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The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted education systems worldwide, exacerbating longstanding educational disparities, particularly concerning technology access and utilization. This qualitative study explores amplified technology inequities in rural New Mexico education, capturing students' experiences through the lens of teachers. Using a single-site case study, the research will employ purposeful sampling techniques to select participants with relevant experiences during the pandemic. Four in-depth interviews are conducted with teachers. The data analysis reveals themes and patterns related to the challenges faced by rural New Mexico education during the pandemic. The study examines how education systems adapt to the unprecedented circumstances and implement innovative solutions to ensure learning continuity. These findings provide valuable insights to understanding technology disparities of education in rural New Mexico and informs policy recommendations to address these gaps in the future. [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 qualitative descriptive study was to explore how high school administrators perceived their foundational knowledge necessary to lead in technology and implement the ISTE for Education Leaders at a school district in Texas. The research used the International Society for Technology in Education for Education Leaders as a conceptual framework. Two research questions guided the study. Data were collected through individual interviews and a focus group with school administrators. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. Themes found regarding the research were: 1) Administrators ensure students have skilled teachers who use technology, and students have access to technology that is ethical and safe; 2) Administrators ensure students are ready for the 21st-century, and students have technology that is up-to-date to foster growth; 3) Administrators support educators in their use of technology, in using technology to evaluate students and ensuring they themselves are up-to-date with the latest technology standards; 4) Administrators implement the ISTE for Education Leaders through professional development, team leadership, resource sufficiency and partnerships with the community; and 5) Administrators implement the ISTE for Education Leaders through participation in online learning networks and engagement in reflective practices through meetings and by data reports. [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.]

Little is known about the extent to which higher-education faculty members required help and resources transitioning back to face-to-face teaching and learning both during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Problems have included (a) determining the best resources and technologies for faculty members to use in the classroom in order to ensure that students feel safe and engaged, (b) identifying best practices that faculty members can implement to improve their skills in response to the pandemic, and (c) the need for professional development to help faculty members implement available technologies in the classroom properly. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which higher-education faculty members required help and resources transitioning back to face-to-face teaching and learning both during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to understand the needs of faculty members returning to face-to-face teaching and learning, the researcher conducted semi-structured interviews with 10 faculty members at a small, private university in rural Ohio. The interviews were recorded and transcribed into Word documents, coding strategies were applied to the transcripts, and common themes were identified. The findings for RQ1 resulted in three themes: (a) assistance with technology, (b) assistance communicating with students, and (c) assistance accessing and implementing strategic tools. The findings for RQ2 resulted in two themes: (a) consistency in enforcing protocols and (b) support services. The findings for RQ3 resulted in two themes: (a) figuring out how to connect with students and (b) developing new strategies for implementing technology. Recommendations for practice include (a) developing a crisis management plan, (b) creating policies aimed at helping students obtain personal electronic devices, and (c) creating a central repository of teaching ideas in response to the demands of a pandemic. Recommendations for further research include (a) exploring the perceptions of students in addition to teachers regarding their needs and preferences of learning modalities in response to a pandemic or other emergency, (b) analyzing and evaluating the protocols that other universities implement to support faculty members during periods of crisis, and (c) including faculty members from a more diverse number of academic departments within the university. [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.]

With the development of increasingly advanced technologies, interactions with and via these technologies have become even more central to human activity. Technology is utilized in both sanctioned and unsanctioned ways within language and literacy classrooms around the world making questions, concerns, and curiosities around educational potentials and ethical consequences abundant (Holmes et. al, 2021). Even as online interactions across national, cultural, ideological, linguistic, and virtual borders become more frequent and complex, equity in these interactions has not increased and representation remains disproportionate (Acey et al., 2021). Material modes and tools of communicative practices are complicit in the ways groups and individuals engage amongst, and make meaning of, themselves and global peers. In this dissertation, I engage a New Materialist framework (Braidotti 2013; Barad 2007) to complicate notions of agency and authorship in my analysis of data from an ethnographically informed study exploring the meaning making and literacy practices of youth engaging in transnational, digital communication. This thesis examines the everyday digital literacy practices and material entanglements within which youth participants in Mexico, Uganda, and the United States make sense of themselves and others through materially-discursive practices (Barad 2007). Through my analysis, I found that in these engagements meaning making was an emergence of layered, local histories, and embodied experience. I also examined the differential roles similar technologies and platforms took up in different contexts finding that digital literacy holds the potential for both oppression and liberation. I end this dissertation with implications for research and pedagogy along with a call for researchers and educators to critically examine and responsibly engage with the unintended outcomes of digital literacy entanglements in order to inform critical language and literacy pedagogy that is relevant and responsive to the globalizing and digitally mediated landscape of the 21st century. [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.]

Healthcare professionals and individuals underutilize substance use screenings, driving exploration of innovative approaches like virtual agent-guided screening. This study assessed the virtual counselor app's equivalence to in-person evaluation for substance use screening. Participants also completed a user experience questionnaire and a debriefing interview, ensuring comprehensive evaluation. The study had 204 undergraduates enrolled, all of whom underwent both virtual and in-person evaluations. Participants were randomly assigned to be administered the AUDIT-10 or DAST-10. Two one-sided t-tests indicated that the results from the screening were equivalent. This suggests that both methods produce similar results in identifying substance use. The in-person sessions were rated significantly higher for focused attention, perceived usability, and satisfaction compared to virtual counselor sessions. The debriefing interview revealed that while more people favored using the virtual counselor than not, some expressed uncertainty about utilizing it in real life. Participants' feedback on the virtual counselor platform also revealed common themes, including improving the counselor's visual presentation, enhancing the virtual environment, creating personalized interactions, modernizing visual elements, and refining audio. These findings suggest that while virtual agent-guided substance use screening is equivalent to in-person screenings in terms of accuracy, there are notable differences in user experience. Future studies should prioritize the enhancement of user experience in these applications to ensure its acceptance and integration into healthcare operations. The potential benefits of virtual screening, combined with a positive user experience, could improve the accessibility and effectiveness of substance use screening in healthcare. [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 dissertation consists of three chapters that contribute to the fields of macroeconomics, economic development, and entrepreneurship. In the first chapter, "Entrepreneurship Selection and Performance in the U.S. and Across Countries: The Role of Human Capital," I seek to establish a set of stylized facts related to entrepreneurship and human capital, the latter being proxied by years of formal education. Analyzing individual-level survey data from nearly 100 countries unveils new empirical facts: there is a strong positive link between the mean-adjusted rate of entrepreneurship for higher educated individuals and output per worker or estimated total factor productivity (TFP). Further focus on the U.S. economy, again at the micro level, reveals a non-linear and time-varying relationship between the rate of entrepreneurship and educational attainment exhibiting an asymmetric U-shape with its left branch declining over time. At the same time, higher education is strongly positively associated--not U-shaped--with numerous measures of business outcomes among active firm owners/managers. Conditioning on a rich set of socioeconomic and demographic observables, the robustness of these results is confirmed under proper repeated imputation inference. The second chapter, "Entrepreneurship, Human Capital, and the Allocation of Talent," raises new points of inquiry and attempts to enrich the discussion in the relevant literature. Is the allocation of human capital between entrepreneurs and workers a key determinant of aggregate productivity and income? How pervasive are its implications for macro-development? To organize the discourse on addressing these questions, I propose a versatile heterogeneous-agent model with occupational and educational choices, which is able to rationalize the empirical findings of Chapter 1 while remaining broadly consistent with aggregate and survey data. Under the hypothesis that entrepreneurial human capital may enhance productive capacities via costly technology adoption, the entrepreneurship-education nexus has first-order aggregate and distributional consequences. As new generations build skills through schooling and form expectations about their future labor market prospects, this mechanism also affects the accumulation of human capital economy-wide. Calibrating the model to the U.S. economy is successful in replicating a wide spectrum of targeted and non-targeted moments, thereby capturing salient features of micro and macro data. Quantitative explorations suggest sizeable and persistent losses in output and total factor productivity (TFP) across nations due to inadequate complementarity between idiosyncratic talent and human capital. This novel channel can often account for a major share of cross-country income differences vis-a-vis the U.S., as it drastically affects both factor accumulation and endogenous TFP formation. In the third chapter, "Sometimes Less is More: Growth, Risk Aversion, and the Suboptimality of Entrepreneurial Insurance" (joint work with Neville N. Jiang, Ping Wang, and Haibin Wu), we aim to address two major research questions. Is promoting entrepreneurship always conducive to long-run economic growth? To what extent should policymakers strive to insure entrepreneurial risk away? We study these questions by developing a tractable endogenous growth model with occupational choice, where individuals are heterogeneous in their risk attitude and entrepreneurial ability. Less risk-averse and sufficiently productive agents become entrepreneurs and contribute to growth by expanding product variety. More risk-averse and less productive agents become workers and foster growth by enhancing human and physical capital formation. As occupational choice induces an inverse association between risk tolerance and entrepreneurial talent at the margin, encouraging firm creation may hinder aggregate productivity. The interplay of these forces leads to a non-monotone relationship between the rates of entrepreneurship and balanced growth. A competitive equilibrium entails suboptimal allocations with either too few or too many active entrepreneurs, even in the absence of distortions or financial frictions. Insuring some entrepreneurial risk away is almost always growth-enhancing, but it is almost surely never optimal to provide full insurance. Calibrating the model to U.S. data reveals substantial output-side misallocation, with most of income growth and aggregate TFP losses stemming from the intensive margin due to the presence of risk aversion. [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 dissertation was developed in response to a long-standing imperative for teachers and scholars of writing: the need to meet students where they are (technologically) and keep up with emerging writing technologies. Said differently, when an emerging writing technology comes on the scene, teachers of writing tend to develop theoretical and pedagogical approaches for students' use of that technology in the writing classroom. While the imperative to keep up is well-meaning, the attempt can feel futile or, at the very least, pedagogically frustrating. This frustration is often fueled by permanent innovation, or when a culture's technological innovation outpaces its ability to adapt to and for those technologies. To address the ever-evolving difficulties inherent within the relationship between writing, developing technologies, and teaching writing, this dissertation offers the field of Composition a path through the futility and frustration represented by keeping up. I call this intervention Composition's "Technological Boneyard," or more simply, "the boneyard." The boneyard is first and foremost a metaphor, an imagined dumping ground that contains the obsolete, trashed, and forgotten technologies of writing that Composition has used and discarded in its move toward its "raison d'etre": the study and teaching of writing. Brimming with obsolete and discarded technologies of writing--like the first personal computers, floppy and hard disks, keyboards, and early mobile devices--the boneyard allows Composition to (re)investigate its technological and techno-pedagogical history, as well as its current relationships with developing technologies and writing. Through two qualitative case studies, this dissertation investigates the technologies in the boneyard and considers how abandoned, obsolete, and forgotten writing tools have shaped (and continue to shape) the teaching of writing in higher education, as well as Composition's own history. [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 was undertaken to provide ways to strengthen and enhance existing online courses and to assist music educators in creating new online classes that are effective and engaging for students. Prior to the pandemic there was a clear lack of instructional expectations, guidance for online music education, and technical support for content development. Training initiatives and support for online education were launched during the pandemic, however, the findings from this study revealed that these initiatives were not adequate in assisting music educators, who found themselves needing to supplement their online classes with knowledge and resources from online communities of practice and assistance from colleagues. Based on the analysis of online courses and methods, a 15-week professional development course design with synchronous and asynchronous components was created and evaluated to guide music educators in creating effective and engaging online courses. The online course design created for this study was intended to prepare primary, secondary, and postsecondary music educators in designing and implementing effective and engaging online courses through the exploration of issues surrounding content development, learning, and teaching online. The study was informed by the literature surrounding the related issues of teaching online and the necessary considerations to create and implement an effective and engaging online course. An overview of issues related to instructors, students, and content development was reviewed with additional consideration of the specific issues for instructors outlined in Kebritchi et al., (2017). The findings from this study supported the related literature that the instructor is the most critical factor in the effectiveness of a course. The course design was evaluated, modified, and refined given the analyzed data collected in three phases. The first phase included a review of the course design by three academic scholars with experience in online education and music technology. The second phase included three synchronous meetings with a public middle school music teacher, who had experience with music technology, to review the content, sequence, modules, and assignments. The final phase of data collection concluded with semi-structured interviews of five music educators, who reviewed the course design and provided their perspectives and experience with online education. The sample population from Phase 3 included music educators from across the United States in K-12 private and public schools, higher education, and private studios. This study found that an engaging online course involves the instructor's understanding of how to effectively present and deliver course content in an online environment and how to build an online community that fosters student engagement. The findings from this study supported that an instructor's content delivery must be adapted for an online environment as a digital setting requires unique pedagogical, social, managerial, and facilitation skills than traditional in-person methods (Hurlbut, 2018). The findings suggest that effective training for online music educators include models of developed content, guidance in adapting existing content for an online environment, an introduction to available resources for music educators and students, and ways to integrate interactive elements to effectively design and deliver online music courses and engage students. [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 problem of the study was to determine if the use of a reflective writing assessment at the beginning, middle, and end of a college semester indicated an industrial technology student's knowledge and skills related to technological and engineering literacy. Experiences gained during project-based learning activities were used as the basis for this study. This descriptive study examined the reflective writing abilities of junior and senior year college students enrolled in a university's industrial technology program of study by administering a reflective writing assignment three times over a semester of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) course, STEM 320, Manufacturing and Construction Technology. Participants included industrial technology student participants from this course and an instructor interviewed during the fall 2022 semester. Students enrolled in an industrial design class, STEM 382, during the spring 2023 semester were interviewed to provide support for the written reflection portion of the study. Results indicate that using reflective writing assessments during project-based learning assignments throughout the semester with students who are experienced in performing projects demonstrates students' abilities to articulate the foundational core of what it means to be technologically and engineering literate. [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 qualitative descriptive study explored the experiences and perceptions of older, self-employed workers born before 1980 regarding computer self-efficacy related to communication technology before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings of this study provided insight into their perception of age as an influencer on their use of communication technology. In addition, how they sourced their confidence and skills to use communication technology was investigated. Finally, how they perceived their efficacy in using communication technology during a time of disruption, such as the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on the reliance on remote communication technology, was examined. This study focused on 12 older, self-employed workers born before 1980 who gave descriptions of their perceptions and experiences. As study participants, each worker engaged in semi-structured interviews, which resulted in six themes that constitute this study's findings. These six themes are Ability, Conception, Motivation, Confidence, Lifelong Learning, and Attitude. The discussion of these findings consisted of these six themes viewed from the perspective of the concept of computer self-efficacy, theorized from self-efficacy theory. Key findings include that some participants would view age as a positive influence or noninfluence when they reflected on their lifelong experiences using communication technologies, yet some were still aware and impacted by a societal age-based digital divide. The study found that older, self-employed workers were self-directed learners and that they described the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on the necessity of remote work as motivating them to successfully increase their current communication technology use and adopt new types of communication technology. [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 male allyship, a growing trend in the Technology (Tech.) sector, from the perspective of women who work or have worked in the industry. This qualitative case study consisted of a sample of ten women and ten self-identified male allies from the industry along with three men and four women who participated exclusively in a focus group discussion. All 27 participants had a standard criterion to qualify as volunteers for the study and were introduced to the same research questions in the interview protocol: (1) How do women identify male allies? (2) How do women learn from male allyship? and (3) What attributes do male allies possess to be successful in supporting women from the women's perspective? Findings show that women identified male allies unknowingly and in professional working environments, where male allyship became associated with helping women achieve transformative outcomes in their careers. Bandura's theory of reciprocal determinism was used as a framework to demonstrate how women are central to driving the learning from male allyship through self-directedness and by operating with agency in their organizational environment. Women described men taking an active stance on behalf of women and being allies in their existing professional responsibilities as the most successful attributes of being an ally. The study concludes with a recommendation to incorporate the study findings into an academic curriculum for men and women interested in practicing allyship in a cohort based academic setting. It also recommends organizations embed allyship in all business activities to help men become better allies to women. This study provides timely guidance for individuals and organizations seeking to engage male allies in gender equity initiatives. [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.]