Learning

For decades, educational leadership researchers have focused on school leadership behaviors, competencies, and skills that impact student outcomes measured by the students’ performance on standardized tests. This practice has narrowed the focus for how the field approaches teaching and learning and the evaluation models that measure school, teacher, leader, and student academic performance. To examine leadership and teaching and learning that support the development of the whole child and not just their performance on exams, this quantitative study set out to examine: Is there a relationship between a school leadership teams’ prioritization of SEL, their instructional management practice, and the teachers’ use of SEL pedagogy in the classroom?
To examine the research question, a set of five sub-research questions were developed to organize and guide this work. Interest to participate in this study was gained by aligning the research to the district’s strategic plan. The sample included 107 teacher participants drawn from five participant public elementary schools in a large diverse urban school district. Data applied in the analysis were collected through the application of three instruments. Two of the instruments were developed and pilot tested as part of this research.
The results of this research indicate that despite the ample evidence that shows instructional management having a positive impact on student learning, its effect on the pedagogies examined that support the development of social and emotional competence was limited. The greatest contribution of this study was the development of a valid and reliable tool to evaluate ten social and emotional learning teacher/pedagogical practices.

Sparse thalamocortical cell population synchronicity during sleep spindle oscillations has been hypothesized to promote the integration of hippocampal memory information into associated neocortical representations 1. We asked the question of whether sparse or rhythmic activity in thalamocortical cells of the reuniens nucleus influence memory consolidation and cognitive flexibility during learning after sleep. For this study, I designed a novel attentional set-shifting task and incorporated optogenetics with closed-loop stimulation in sleeping rats to investigate the effects of sparse (nonrhythmic) or rhythmic spindle-like (~10Hz) activity in thalamic cells of the reuniens nucleus on learning and cognitive flexibility. We show that, as predicted, post-sleep setshifting performance improved after sleep with non-rhythmic optogenetic stimulation in the thalamic nucleus reuniens relative to rhythmic optogenetic stimulation. While both non-rhythmic and rhythmic optogenetic stimulation led to an increase in perseverative errors, only non-rhythmic optogenetic stimulation showed effects of learning from errors, which correlated with sleep, and which ultimately had a net benefit in set-shifting performance compared to rhythmic optogenetic stimulation and the control group.

The purpose of this quasi experimental, two group pretest posttest quantitative design study was to explore the influence of content delivery method for a lifetime fitness or wellness course on the impact of student learning outcomes. Also, student satisfaction of the course and instructor were examined. Specifically, two teaching methods of instruction were examined: the flipped classroom model (FCM) and the traditional lecture model (TLM). Cheng, Ritzhaupt, and Antonenko’s (2019) “Effects of the Flipped Classroom Instructional Strategy on Students’ Learning Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis,” which looked at 55 publications between 2000 and 2016, found statistically significant results in favor of the flipped classroom instructional strategy on student learning outcomes. Therefore, it was hypothesized that the flipped classroom model would improve undergraduate students’ learning outcomes of understanding of health content knowledge, physical activity level, physical fitness, and course satisfaction for a college-level lifetime fitness or wellness course as opposed to the traditional lecture class normally taught. Pretest and posttest data were collected.

This study evaluated the effects of feedback and learning process on students' mathematics achievement scores. The topic of instruction was factoring polynomials. Feedback had two levels, knowledge-of-correctness with explanation of error (KCE) and knowledge-of-correctness with branching to similar problems (KCB). Learning process had two levels as measured by the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT), verbal and figural. The subjects were 74 south Florida junior college students enrolled in one of four Intermediate Algebra classes. Subjects were placed into one of four groups by stratified random sampling: (1) verbal and KCE; (2) verbal and KCB; (3) figural and KCE; and, (4) figural and KCB. Two CAI packages delivered instruction and feedback. They eliminated teacher variance and differed only in the type of feedback given to a subject's incorrect response. One contained KCE while the other contained KCB. The two independent variables were feedback and learning process. The dependent variables were immediate posttest scores and one-week delayed posttest scores. Analysis of covariance between the posttest scores and the independent variables was calculated using pretest scores as the covariate. No significant difference in mathematics achievement scores was found for either the types of feedback or the types of learning process. However, a significant interaction effect between feedback and learning process was found. Subjects who were dominant verbal learners receiving KCE and subjects who were dominant figural learners receiving KCB had mathematics achievement scores significantly higher than subjects who were dominant verbal learners receiving KCB and subjects who were dominant figural learners receiving KCE.

Number perception, its neural basis and its relationship to how numerical stimuli are presented have been challenging research topics in cognitive neuroscience for many years. A primary question that has been addressed is whether the perception of the quantity of a visually presented number stimulus is dissociable from its early visual perception. The present study examined the possible influence of visual quality judgment on quantity judgments of numbers. To address this issue, volunteer adult subjects performed a mental number comparison task in which two-digit stimulus numbers (Arabic number format), among the numbers between 31 and 99 were mentally compared to a memorized reference number, 65. Reaction times (RTs) and neurophysiological (i.e. electroencephalographic (EEG) data) responses were acquired simultaneously during performance of the two-digit number comparison task. In this particular quantity comparison task, the number stimuli were classified into three distance factors. That is, numbers were a close, medium or far distance from the reference number (i.e., 65). In order to evaluate the relationship between numerical stimulus quantity and quality, the number stimuli were embedded in varying degrees of a typical visual noise form, known as "salt and pepper noise" (e.g., the visual noise one perceives when viewing a photograph taken with a dusty camera lens). In this manner, the visual noise permitted visual quality to be manipulated across three levels: no noise, medium noise (approximately 60% degraded visual quality from nonoise), and dense noise (75% degraded visual quality from no-noise).

This dissertation studies the neural basis of song, a universal human behavior. The relationship of words and melodies in the perception of song at phonological, semantic, melodic, and rhythmic levels of processing was investigated using the fine temporal resolution of Electroencephalography (EEG). The observations reported here may shed light on a ubiquitous human experience and also inform the discussion of whether language and music share neural resources or recruit domain-specific neural mechanisms. Experiment 1 was designed to determine whether words and melody in song are processed interactively or independently. Participants listened to sung words in which the melodies and/or the words were similar or different, and performed a same/different task while attending to the linguistic and musical dimensions in separate blocks of trials. Event-Related Potentials and behavioral data converged in showing interactive processing between the linguistic and musical dimensions of sung words, regardless of the direction of attention. In particular, the N400 component, a well-established marker of semantic processing, was modulated by musical melody. The observation that variations in musical features affect lexico-semantic processing in sung language was a novel finding with implications for shared neural resources between language and music. Experiment 2 was designed to explore the idea that well-aligned text-settings, in which the strong syllables occur on strong beats, capture listeners' attention and help them understand song lyrics. EEG was recorded while participants listened to sung sentences whose linguistic stress patterns were well-aligned, misaligned, or had variable alignment with the musical meter, and performed a lexical decision task on subsequently presented visual targets.