being predictive of the writing quality of a heterogenous group of L2 writers. These findings suggest that CALF should be examined together when assessing L2 writing and that L1 background is an important factor to consider when studying CALF in L2 writing. It is also necessary to tailor L2 instruction and assessment to address the unique challenges learners from different L1s face. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

We examined spelling errors patterns, cohesive ties, and syntax features in English and Spanish essays written by Spanish-English emergent bilinguals in Grades 1, 2, and 3 (N = 278; 51% female) enrolled in either English immersion or English-Spanish dual immersion programs. In Study 1, we addressed whether students made consistent spelling errors that could be due to crosslinguistic influence, and whether these spelling errors differed by grade level, English learner status, and instructional program while controlling for free and reduced lunch status. Spelling errors potentially due to crosslinguistic influence were coded. We found that students tended to make crosslinguistic errors only in one language and not in the other language (i.e., either Spanish-influenced errors in English or English-influenced errors in Spanish). Students in the dual immersion program made more Spanish-influenced spelling errors in English compositions while students in the English immersion program made more English influenced spelling errors in Spanish compositions. Students in higher grades made less Spanish influenced spelling errors in English compositions than students in lower grades. In Study 2, we investigated whether syntax features (mean length of utterance, number of verbs, subject agreement words, and subject agreement words accurately conjugated) differed by grade level, English learner status, and instructional program while controlling for free and reduced lunch status, whether syntax features in one language predicted its counterpart measure in the other language, and whether syntax features were related to writing quality within languages. Essays by students in Grades 2 and 3 had longer utterances, more verbs, and greater accuracy than Grade 1. Mean length of utterances and subject agreement accuracy were significantly associated with its counterpart in the other language, respectively. Syntax features were related to quality, but the magnitude of relations differed by English learner status and instructional program. Finally, in Study 3, we explored whether reference, conjunction, and lexical ties measured by quantity and accuracy were predicted crosslinguistically by counterparts in the other language, whether they differed by grade level, English learner status, and instructional program while controlling for free and reduced lunch status, and whether they were related to essay quality within and across languages. Students in Grades 2 and 3 used a greater number of cohesive ties and more accurately than Grade 1, English learners used fewer cohesive ties in English and Spanish essays than non-English learners, and dual immersion students wrote a greater number and more accurate Spanish cohesive ties than English immersion students whereas the opposite was found for English immersion students and English essays. Reference and lexical ties predicted writing quality within each language, and English cohesive ties predicted Spanish writing quality. Taken together, these results suggest that spelling errors by emergent bilinguals in primary grades are associated with instructional program and English learner status, which is related to spelling in the other language, and that written syntax features and cohesive ties predict writing quality for Spanish-English emergent bilinguals in primary grades. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Paradigms with conflicting data patterns can be difficult to learn, resulting in acquisition error. In this dissertation, I look at how paradigms are reanalyzed over time to gain insight into the factors that influence morphophonological learning. Existing models of morphophonology (e.g. Hare & Elman 1995; Albright 2002b,a, 2010) predict reanalysis to be frequency-matching, occurring in a way that matches probabilistic distributions within the paradigm. I propose that in fact, reanalysis responds to two factors: both frequency-matching and a bias towards less marked outputs. Additionally, markedness effects in reanalysis are argued to be restricted to so-called 'active' markedness effects, which are already present in the language as stem phonotactics. I present three case studies, all from Austronesian languages, where reanalysis is arguably sensitive to a markedness bias, and confirm this by implementing a quantitative model of reanalysis. This model, outlined in Chapter 2, simulates the cumulative effect of reanalyses over time with an iterated learning paradigm. In each iteration, learning is modeled using Maximum Entropy Harmonic Grammar (MaxEnt; Smolensky 1986; Goldwater & Johnson 2003), with a markedness bias implemented as a Gaussian prior (Wilson 2006). The three studies are presented in Chapters 3-5. All three cases involve paradigms where there is ambiguity in how the suffixed forms will surface, resulting in reanalysis of these suffixed forms. The first case study concerns Malagasy weak stems; frequency-matching models predict reanalysis towards one alternant, but instead there has been reanalysis towards another statistically dispreferred alternant. I argue that this outcome is motivated by avoidance of intervocalic stops, and show that this analysis does better than alternative explanations. The second and third case studies concern Samoan and Maori. In both languages, certain suffixes have multiple allomorphs with an unpredictable distribution. In Samoan (Chapter 4), reanalysis is generally towards the suffix allomorph predicted by frequency-matching models, but is also modulated by OCP-place effects (McCarthy 1988, 1994). Specifically, suffixed forms which violate OCP-place are more likely to be reanalyzed. In Maori, reanalysis is towards a suffix allomorph that is not predicted by frequency-matching models. I argue that reanalysis has instead been motivated by avoidance of both vowel hiatus and heavy syllables. All three languages show evidence of reanalysis that is sensitive to a markedness bias. Moreover, all three cases are also consistent with the principle of active markedness, as the markedness effects found in reanalysis are already present in the language-specific phonotactics. Based on these results, I argue for a richer model of reanalysis in which phonotactic principles serve as a learning bias. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Memory retrieval is well known to modify retention of not only retrieved material, but also related, non-retrieved material. This dissertation consists of two manuscripts that investigated retrieval phenomena in the learning of foreign language vocabulary and science education material. The testing effect--the retention benefit of practicing retrieval compared to studying-- and the pretesting effect--incorrectly guessing a target before learning compared to studying-- demonstrate the advantages of retrieval-based learning, but no extant theories have accounted for both of these effects. In Chapter 1, we investigated an error-driven learning account whereby retrieval-based learning serves to "stress test" the memory system, allowing it to learn to better predict a target from a cue, whereas in studying, there is no opportunity for the system to form a prediction. We predicted that inserting a small temporal "gap" between a foreign language word and its English translation should enhance retention when compared to simultaneous, "no gap," presentation. In four experiments (N = 287) we consistently observed that "gap" conditions benefitted retention compared to "no gap" conditions, which supports the error-driven learning account. We observed that a gap as short as 600 ms benefitted retention one day later, one minute later, and in a pure list design. In Chapter 2, we investigated the sequalae of retrieval practice for non-practiced educational science text material. Some evidence suggests that retrieval practice of main ideas would lead to greater retention of non-practiced information, whereas other evidence suggests that retrieval practice of peripheral information would lead to impaired retention of non-practiced information, when compared to a control group that did not practice retrieval. In two experiments (N = 360) we observed robust testing effects, but we did not observe robust differences in non-practiced material, suggesting that the kind of focal retrieval practice used here has focal effects on science material retention. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

When acquiring a second language, learners must become able to perceive the difference between novel sounds ("discrimination") and also associate strings of sounds with distinct vocabulary items ("lexical encoding"). Recent research has questioned whether discrimination is a sufficient or necessary condition for encoding, and Japanese length is of particular relevance to this question because of the large number of contrasts distinguished primarily by duration. For example, "koko," "kooko," "kokko," "kokoo," "kookoo," and "kokkoo" are six distinct, unrelated nouns, and while previous studies have shown that learners are able to detect differences between at least some forms, length-related errors in word recognition and production remain highly frequent, even for advanced learners. Therefore, modeling these error patterns is of key interest to teachers and researchers, but current models of L2 perception do not yet account for phonemic length. This study examines the performance of 30 American English-speaking learners of Japanese and 10 native speakers on an Oddity discrimination task, two lexical encoding tasks (picture-word matching and forced-choice lexical decision), and a Free Classification and Identification task to model patterns of confusion across a variety of length-related contrasts. For discrimination, vowel contrasts in initial position were easier than consonant length contrasts, and Free Classification and Identification results patterned very closely with discrimination performance, showing that these tasks are viable for modeling discriminability, even for non-segmental features. For lexical encoding, the most difficult contrasts in discrimination were similarly at near chance levels for lexical encoding, suggesting that a baseline level of discrimination is needed. Overall, there were moderate, significant correlations between discrimination and lexical encoding tasks, but the encoding tasks were much more closely related to each other than to discrimination, providing convergent and divergent evidence that the two constructs are measurably separable. For encoding, non-word competitors of the "all-short" form were much more difficult to reject compared to stimuli that had spurious long segments. These results line up with previous research on other languages to show how lexical encoding is hierarchical. In sum, the results support the interpretation that lexical encoding, while related to discrimination, is a separable construct. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Experience, whether personal or vicarious, plays an influential role in shaping human knowledge. Through these experiences, one develops an understanding of the world, which leads to learning. The process of gaining knowledge in higher education transcends beyond the passive transmission of knowledge from an expert to a novice. Instead, students are encouraged to actively engage in every learning opportunity to achieve mastery in their chosen field. Evaluation of such mastery typically entails using educational assessments that provide objective measures to determine whether the student has mastered what is required of them. With the proliferation of educational technology in the modern classroom, information about students is being collected at an unprecedented rate, covering demographic, performance, and behavioral data. In the absence of analytics expertise, stakeholders may miss out on valuable insights that can guide future instructional interventions, especially in helping students understand their strengths and weaknesses. This dissertation presents Web-Programming Grading Assistant (WebPGA), a homegrown educational technology designed based on various learning sciences principles, which has been used by 6,000+ students. In addition to streamlining and improving the grading process, it encourages students to reflect on their performance. WebPGA integrates learning analytics into educational assessments using students' physical and digital footprints. A series of classroom studies is presented demonstrating the use of learning analytics and assessment data to make students aware of their misconceptions. It aims to develop ways for students to learn from previous mistakes made by themselves or by others. The key findings of this dissertation include the identification of effective strategies of better-performing students, the demonstration of the importance of individualized guidance during the reviewing process, and the likely impact of validating one's understanding of another's experiences. Moreover, the Personalized Recommender of Items to Master and Evaluate (PRIME) framework is introduced. It is a novel and intelligent approach for diagnosing one's domain mastery and providing tailored learning opportunities by allowing students to observe others' mistakes. Thus, this dissertation lays the groundwork for further improvement and inspires better use of available data to improve the quality of educational assessments that will benefit both students and teachers. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Phonotactic patterns are generalizations that govern the order of consonants and vowels, within words and syllables. Certain second-order phonotactic patterns--those that relate multiple sounds within a syllable, such as "if the vowel is [near-close near-front unrounded vowel], then [s] can only appear at the end of the syllable"--require a period of sleep-based consolidation before adults can internalize them such that their speech errors conform to these generalizations in a tongue-twister task (Gaskell et al., 2014). The present work examines the role of prior knowledge in consolidating these second-order phonotactics for speech production, testing the hypothesis that new phonotactic knowledge which is similar to previously-acquired knowledge is easier to consolidate during sleep. We do this by analyzing errors made in a tongue-twister task (Chapter 2). We operationalize "similar prior knowledge" in terms of the syllable positions to which the consonants are constrained, and consider two sources of prior knowledge in these speech experiments: participants' native language (English; Experiment 1) and pre-trained restrictions learned through tongue-twisters produced in the first experimental phase (Experiment 2). In a follow-up experiment in a non-linguistic sequential action domain (keypress sequence production; Chapter 3), we test whether the results we found in Experiment 1 were specific to speech production, or due to more general properties of sequential action. Our results indicate that global (first-order) and local (second-order) sequential patterns are simultaneously represented in production, and that this may be a necessary property of the schema for structured sequential action, in both speech and keypress sequence production. We found evidence of transfer from phonotactic restrictions that had been previously learned in a similar environmental context, supporting an incremental account of phonotactic learning (Anderson et al., 2019) as well as a view of phonotactic learning in which restrictions are stored together with their contexts of acquisition (Dell et al., 2019). Our results also suggest that consolidation's main function in phonotactic learning for speech production is to resolve interference among multiple conflicting mappings between consonants and their syllable positions. Moreover, we found evidence that participants' native language (English) may have affected their speech errors. Overall, this research demonstrates that prior knowledge's complex role in sequential pattern learning, which depends not only on similarity to new information and opportunity for consolidation, but also on the environment in which that prior knowledge was acquired. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The systems underlying incremental sentence comprehension are, in general, highly successful -- comprehenders typically understand sentences of their native language quickly and accurately. The occasional failure of the system to deliver an appropriate representation of a sentence is therefore potentially illuminating. There are many ways the comprehender's general success could in principle be accomplished; the systematic pattern of failures places some constraints on the possible algorithms. This dissertation explores two cases of systematic failure, negative polarity illusions and substitution illusions (sometimes called "Moses illusions") with the goal of identifying the specific circumstances under which the illusion arises, and, as a consequence, the specific constraints placed on possible implementations of linguistic knowledge. In the first part of this dissertation, I explore the profile of the negative polarity illusion, a case in which a sentence containing an unlicensed negative polarity item and a preceding, but not structurally-relevant licensor is perceived as if it is acceptable, at least in early stages of processing. I consider various proposals for the grammatical knowledge that determines the restricted distribution of negative polarity items, and possible algorithms for using that grammatical knowledge in real time to process a sentence containing a negative polarity item. I also discuss possible parallels between negative polarity illusions and superficially-similar illusory phenomena in other domains, such as subject-verb agreement. Across sixteen experiments, I show that the profile of the illusion is more restricted than previously thought. Illusions do not always arise when an unlicensed negative polarity item is preceded by a structurally-irrelevant licensor, and the circumstances under which they do arise are quite specific. These findings suggest that the negative polarity illusion may be meaningfully distinct from other illusory phenomena, though this conclusion does not necessarily require stipulating a separate mechanism for every illusion. I discuss the implications of these findings for possible real-time implementations of grammatical knowledge. In the second part of this dissertation, I turn to the substitution illusion, a case in which a word in a trivia fact is swapped out for another word, making the sentence a world knowledge violation, but comprehenders do not consciously detect the anomalous nature of the sentence. Here I attempt to develop specific and testable hypotheses about the source of the illusion, paying particular attention to how the same mechanism that "fails" in illusion sentences (in that it does not allow the comprehender to detect the anomaly) serves the comprehender well in other circumstances. I demonstrate that the substitution illusion, like the negative polarity illusion, is more restricted than previously thought -- some stimuli yield very high illusion rates while others yield very low illusion rates, and this variability appears to be non-random. In seven experiments, I pursue both a correlational approach and an experimental manipulation of illusion rates, in order to narrow the space of possible explanations for the illusion. These investigations collectively demonstrate that occasional errors in comprehension do not necessarily reflect the use of "shortcuts" in sentence processing, and can be explained by the interaction of the linguistic system with non-linguistic components of the cognitive architecture, such as memory and attention. While neither illusion phenomenon is ultimately fully explained, the research presented here constitutes an important step forward in our understanding of both domains and their broader implications. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

We need a critical mathematics. Our ability to enact social change through teaching mathematics and through critical research in mathematics education is severely limited by the canon of mathematical knowledge and the ideology that declares mathematical knowledge as certain. In this dissertation I extend Carspecken's critical action theory to articulate a philosophy of mathematics that hinges on our existential needs for recognition, the experience of error, and the limits of knowledge. Those limits stand contrary to the canon, where what counts as mathematical knowledge is either provable or instrumentally useful. But proof and instrumental utility must come after communicative rationality in the order of explanation, just as the scientific method must come after communicative rationality in that same order (Habermas, 1971). The story of communicative rationality is the story of getting it wrong; rationality is structured by uncertainty and driven by our existential needs for recognition and the experience of error. Uncertainty, existential needs, and error are the shadows that bind mathematical systems together across individuals and ages -- we all do math wrong sometimes. Why does the experience of error drive communicative rationality? What is at stake? The stakes are our being as normative subjects. We live in existential fear as error threatens our social identity, the {me}. The {me} is a complex bundling of commitments, errors, and successful acts of consumption that, for consciousness, are finite forms generally expressed through language. But the {me} is not all that we are - we are also the {I}. The {I}, I shall endeavor to express, is "in"finite - a bursting of finite form. Knowledge of that {I} is emancipatory, or critical (P. Carspecken, 2009). With this in place I will develop a philosophy of number and operation, consider how to incorporate the vast body of research that documents student errors into the system as described, and describe a research method for analyzing student work using projective inferences (Brandom, 2000). Finally, I explore second-person transactional thought, answering the question "Who are you?". [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This study investigates how aspects of collocational proficiency affect the ratings that expert examiners give to second language (L2) English learner essays. Lexical proficiency is a multi-faceted phenomenon and certain aspects of it are particularly impactful on human judgements, including lexical sophistication and accuracy. However, the importance of proficiency with formulaic sequences (FSs), like collocations, has received less attention than proficiency with single words, despite FSs' essential role in language production. In addition, previous comparison studies have used a small number of raters with varying levels of assessment expertise, assessing texts of varying length and topic.In addressing these issues, this study uses a predominantly quantitative, experimental approach comprised of two stages. First, a small set of three texts of different proficiency levels were created based on model IELTS Task 2 essays, controlling for topic and length. From these texts, a set of 30 versions were produced, manipulating specific collocational features related to sophistication and accuracy. Second, IELTS examiners (n = 47) rated the texts and provided rationales for their choices. From these data, many-faceted Rasch models were used to obtain expected scores, and linear regression models were used to determine which aspects of collocational proficiency best predicted the experts' ratings. The findings reveal that increases in lexical sophistication significantly and positively impacted the experts' ratings. Post-hoc analyses demonstrated that the categories of high sophistication and mid sophistication differed significantly from low sophistication. However, mid sophistication was not significantly different from high sophistication. When these 'advanced' words were used as part of collocations, they then provided a small but significant additional boost to ratings. Notably, there was no significant effect for increased collocational accuracy. In conjunction, these findings indicate that 1) sophistication is perhaps best viewed on a spectrum rather than categorically, 2) there is an additional increase to ratings if learners use advanced lexis as part of collocations, and 3) there is a potential baseline in terms of gravity and frequency of collocation errors below which ratings are not significantly affected. The implications for these findings are therefore discussed in relation to written language assessment and L2 vocabulary pedagogy. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Administration and scoring of cognitive assessments have evolved from a paper-based platform to a digital format. Since this advancement, Pearson has created a system (Q-interactive) that allows examiners to administer the WISC-V via two iPads. However, limited research exists exploring the effects of this new method of administration when compared to the traditional format of the WISC-V. The Wechsler scales have a Verbal Comprehension Index that has historically been shown to be prone to examiner errors given that scoring can be subjective and requires clinical judgment and the recording of lengthy responses. This study aimed to assess whether there is a difference in the total number of errors between administrations of the traditional and the digital formats of the WISC-V. A total of 22 paper and 38 digital WISC-V Similarities and Vocabulary protocols completed by practicing school psychologists were collected. Consistent with previous literature, errors were common. Further, digital protocols had significantly more errors than the traditional format. This was mostly due to recording errors, specifically failing to record verbatim responses, as well as failing to query when needed. On both formats, school psychologists frequently failed to record verbatim responses, failed to query, and assigned an incorrect point value to a response. Limitations of the study as well as implications, recommendations, and future research are discussed. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Intelligence tests are used in a variety of settings such as schools, clinics, and courts to assess the intellectual capacity of individuals of all ages. Intelligence tests are used to make high-stakes decisions such as special education placement, employment, eligibility for social security services, and determination of the death penalty. Considering the importance of intelligence tests and the decisions for which these are used, it is imperative to ensure valid test scores. This study examined the effect of examiner errors made by graduate students on the Index and FSIQ scores using the most recent versions of the Wechsler Intelligence test Scales: WAIS-IV and WISC-V. This study also aimed to document the change in qualitative descriptors for the FSIQ after corrections to compare the prevalence of errors between the WAIS-IV and WISC-V, and to determine if the total number of errors decreased from the first to the last record form submitted by student examiners. The Wechsler Intelligence scales continue to lead among school psychologists, psychiatric psychologists, and neuropsychologists in their practice and study and have been found to be among the most often employed tools for evaluating children's intellectual abilities and particular strengths and weaknesses. Results suggested that errors continue to persist over time. The effect of errors on the derived scores and changes in qualitative descriptors appeared to be rare. Results also suggested that errors by graduate students were more prevalent on the WISC-V record forms compared to WAIS-IV record forms. Although students continued to make an average of eight errors on their last record form, errors reduced significantly from students' first to their last record form. The findings of this study may be most helpful for instructors and graduate students in training. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

One of the most serious forms of cheating occurs when examinees have item preknowledge and prior access to secure test material before taking an exam for the purpose of obtaining an inflated test score. Examinees that cheat and have prior knowledge of test content before testing may have an unfair advantage over examinees that do not cheat. Item preknowledge leads to compromised content and threatens the integrity of testing programs and the validity of the scores reported. Monitoring methods for detecting item preknowledge are needed to detect unexpected group behavior and identify potentially compromised content. This study examined the effectiveness of using data forensics and sequential monitoring of item performance with real data to detect item preknowledge and known compromised content. The study also examined the effect of compromised content on item performance and examinee ability estimates. The main detection methods used were sequential monitoring of item difficulty using both CTT and IRT methodologies. Two exams with known compromised content administered to school level cohorts of examinees were studied. Items on each exam were classified as exposed or non-exposed. For each exam, the power and Type 1 error rates for the two methodologies were compared for three levels of item exposure (Low, Medium, and High) represented by three forms of the exam. The item performance and ability estimates of examinee groups were considered when evaluating the two methodologies. Sequential analyses for the two monitoring procedures were unable to identify optimal cut points that would maximize power and control Type I error, regardless of level of item exposure or exam studied. Sequential plots showed fluctuations in performance over time which may have attributed to the difficulty in detecting compromised content. Since the two exams studied are typically administered to all examinees within a school at the same time, the varying ability of school cohorts was confounded by differences in ability across schools making accurate detection difficult. Analyses of the effect of compromised content on item performance and ability estimates indicated that as the level of item exposure increased, the degree of contamination in the ability estimates and performance of non-exposed items may have also disproportionately increased. However, differences in estimated abilities for exposed and non-exposed items were found to be useful for flagging aberrant examinees that may have benefited from preknowledge when the level of item exposure was not too high. These findings suggest that it is important to monitor performance early and often to identify exposed items so that they can be removed to reduce the impact of compromised content on ability estimates. A major limitation of the study was that we didn't know when items were truly exposed or the extent of item exposure on the exams. Items were confirmed as exposed through web monitoring or anonymous tips, but we didn't know if other items on a form were also contaminated or if the extent of a breach was limited to a small cohort of examinees or more widespread. Another limitation of the study is that the exams under study were administered by cohort. Identifying exposed items was confounded by sequential administration to school cohorts where the level of ability varied by school. There were fluctuations in performance across time and multiple change points for low and high performing schools within groups that made it difficult to identify the extent or frequency of exposure. Next steps for future research are to investigate the sequential monitoring of response times to see if monitoring response latency can better detect breached items for these exams, as well as conducting simulation studies using the two procedures that reflects the real data parameters, ability of cohorts and level of exposure. Future research should examine how well the sequential monitoring procedures perform on exams with real data that are not administered to cohorts that vary in ability and that wouldn't systematically introduce fluctuations in the abilities of the moving sample. Other promising areas of research for detecting examinees with item preknowledge include using Bayesian inference on ability estimates and outlier detection using response times (Sinharay, 2020) as well as, conducting studies exploring the usefulness and effectiveness of a new mixture Rasch-Lognormal response time model (MixRL) for examining response accuracy (Lee & Wollack 2020). This research gives insight into the sensitivity of the different methods for detection of item preknowledge and compromised content when using real data for subgroup populations. One expected outcome of this research was a list of recommendations and procedures based on data forensics and statistical analyses that can be used by operational testing programs when monitoring changes in item performance for subgroup populations to detect compromised content and identify aberrant examinee groups with item preknowledge. Although sequential monitoring procedures did not work well for the exams studied, this study does provide recommendations for practitioners and highlights the importance of accounting for operational considerations and group characteristics when implementing monitoring procedures that can help with setup and the interpretation of results. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Purpose: Developmental language disorder (DLD) affects individuals through childhood into adulthood. However, we do not know how this disorder affects the written language abilities of college students, for whom writing difficulties may cause significant academic issues. This study sought to explore and characterize the differences in writing ability, planning strategies for writing, and revision tendencies of college students with and without DLD. We also sought to determine whether meaningful differences exist in the types of information gained from handwritten and typed writing samples. Method: Fifty college-enrolled young adults between the ages of 18-22 were recruited and divided in to two equal groups (25 with DLD, 25 with typical language). Each completed two writing prompts (one by hand and one on the computer) and a survey of their writing habits. Their writing samples were analyzed for length, complexity, and the presence of errors at the word and sentence levels. Video recordings of their typing and photos of their handwriting were analyzed for their revision tendencies. Responses to the survey were analyzed for group differences in use of planning strategies. Results: Expository samples written by college students with DLD are likely to have fewer words and more syntactic errors than the samples written by their peers with typical language. College students with and without DLD are likely to write samples with the same levels of syntactic complexity, lexical diversity, and word-level errors. Typing is conducive to longer samples for college students with and without DLD. There are no major differences in the strategies college students with and without DLD report using for planning for writing assignments. There is no relationship between number of on-line revisions and total number of errors for college students with DLD. Conclusions: The lack of practically significant group differences between college students with and without DLD in terms of writing quality and complexity highlights the importance of individual strengths-and-needs-based assessment and intervention for this population. Typing is a highly practical and functional manner of measuring writing ability for college students with and without DLD that could yield useful clinical information. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The gap in supply (i.e., shortage) and demand of the STEM workforce have prompted extensive research on identifying factors that predict STEM outcomes and retention of students. Few studies, however, have examined the relationships between STEM outcomes and predictors in an integrated model, taking into account measurement errors in the predictors. Drawing upon the Expectancy-Value Model of Achievement Related Performance and Choice, I conducted a structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis to examine the relationships between "academic support," "academic engagement," "mathematics readiness," student "hours worked," and first-year STEM students' academic success and retention. The SEM allowed me to investigate the relationships between predictors and outcomes simultaneously while accounting for the measurement errors. The sample consisted of 798 first-year STEM majors who took the National Survey of Student Engagement during the 2016, 2018, and 2020 academic years in a large urban university. Results indicated that "academic support" was a statistically significant predictor of first-year STEM students' academic success and retention. Additionally, "mathematics readiness" was found to be a statistically significant predictor of first-year retention. Lastly, results suggested that female students on average were more likely than their male counterparts to engage in "academic support" and "academic engagement" activities even though females worked more hours than males. The results have implications for policies and practices aimed at improving STEM retention. Areas of further research are also identified. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This study investigated factors that are related to student success in using and learning from written corrective feedback (WCF). Focusing on learner affective variables and a student writing corpus collected over the span of a semester, different types of feedback and errors were investigated. Previous studies have focused on one or, at the most, two variables, such as motivation, error type, corpus, instruction type, etc., but a combination of all of the different factors, such as error type, motivation, correction type, and corpus, offers a fresh perspective towards learning about student use of feedback. Using expectancy-value theory and Gass' five-step framework as guiding frameworks, this study offers a convergent mixed methods perspective to WCF through a comprehensive quantitative analysis of student writing and corpus data coupled with a qualitative outlook through analysis of student writing and corpus data feedback and student perception of it. Twenty-two undergraduate ESL students were recruited and their guided writing drafts were studied through the course of a semester. A writing prompt was analyzed with stimulated recall regarding error correction and feedback usage. Motivational testing of student motivation towards feedback and tasks were surveyed through the use of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) and analysis of concordancing and collocations of the writing samples were taken as well. Student interviews were also used to investigate student perception of feedback. The data collected both quantitatively and quantitatively was merged to create themes that helped to show that there was a connection between expectancy-value, motivation, and feedback use and that the breakdown between intake, integration, and output seems to be valid and worth further exploration. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Generalization is the ability to apply regularities to novel instances, for example, correctly guessing that the plural for the novel English word 'wug' should be 'wugs'. Early language learners make overgeneralization errors like 'mouses', applying regularities beyond their attested uses. Theories concerned with the question of how learners learn to correctly generalize regularities, without overgeneralizing, have recently been criticized for being insufficiently mechanistic. Rule learning and statistical learning theories typically do not take into account whether that generalization is happening during production (e.g. coming up with the plural for 'wug'), or comprehension (e.g. judging whether 'wugs' or 'wugga' sounds better as a plural for 'wug'). However, my own prior research showed that training modality affects regularity learning, with production training leading to a more accurate ability to apply regularities to learned words. Thus, modality may provide a potential path to making theories more specific and mechanistic. In this thesis, I first reviewed relevant literature on generalization through a task modality lens. There is very little literature directly contrasting, in a balanced manner, the effects of production versus comprehension "training" on learning and generalization. However, generalization studies have used both production and comprehension "testing" to assess generalization performance. Drawing on these results, I identified several different patterns of generalization results by testing modality. I concluded that, if there are any modality differences, production training should lead to better generalization, and production tests should be more likely to elicit overgeneralization errors. I then designed and conducted an artificial language learning experiment that contrasts production versus comprehension "training" modality between different groups of participants, and uses both comprehension and production "testing" to assess learning and (over)generalization. People learning the artificial language with production training were better at generalizing and made fewer overgeneralization errors than people learning the artificial language with comprehension training. Surprisingly, comprehension-trained people did do better than production-trained people on vocabulary learning. Finally, people made overgeneralization errors in both comprehension and production tests. I discussed consequences for existing theories as well as practical applications of my findings for second language learners. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Studies in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) indicate that the use of discourse markers (DMs) in the academic writing of second language learners improves the overall quality of these texts by contributing to their cohesion and comprehensibility (Saif Modhish 2012; Jalilifar 2008; Intaraprawat & Steffensen 1995). However, despite the importance of the use of DMs in second language writing, the acquisition and production of DMs in the field of Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL) has been given little attention. Few studies on the teaching of DMs to Spanish Second Language (SSL) learners have focused on oral discourse and suggest that both explicit and implicit instruction promote the learning and use of DMs among SSL learners (Hernandez & Rodriguez-Gonzalez 2013; de la Fuente 2009). However, pedagogies that promote the use of DMs in SHL writing have not yet been identified in the literature, and pedagogies for the use of DMs in SSL writing are few (Saiz 2003). For this reason, my Dissertation attempts to answer the following research questions: 1) What is the frequency of use of discourse markers used by SHL learners in narrations? and 2) Does the following pedagogical intervention (i.e., Explicit Instruction + Input Flood + Textual Enhancement) increase the production of discourse markers in the narrations of SHL learners compared to traditional instruction? For this study, 39 SHL students enrolled in advanced Spanish writing courses served as participants: 19 served as participants in the Experimental group and 20 in the Control group (i.e., who received traditional instruction). All participants were asked to write two narrations of two different short, silent films: a pre-test narration and a post-test narration. Before writing the second narration, participants in the Experimental group watched a video on the functions and uses of DMs (i.e., explicit instruction) while reviewing a sample narration that incorporated implicit instruction strategies (i.e., Input Flood and Textual Enhancement). Participants in the Control group reviewed a list of DMs and completed a fill-in-the-blank activity using DMs from the list provided. A total of 600 discourse markers from the pre- and post-test narrations were extracted and results indicate that participants resorted to using the same set of DMs: pero ("but") (16.3%), cuando ("when") (16.3%), luego ("then") (8.6%), entonces ("then") (7.5%), and porque ("because") (7.3%); these five DMs accounted for about 48% of the DMs used in the narrations written by participants. Results also indicated that participants showed a preference for singleword DMs that sequence events (e.g., cuando ("when") and luego ("then")). Results also showed that about one-third (i.e., six) of the participants in the Experimental group incorporated new, complex (i.e., two- to three-word) DMs, such as ya que ("given that") and tan pronto como ("as soon as"), in their post-intervention narrations; these DMs were explicitly mentioned and used in the video that served as the pedagogical intervention. This increase in the use of DMs suggests that a combination of Explicit and Implicit Instruction promotes the acquisition and use of DMs in SHL writing. Additionally, an independent samples t-test comparing the number of DMs utilized in the post-test narrations of both the Experimental and Control groups produced a significant t value (t(37) = 2.53, p < 0.02). An examination of the means revealed that the Control group had a lower mean than the Experimental group (M = 5.95 and M = 9.05, respectively). Lastly, this dissertation also addressed the effects of the age at which SHL learners began to produce Spanish on the syntactic complexity, morpho-syntactic accuracy, and fluency of SHL narrations. That is, do the narrations of SHL learners with different experiences with Spanish (i.e., early SHL speakers vs. late SHL speakers), enrolled in a third-year Spanish writing course, differ in syntactic complexity, morphosyntactic accuracy, and fluency measures? If so, what are the differences and/or similarities in the syntactic complexity (i.e., mean length of T-Unit and mean number of clauses per T-Unit), morphosyntactic accuracy (i.e., error-free T-Units per T-Unit and error type), and fluency (i.e., number of words, number of T-units, and number of subordinate clauses per text) of narrations produced by these two types of SHL learners? The analysis of the data collected for this Dissertation indicated that Early and Late SHL learners did not differ regarding the syntactic complexity (i.e., Mean Length of T-unit and Total Number of Clauses per T-unit) and fluency (i.e., Total Number of Words, T-units, and (Type of) Subordinate Clauses) of their narrations. However, Early and Late SHL participants differed regarding the morphosyntactic accuracy (i.e., Error-Free T-units) of both narrations. Nevertheless, both groups were similar in the types of errors most produced in their narrations given that more than 46% of the errors produced by Early and Late SHL participants were preposition and vocabulary errors. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The purpose of this study was to examine how pre-service teachers (PSTs) develop their teaching adaptive competence through teaching rehearsal and repeated teaching, which is one of the focused teacher education strategies in practice-based teacher education (PBTE). This study was conducted in an introductory teaching methods course of a physical education teacher education (PETE) program. A total of 22 PSTs participated in the study. Fourteen were male, and eight were female. The PSTs had varied coaching experiences ranging from little to no coaching in limited recreational sports settings, and none had teaching or coaching experience in the school setting. A total of 150 lesson plans (three different lesson plans per PST that were revised across five weeks) and 85 teaching videos (five peer-teaching sessions) were collected and analyzed to examine PSTs' adaptive competence in the lesson plans and enacted teachings. First, PSTs' lesson plans were analyzed by the total number of adaptations, the number of adaptations to each Core Practice, and the number of types of adaptations. Second, PSTs' teaching videos were explored by the number of adaptations (add and miss), and errors. Last, it was examined whether there are relationships between PSTs' teaching adaptations demonstrated in lesson plans and errors in enacted teaching. The results showed that PSTs created a wide-ranged number of adaptations to lesson plan one to three (lesson plan one [Median=38.50, range 6-101]; two [Median=49.00, range 14-184]; three [Median=38.00, range 18-97]). The PSTs made the most adaptations to Core Practice two (providing clear instruction) followed by one (establishing rules and routine) and five (building positive relationships with students); minimum adaptations were made to Core Practices three (breaking down the content into smaller elements) and four (checking students' understanding). Also, the majority of teaching adaptations made by PSTs were type two (refine) adaptations, and a minimal number of teaching adaptations were made for types one (modify) and three (apply). Relative to teaching, the results showed that PSTs were able to make teaching adaptations (add and miss) in enacted teaching that was not on their lesson plans, and PSTs showed fewer errors in enacted teaching as they progressed from week one to five. Last, Spearman's rho analysis showed that there were no relationships between PSTs' adaptations to their lesson plans and errors in enacted teaching. Preservice teachers developed their teaching adaptive competence in lesson plans and enacted teaching through teaching rehearsals and repeated teaching in authentic settings with the use of teaching scenarios, quality supervisors' feedback, and structured reflection. In conclusion, PBTE is an effective framework for promoting PSTs' teaching adaptive competence in lesson planning and enacted teaching. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

There is a general consensus in theories of human speech recognition that humans engage in predictive processing during online speech processing. There are also claims that predictive processing indicates the operation of a predictive coding (PC) mechanism (Rao & Ballard, 1999). Formally, PC is a generative model where top-down signals consist of predictions while bottom-up signals consist of prediction error (deviations from predictions; Rao & Ballard, 1999). Some researchers have taken decreased neural signals when inputs conform to expectations as evidence for PC (e.g., Blank & Davis, 2016), and that other computational frameworks (e.g., interactive activation, as in the TRACE model of McClelland & Elman, 1986) are incompatible with apparent reductions in prediction error when inputs match expectations. However, these claims were made without linkage to computational models faithful to formal PC because no such implementations existed. This dissertation fills this gap by implementing and testing the first faithful implementation of PC as a model of human spoken word recognition (SWR). After validating the new model on fundamental aspects of SWR (the timecourse of lexical activation and competition), I compared model simulations to two behavioral and neural targets. While the new model readily captures basic activity reduction when inputs match expectations (Gagnepain, Henson, & Davis, 2012), more subtle and detailed predictions regarding patterns of activity under conditions of priming and noise (Blank & Davis, 2016) were not present. This suggests that the more subtle patterns may not be hallmarks of PC, and motivates discussion about pitfalls of inferring complex computational mechanisms from complex neural data. The new PC model fills a fundamental gap in current computational understanding of SWR. Thus far, the results with this model challenge current claims about the nature of neural activity predicted by PC. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Speech is extremely variable along many different dimensions. One source of variability listeners often encounter is accented speech, in which phonological units can systematically differ from the listener's native categories. This dissertation presents five experiments testing how listeners adapt to accent-based phonological variability, comparing the results within the framework of three competing hypotheses of phonological adaptation. Experiments 1A and 1B demonstrate that listeners store salient features of somewhat-familiar accents, Experiment 2B provides some evidence that listeners rapidly adapt to a novel accent, although they do not accept new lexical exemplars easily, and Experiment 3 shows that listeners treat accented shifts differently from mispronunciations, adapting to accented speech more quickly. Together, these experiments provided some evidence for all three hypotheses of phonological adaptation, suggesting that listeners may make use of a number of different strategies in order to successfully adapt to variability in the speech signal. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

When we read, errors in oculomotor programming can cause the eyes to land and fixate on different words from what the mind intended. Previous work suggests that these "mislocated fixations" form 10-30% of first-pass fixations in reading eye movement data, which presents theoretical and analytic issues for eyetracking-while-reading studies. These issues motivated this dissertation: a series of three studies that culminated in an attempt at a classification algorithm that estimates the probability of a first-pass fixation being mislocated. The first study was a comprehensive descriptive analysis of reading eye movements in English that sought to understand eye movement patterns that could give rise to mislocated fixations. The second study was an implementation of a decomposition algorithm that estimated the expected proportion of mislocated fixations on a set of English sentences. The decomposition algorithm estimated that 24% of the fixations on the studied sentences are likely mislocated, but there was wide variation in the contexts in which these mislocated fixations occurred. Mislocated fixations were observed most often on 1- to 3-letter words, on word boundaries, as launched from 8-12 characters from the beginning of the observed target word, and as preceded by skipping saccades. These results informed the classification algorithm that was developed in the third study. The classification algorithm was first implemented on simulated data where it showed around 71-74% overall accuracy and a 60-70% hit rate for identifying truly mislocated fixations, indicating modest performance in its current form. However, there was also wide variation in the contexts where the classification algorithm performed well, with its performance being best--although still affected by false alarms--for initial fixations preceded by skips and for forward refixations. Thus, a subsequent implementation of the classification algorithm on an actual reading dataset was limited to these two types of fixations, where the labels generated by the algorithm were found to distinguish fixations on patterns that have been expected to distinguish mislocated from well-located fixations. These results demonstrate that the labels generated by the classification algorithm could be meaningful, thereby indicating its potential as a tool to study patterns and properties associated with mislocated fixations. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Errors in mathematics are common hurdles for teachers and students; therefore, it is important to learn what errors students make and how students treat them. This study initially identified the types of errors students made while working with algebraic expressions and documented and analyzed the process of students completing an error analysis assignment using one of two different support tools provided. Using a descriptive quantitative design, a detailed account of the students' error analysis process was developed. Students were assigned a formative assessment that showed how the students performed and what types of errors the students made. The average quiz score was 50%. The whole group of 18 students made 111 errors. The average number of errors was six per student. Findings show that students made the most errors while working on factoring tasks (41.4%). Next, the students made combining like terms errors (30.6%). The students made the fewest errors while working on distribution tasks (17.1%). Students were assigned an error analysis assignment with integrated support tool. The Answer Key and Word Bank students were asked to write the errors they made for each incorrect question and incorporate the word bank vocabulary. Their responses support the conclusion that all the students understood the error analysis task. The Error Sentence Samples students were asked to select all the error sentences that applied to the errors they made for each incorrect question. The students had little success in correctly identifying their errors. The majority of the students' errors were left unidentified, and the students considerably over-selected errors beyond their actual errors made. The 12 students who completed the error analysis assignment made 63 errors overall, and each support group made approximately the same number of errors. The Answer Key and Work Bank group found a greater percent of their errors at 30% found, while the Error Sentence Samples group found 20%. This study determined that students need increased practice and scaffolding to find their errors, and that researchers should study error analysis done in a traditional learning environment and gather student feedback about the error analysis usefulness. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

In this dissertation, I argue that web development can play a pivotal role in developing computational thinking as well as provide a stepping stone to an advanced mastery of computation. The preceding literature has extensively examined not only how learners practice computational thinking with a wide array of programming languages, but also how to assess their knowledge and skills against predefined educational criteria. In contrast to the literature on learning traditional programming at scale, there is relatively little known about what people practice and learn in web development, particularly in informal settings at scale. Against this backdrop, I pose the following questions. What knowledge and skills do web developers engage with in their early stages of learning? What mistakes and misconceptions do they make when learning to code in HTML and CSS? How can such learning be measured in informal settings that potentially support a wide range of contexts and purposes? What patterns emerge as people continuously engage in the creation of web artifacts? Guided by these questions, I aim to draw connections between the existing literature and my findings, which is currently missing, in a way attaining a deepened understanding of the skills and concepts that learners practice and know, the errors and misconceptions that they struggle most with, and the creative ways that assess informal learning. Ultimately, my goal is to broaden the notion of computational thinking through web development and to support a broader base of people as computer-literate citizens. To these ends, I conducted four empirical studies situated in a variety of learning contexts, including a laboratory-based study, an educational game, and online web authoring. The contributions of the present dissertation are as follows: (1) A conceptual framework that interprets computational features in web development at multiple levels, binding code features with higher-level features such as abstractions and concepts, which are potentially indicative of learners' knowledge and skills; (2) Data-driven evidence for early-stage web development as a rich, multi-layered activity including a wide range of computational skills and concepts that can broaden notions about computational thinking; (3) An expanded inventory of errors that people make and misconceptions they hold when learning to code in HTML and CSS, and the application of this inventory to large-scale code logs; (4) Design and implementation of learning analytics in informal contexts where collecting data on learning outcomes is challenging or not possible otherwise; and (5) Recommendations on the design of instructional methods and learning tools, as well as future research efforts, filling the gap between theory and practice. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The purpose of the study was to investigate the feasibility of streamlining the transcription and scoring portion of language sample analysis (LSA) through computer-automation. LSA is a gold-standard procedure for examining childrens' language abilities that is underutilized by speech language pathologists due to its time-consuming nature. To decrease the time associated with the process, the accuracy of transcripts produced automatically with Google Cloud Speech and the accuracy of scores generated by a hard-coded scoring function called the Literate Language Use in Narrative Analysis (LLUNA) were evaluated. A collection of narrative transcripts and audio recordings of narrative samples were selected to evaluate the accuracy of these automated systems. Samples were previously elicited from school-age children between the ages of 6;0-11;11 who were either typically developing (TD), at-risk for language-related learning disabilities (AR), or had developmental language disorder (DLD). Transcription error of Google Cloud Speech transcripts was evaluated with a weighted word-error rate (WER[subscript w]). Score accuracy was evaluated with a quadratic weighted kappa (K[subscript qw]). Results indicated an average WER[subscript w] of 48% across all language sample recordings, with a median WER[subscript w] of 40%. Several recording characteristics of samples were associated with transcription error including the codec used to recorded the audio sample and the presence of background noise. Transcription error was lower on average for samples collected using a lossless codec, that contained no background noise. Scoring accuracy of LLUNA was high across all six measures of literate language when generated from traditionally produced transcripts, regardless of age or language ability (TD, DLD, AR). Adverbs were most variable in their score accuracy. Scoring accuracy dropped when LLUNA generated scores from transcripts produced by Google Cloud Speech, however, LLUNA was more likely to generate accurate scores when transcripts had low to moderate levels of transcription error. This work provides additional support for the use of automated transcription under the right recording conditions and automated scoring of literate language indices. It also provides preliminary support for streamlining the entire LSA process by automating both transcription and scoring, when high quality recordings of language samples are utilized. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

A nonrandomized quasi-experimental, mixed-method double pretest-posttest design was used to compare the effects of a multilinguistic word study model of instruction -- RAVE-O program (Wolf, Miller, & Donnelly, 2000) -- in comparison with a phonics word study model of instruction -- Fountas and Pinnell Phonics Lessons -- Letters, words, and how they work (Pinnell & Fountas, 2003). Repeated measures data were collected over 12 weeks, reflecting three points in time (i.e., Time 1: Fall pretest -- baseline to Time 2: April pretest to Time 3: June posttest) to examine 50 first-grade students' growth in word reading and spelling. Additionally, the linguistic patterns of spelling errors were examined across approaches. It was hypothesized that first-grade students who received explicit multilinguistic word study instruction would demonstrate greater literacy achievement (i.e., word reading and spelling) than first-grade students receiving traditional phonics word study instruction. It was also hypothesized that the linguistic pattern of spelling errors (i.e., phonological, orthographic, transpositions, and morphological) would differ as a function of the instructional approach. Neither proposed hypothesis was confirmed in this study. Data showed an overarching pattern of achievement in which, for most outcomes, children demonstrated growth in word reading and spelling skills regardless of the word study approach. More extensive examination of spelling (i.e., correct words, feature points, and inflected endings) revealed significant growth over time for all spelling outcome measures -- including morphological comprehension and use, regardless of the word study approach. The linguistic categories of spelling error types on multimorphemic words from least to most were transposition, orthographic image, phonological, orthographic, with the most frequent errors being morphological errors. Students in both groups demonstrated significant growth from pre- to post-testing on their ability to provide the correct affix (i.e., prefix or suffix) when spelling multimorphemic words (i.e., unable, return, giving) -- even if they were unable to spell the word correctly. While neither proposed hypothesis was confirmed in this study, the results showed that multilinguistic word study instruction could produce comparable results to traditional phonics word study instruction. This study also reinforced that children in the primary grades can access and use varying linguistic resources and processes, including higher-level morphological knowledge in their reading and spelling development. Furthermore, this study supported the position that examining instruction in the primary grades that incorporates metalinguistic information and a greater understanding of oral and written language versus waiting until the upper grades warrant further examination. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

A fundamental component of research on learning is understanding processes of performance. One typical method of studying how and why people perform in particular ways is to record audio or video of those processes. Research methodologies that rely on audio or video data start with recording phenomena (events) researchers are interested in. After recording audio or video data of an event, researchers often transcribe their data. Next, the transcription is annotated or coded. Afterward, the annotated transcript is then further analyzed or modeled in some way, and finally, conclusions or inferences are made based on that model. Unfortunately, as with all human endeavors, analytic methods such as transcription are imperfect, and errors and inconsistencies can erode the validity of the conclusions they produce. This dissertation focuses on the reliability and validity of transcription and coding and ways of assessing their sensitivity to error. Specifically, it will introduce a novel transcription error sensitivity analysis test that measures the impact transcription error has on subsequent coding. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Learning to read in English is difficult for adult English language learners due to their diverse background, their level of experience with literacy in their first language, and their reason and desire for wanting to learn to read in English. Teachers of adult language learners must consider the educational and language experiences of adults enrolled in English as a Second Language (ESL) classes in order to provide adequate learning opportunities for a diverse student body. Promoting learning opportunities for adult Arabic speakers was an area of interest for me when I first began teaching adult English language learners six years ago. The purpose of my action research study was to provide the adult Arabic speakers in my classroom with strategies they could use in order to read accurately in English. Current research used to guide my study focused on the difficulties Arabic speakers have with the orthographic features of the English language. As I conducted various cycles of action research in an ESL reading class, I developed an intervention to support adult Arabic speakers gain an understanding of the sound spelling system of the English language inclusive of instructional strategies to support accurate word reading. Data was collected to identify the individuals experience in learning to read. I included a pre and post miscue analysis to help identify the common error patterns of the participants of my study. Over an eight-week period, I followed a constructivist approach and facilitated word sorts to help students identify common sound spellings found in the English language. Instructional strategies were included to help the participants decode multisyllabic words by bringing awareness to the syllable types found in the English language. The findings of my study revealed that Arabic speakers benefited from an intervention focused on the sound spellings and syllabication of the English language. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Language comprehension is remarkable in that we adapt easily to different forms of language use, from adapting to speakers' dialects, meanings of new slang words, and fictional worlds described in novels. While there is growing evidence comprehenders adapt their expectations for text during reading, the nature of these adaptation mechanisms remains unclear. Some comprehension accounts maintain adaptation results from error-driven learning, such that larger errors lead to greater changes in expectations than smaller errors. Yet, the relationship between strength of error and the rate by which one adapts to semantic information during reading (i.e. whether larger errors lead to greater "and" faster adaptation) is an open question. The present dissertation tested this by investigating the time course by which younger and older adult readers adapt their expectations for fantasy-based texts. Participants read twenty short narratives, each containing five instances of semantic, or meaning, violations. Varying strengths of semantic violations--stronger (larger error) and weaker (smaller error) semantic violations--served as cues for readers to adopt a fantasy-world perspective on the text; adaptation was evident through decreased disruption to violations across instances within a single narrative and between narratives. The first experiment examined whether readers predict more fantasy-related content in subsequent parts of narratives with stronger than weaker violations during a cumulative cloze task. The second experiment used eye tracking to examine whether readers adapt faster to stronger than weaker violations within and across narratives. The third experiment took a broader cognitive approach to comprehension by investigating whether different aspects of readers' cognitive control ability associate with their degree of adaptation. Results indicate readers quickly adapt their expectations for a given fantasy text containing stronger violations. However, there was no evidence for adaptation to weak violations in fantasy narratives. There was considerably stronger evidence for adaptation to stronger violations within narratives than across narratives, suggesting there may be a limit to which comprehenders adjust their expectations during reading. Taken together, these findings are partially supportive of an error-based account of comprehension and leave open questions. This work highlights the importance of assessing comprehension from both language-specific and cognitive-general perspectives. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Purpose: Children with speech sound disorder (SSD) mispronounce more speech sounds than is typical for their age and a growing body of research suggests that a deficit in speech perception abilities contributes to development of the disorder. However, little work has been done to characterize the neurophysiological processes indexing speech perception deficits in SSD. The primary aim of the current study was to compare the neural activity underlying speech perception in young children with SSD and typical development (TD). Method: Twenty-eight children ages 4;1-6;0 participated in the current study. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while children completed a speech perception task which included phonetic (speech sound) and lexical (meaning) matches and mismatches. Groups were compared on their judgment accuracy for matches and mismatches as well as the mean amplitude of the Phonological Mapping Negativity (PMN) and N400 ERP components. Results: Children with SSD demonstrated lower judgment accuracy across the phonetic and lexical conditions compared to peers with TD. The ERPs elicited by lexical matches and mismatches did not distinguish the groups. However, in the phonetic condition, the SSD group exhibited a more consistent left lateralized PMN effect and a delayed N400 effect over frontal sites compared to the TD group. Conclusions: These findings provide some of the first evidence of a delay in the neurophysiological processing of phonological information for young children with SSD compared to their peers with TD. This delay was not present for the processing of lexical information, indicating a unique difference between children with SSD and TD related to speech perception of phonetic errors. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The purpose of this meta-synthesis is to formulate a hypothesis concerning the importance of diacritical marks in Arabic word recognition for typically developed Arabic readers. I propose that the importance of diacritical marks in Arabic word recognition varies as a function of grade level, stimuli frequency, and text affiliation. Stimuli commonly affiliated with narrative and informational texts are more easily read with diacritical marks in lower primary grades, where phonological recoding is the dominant reading strategy for accessing phonologically and semantically unfamiliar words. Four years of systematic exposure to standard Arabic can increase knowledge of morphology, vocabulary, and orthography to the point of developing a visual reading strategy that dominates word recognition. Thus, in the upper school grades, diacritical marks lose their supportive function for accessing stimuli commonly affiliated with narrative and informational texts; they eventually become a visual burden that compromises the direct visual access of words/texts, causing delayed semantic access and errors in accuracy. However, diacritical marks regain their supportive function when Arabic readers in the upper grades encounter stimuli that are more commonly affiliated with Quranic, literary, and poetic classical texts. These stimuli are known to have a low frequency of the derivatives, roots, and morphemic patterns with which readers are unfamiliar. Encountering these stimuli forces Arabic students to re-adopt a phonological recoding reading strategy. This meta-synthesis includes nine studies published between 1995 and 2020. The results reported in this meta-synthesis substantiate my hypothesis. The results reported in seven studies align with my hypothesis. The results reported in two studies that reported contradictory findings do not discredit my hypothesis, but rather contribute two additional variables that further refine my hypothesis. Overall, sufficient evidence supports the conclusion that the importance of diacritical marks in Arabic word recognition for typically developed Arabic readers varies as a function of grade level, stimuli frequency, and text affiliation. Developing a comprehensive theory concerning the importance of diacritical marks in Arabic word recognition would provide research-based evidence for purely anecdotal policies regarding the transition from vowelized to unvowelized script that have been used in Arabic educational systems for more than 70 years. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Software is an integral part of our lives. It controls the cars we drive every day, the ships we send into space, and even our toasters. It is everywhere and we can easily download more. Software solves many real-world problems and satisfies many needs. Thus, unsurprisingly, there is a rising demand for software engineers to maintain existing software and to design and build new systems. Unfortunately, there is a scarcity of software engineers. But thankfully, more and more people are opting or being encouraged to pursue a Computer Science education, and we are seeing an explosion in enrollment worldwide. At UC Davis, for example, an introductory programming course quadrupled in enrollment from about a hundred students to four hundred. Recently, official enrollment at UC Berkeley's introductory programming course was 1,762. Massively open online courses (MOOCs) like Coursera and Udacity regularly sign up thousands of students for a single course. Not surprisingly, however, not everyone who enrolls in CS courses succeeds. A study in 2014 found that, on average, 33% of students fail. Often, these same students decide to drop out instead. For example, Ireland reported that about a third of students drop out of Computer Science degree programs. Undoubtedly, there are many factors contributing to these issues. But perhaps, the most straightforward reason is that programming is simply difficult and challenging. And with larger classes, students are receiving less personalized instruction and intervention. Therefore, we need innovative tools and approaches to help students learn to program. In this dissertation, we focus on "technical barriers to learning programming." We define technical barriers as those challenges that are faced by programmers of all levels but are especially difficult to beginners. These technical barriers can cause students to waste time, to become frustrated, and even to quit. This dissertation describes three efforts addressing these technical barriers from different angles: simplifying the programming environment, assisting with compilation errors, and exploring a syntax-free programming paradigm. Students often spend a considerable amount of time and effort installing and configuring programming tools and environments. This can frustrate, and distract them from more important learning objectives, particularly in introductory programming courses. A web integrated development environment (IDE) can serve as a low-threshold, ready-to-use programming environment, and reduce the time and effort needed to start practicing programming. Moreover, the uniform execution environment can facilitate better interactions between students and instructors. We describe the design and deployment of KODETHON, a web IDE, at a large public university. KODETHON can support multiple programming languages, multi-file projects, and real-time collaboration. To date, more than 3,000 students have used KODETHON in at least 15 different courses to write over 15 million lines of code. We studied student adoption behavior and perceptions of KODETHON by analyzing server database and logs, and by deploying a user survey. We found that about a third of participants perceive KODETHON to be useful. We also found that students find "Web-based" and "No Installation Required" to be the two most useful features. We present lessons learned and provide advice for educators and researchers considering introducing a web IDE as a pedagogical tool. Every programmer, from novices to professionals, makes compilation errors. Resolving compilation errors can be time-consuming, difficult, and frustrating. For decades, error messages have been identified as a source of this difficulty. A promising approach to help programmers is to augment error messages with "compilation repair examples." The challenge is how to obtain and present these repair examples. We present COMPASSIST, a system that generates and refines repair examples. Based on these repair examples, the system suggests possible patches to users when their program fails to compile. We evaluated COMPASSIST on a mainstream C++ compiler, and demonstrate that it can generate examples for more than half (867/1, 686) of compiler errors. We also conducted a user study where participants found these synthetic repair examples to be helpful in a majority (5/9) of tasks involving real-world C++ compiler programs. Lastly, we focus on programming language syntax. Natural language is robust against noise. The meaning of many sentences survives the loss of words, sometimes many of them. Some words in a sentence, however, cannot be lost without changing the meaning of the sentence. We call these words "wheat" and the rest "chaff". The word "not" in the sentence "I do not like rain" is wheat and "do" is chaff. For human understanding of the purpose and behavior of "source code," we hypothesize that the same holds. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest). [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Researchers and instructors have only recently embraced the role of errors as vehicles for learning in the algebra classroom. Studying a mixture of correct and incorrect worked examples has been shown to be beneficial relative to correct worked examples alone. This study examines the effectiveness of having students generate, or anticipate, errors another student might make. Five Algebra 1 sections at a suburban mid-Atlantic public high school participated amid an early equation-solving unit. During teacher-led instruction, all five sections examined 2-3 correct worked examples. The final example varied across conditions. One section received an additional correct worked example. Two sections examined an incorrect worked example. The remaining two sections engaged in an error anticipation exercise where the teacher wrote an equation on the board and asked the students to predict errors another student might make in solving. The study measured conceptual and procedural knowledge, encoding ability, and student-generated errors. Although no meaningful significant differences were found, students in the error anticipation condition saw no difference in performance in conceptual and procedural items versus those who examined incorrect worked examples. Analysis that combined the error anticipation and incorrect worked examples conditions showed that those students trended toward outperforming those who examined correct examples only on procedural items. These results support further examination of error anticipation as a worthwhile instructional activity. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The purpose of the current study was to examine the differences between number and types of administration and scoring errors made by administration method (digital/Q-Interactive vs. paper-and-pencil) on the Wechsler Intelligence Scales for Children (WISC-V). WISC-V administration and scoring checklists were developed in order to provide an assessment of competency. Master's-level and doctoral-level graduate students in the School Psychology program at St. John's University administered selected WISC-V subtests to a research assistant, who provided fabricated examinee responses from a script. The session was video recorded and two raters independently coded administration and scoring errors made by reviewing the recording and the completed test protocol. The results of the current research examined the total number of administration and scoring errors made by graduate students on the paper-and-pencil and digital WISC-V methods as well as the most common types of errors made for each format. Differences between the number and types of errors made on the paper-and-pencil and digital administration methods revealed lower mean error rates for the digital method across certain subtests and types of errors. Implications for the utility of digital versus the paper-and-pencil method are discussed. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]