Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2019, Instructional Technology (Education)

The study sought to investigate to what extent a technology-integration course constructed with guidance from the Learning By Design (LBD) instructional approach and TPACK instructional methods facilitates preservice teachers' TPACK development at a mid-sized Midwestern university in the United States. The study employed a case study approach and utilized multiple data collection methods, including a TPACK survey instrument, which was used to identify the changes in TPACK as perceived knowledge after the LBD-based course; content document analysis to gauge TPACK as applied knowledge in the preservice teachers' teaching products produced during the LBD process; and analysis of participant interviews to investigate the preservice teachers' interpretation of their technology-integration experience during the LBD process. Results indicated a significant change in preservice teachers' TPACK in the knowledge domains of TCK, TPK, and TPACK, with effect sizes ranging from medium to large. The findings from the content document analysis indicate that the preservice teachers reflected their self-confidence in TPACK in their instructional practices. When the participants felt that their TPK, TCK, and TPACK increased, they reflected an application of them in their teaching products. Among the aforementioned integrative knowledge constructs, the preservice teachers' application of TPK was the highest, and it involves utilizing technology to enhance students' learning and meet diverse learners' needs. The findings reveal that the preservice teachers had difficulty applying TCK as an integrative form of knowledge. The findings from the interview analysis revealed that Learning By Design helps develop preservice teachers' confidence regarding using technology integration in their future classroom teaching. Some of the major LBD benefits included providing preservice teachers with hands-on teaching experience with technology that allowed them to draw upon their previous pedagogical (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: David Moore (Committee Chair) Subjects: Curriculum Development; Design; Education; Educational Technology; Educational Tests and Measurements

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Akron, 2024, Psychology-Counseling

High levels of discrimination and violence as well as requirements for gender affirming medical interventions lead trans patients to seek out mental health services at high rates. However, mental health providers are underprepared to serve the unique needs of trans patients. Trans patients report a variety of barriers to accessing competent therapeutic services, including trans-specific microaggressions and a dearth of adequately trained providers. All existing instruments that measure trans counseling competence rely solely on provider self-report, despite numerous foundational issues with self-report of cultural competence. This dissertation study represents the initial steps in the development of a measure of trans counseling competence, as reported by patients themselves. An initial list of 98 items was generated through literature review and qualitative focus groups and interviews with trans community members. These items were sent to four content area experts for feedback on item content as well as measure instructions and response options. Substantial edits were made in accordance with expert feedback, and a list of 103 potential items, along with a measure of social desirability and a demographics questionnaire, was presented to participants. Inclusion criteria for the study included age ≥ 18 years, self-identification as trans or gender diverse, at least one prior experience in formal mental health treatment, and the ability to read English. Participants were recruited through social media, University of Akron SONA research systems, and 30 LGBTQ+ centers that agreed to share the survey with their constituents. 402 initial survey responses were recorded; after screening and cleaning the data, 185 participants were retained for primary analyses. Items were removed one at a time based on their performance on a variety of measures, including component loadings and cross loadings, correlations with social desirability, and amount of “not applicable” responses, (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dawn Johnson (Advisor); Ingrid Weigold (Committee Member); Margo Gregor (Committee Member); Varunee Sanggangjanavanich (Committee Member); Toni Bisconti (Committee Member) Subjects: Psychology; Psychotherapy

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Social Work

The general role of the school social worker is to provide services and supports to address barriers to the academic, social, emotional, and physical well-being of all students. This role includes all aspects of the school environment and climate. Teachers play an essential role in creating a culture where students believe they are capable and belong. Teacher well-being is critical to optimize student well-being and outcomes and promoting teacher well-being should be a consideration to fostering healthy schools. The positive interactions and relationships that teachers cultivate with students have a positive impact on the well-being of both parties. While research has acknowledged the significance of teacher-student relationships, the majority of studies have primarily focused on the student. There is a notable gap in understanding the mechanisms behind developing teacher-student relationships and the individual and ecological factors that either foster or hinder them. Studying this phenomenon with the social work person-in-environment perspective serves to provide a comprehensive examination that includes individual, school, and system-level factors. School social workers' training in systems, mental health, and psychology positions them to assess and intervene to support teachers' relational efficacy. This study had two specific aims: (a) Explore teachers' perspectives of teacher-student relationships and the factors affecting building and maintaining positive teacher-student relationships in the school environment; (b) Utilize the teachers' perspective to design and validate a scale to measure K-12 teachers' feelings of capability and motivation to establish and maintain positive teacher-student relationships. This dissertation applied an exploratory sequential mixed methods approach to research, develop, and validate a measure of facilitators and barriers to teachers' motivation to establish and maintain positive relationships with students. Fo (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Natasha Bowen (Committee Chair); Kisha Radliff (Committee Member); Bridget Freisthler (Committee Member) Subjects: Education; Occupational Health; Social Work; Teacher Education; Teaching

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2022, Psychology/Clinical

The present research examined the perceived service and support needs of family members (i.e., partners, parents, other relatives) of individuals with PTSD. A major goal of the present research was to develop a self-report inventory of family needs suitable for assessment, research, and clinical uses. The present research consisted of two studies using independent samples of adult family members. Study 1 is a qualitative study that examined the personal accounts of services and supports reported as needs by 47 family members of people with PTSD. Thematic analysis of these accounts indicated that family members experienced a wide array of needs including Information Needs, Health and Wellness Needs, Service Type Needs, Service Quality Needs, Relationship Needs, and Community Needs. Grounded in the experiences of family members, the PTSD Family Support Needs Inventory (PFSNI), a 58 item self-report measure was developed for Study 2 that consisted of six domains to assess the degree of unmet family member needs. Study 2 examined psychometric properties of the PFSNI using an independent sample of 135 family members of adults living with PTSD. To help establish the validity of the PFSNI, Study 2 examined how scores on the PFSNI related to self-report measures that could help demonstrate criterion validity (PTSD Understanding measure), convergent validity (measures of Knowledge about PTSD, Caregiving Personal Gain, Caregiving Overload, Caregiving Burden, and Family Coping with PTSD), and discriminant validity (Social Desirability measure). The PFSNI demonstrated acceptable internal item consistency across needs domains and test-retest reliability over a two-week period. Exploratory hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicated that, even after accounting for demographics and severity of impact of PTSD and mental health on the family, the degree of participant unmet needs reported on the PFSNI significantly predicted family members' reports of well-being (i.e., C (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Catherine Stein Ph.D. (Advisor); Jenny Toonstra Ph.D. (Other); Dara Musher-Eizenman Ph.D. (Committee Member); Carolyn Tompsett Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Psychology

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 2021, Psychology

Teasing is a common but complex part of communication, especially when needing to distinguish between prosocial and antisocial intents/types. Its complexity may also explain the protracted development of prosocial-antisocial tease comprehension (PATC) into late childhood and continued difficulty with PATC into adolescence and adulthood. To understand this comprehension process, its development, and its difficulties, a measure is needed to study the nuances of PATC, but previous PATC measures are undermined by the lack of a theoretical basis and more intensive testing of and/or support for validity and reliability. This pair of studies begins the process of developing a new PATC measure based in social information processing theory (e.g., Dodge & Crick, 1990), which postulates that contextual and situational cues are used to navigate and comprehend complex, ambiguous social interactions. The measure features prosocial, antisocial, and ambiguous teases that vary in the number of cues and the specific cue categories (i.e., facial expression, gesture/body language, and relationship information) included. Study 1 tested the preliminary measure with a small sample, focusing on evaluation of tease types and participants' explanations for those evaluations to move beyond face validity and test the expectations for the measure. Study 2 improved the measure and identified items for a more finalized measure by having a much larger sample evaluate the tease types of possible items. The expectations for the measure from social information processing theory and past research were all supported to some extent and replicated across the studies. Namely, participants used cues present in a tease scenario to guide their reasoning about PATC. The more cues an item had, the better the PATC and accuracy were. There were differences in item and general measure performance by tease type, and, finally, different cue categories had different effects on PATC and accuracy. Altogether, these fi (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: John Gibbs PhD (Advisor); Stephen Petrill PhD (Committee Member); Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Psychology

EdD, University of Cincinnati, 2008, Education : Special Education

The purpose of this research was the development of a valid and reliable mathematics curriculum-based measure (MCBM) that can be used by early childhood programs and teachers to assess Number sense,the ongoing development of quantitative reasoning, in preschool children. This is important in light of the current focus on program accountability, as exemplified by the National Reporting System instituted by Head Start, implications of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, and the documentation of progress toward academic content standards required by many states. Previous attempts to develop assessment tools for measuring number sense have focused largely on memorized number facts and have not considered the pre-counting quantification skills described by Piaget and Kamii. Of further concern to educators is the difficulty in accurately assessing preschool children. For this reason, curriculum-based measures, which are aligned to classroom curriculum and can therefore inform planning and instructional decisions, are of particular interest. The hypothesis of the current research was that six measurable variables, quantification level, counting skills, comparison of sets, numeral recognition and understanding, combination of sets, and patterning, would make a significant contribution to the latent construct of number sense. The measurement tool was an interactive game, played between assessor and child, that consisted of a series of cards in a standardized order and teddy bear counters. The game was aligned to the curriculum of a licensed preschool center in Cincinnati, Ohio, from which a sample of 108 children, ages 3 to 5, was drawn during the 2006-07 school year. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to evaluate the hypothesized model. Results indicated a good model fit: χ2 (3, N = 108) = 4.246, p = .236; NFI =.990; CFI = .997; and RMSEA = .062. In addition, all standardized path coefficients demonstrated both statistical (p < .001) and practical significance (β > .3) (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Anne Bauer EdD (Committee Chair); Victoria Carr EdD (Committee Member); Peggy Elgas PhD (Committee Member); Wei Pan PhD (Other) Subjects: Educational Evaluation; Mathematics Education; Preschool Education; Special Education

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Toledo, 2007, Psychology

Individuals with Trichotillomania (TTM) engage in chronic, repetitive hair pulling, generally to the point of noticeable hair loss and considerable psychological distress. They may experience intense feelings of shame and guilt for engaging in this self-damaging behavior and for being unable to stop themselves from doing so. The current study was conducted to create and validate a new self-report measure to assess the broader suffering of TTM in adults. The measure developed, entitled the Hairpulling Distress and Impairment Scale (HDIS), could improve the ability of researchers and clinicians to assess individuals' experiences of TTM and chronic hairpulling and to better inform TTM treatment. A heterogeneous group of 1189 hair pullers participated in the study, which utilized online data collection. Participants completed an online set of measures which included the HDIS, Massachusetts General Hospital Hairpulling Scale, Massachusetts General Hospital Trichotillomania Impact Scale, modified Psychiatric Institute Trichotillomania Scale, Beck Depression Inventory, and Beck Anxiety Inventory. The HDIS demonstrated good internal reliability, and its test-retest reliability over a two to four week period was excellent. Factor analysis using a Varimax rotation revealed the presence of three meaningful factors: “Interference,” “Shame,” and “Control,” each of which demonstrated adequate internal reliability and excellent test-retest reliability. The first factor, called “Interference,” consisted of 15 items which measured the general distress of chronic hairpulling. Means and standard deviations were calculated for the total and subscale scores. A correlation matrix was generated to reveal relationships between the total scores on each of the measures. Convergent validity was assessed by comparing the HDIS with three measures of hairpulling severity, and moderate to strong positive correlations were found. Divergent validity was assessed by comparing the HDIS with the BDI a (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Wesley Bullock (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2004, Psychology

Effortful Control (EC) represents a general self-regulatory capacity that moderates the risk for the development of psychopathology in children, through effortful regulation of reactive types of regulatory responses (e.g. Negative Affectivity and Positive Affectivity) in individuals. EC reflects a unique temperamental dimension that involves attentional control and behavioral regulation. Existing measures of EC have been plagued by inconsistencies in EC's conceptualization, and few measures have been developed for older children. For Study 1, data from 222 children (age 11-15), using their responses to the Effortful Control Scale and Attentional Control Scale, were factor analyzed to develop a new self-report measure of EC and Impulsivity for older children. Exploratory factor analyses resulted in a four-factor solution corresponding to the dimensions of Persistence, Attentional Focusing, Attentional Shifting, and Impulsivity, similar to the factor structure and dimensions that have been established in previous research. Study 2 examined the reliability and validity of the new Revised EC Scale. Responses from the Revised EC Scale, TPANAS, and the Modified YSR were collected from 84 children (ages 11-14) in the Columbus, Ohio area. A confirmatory factor analysis of the Revised EC Scale indicated that the factor structure adequately fit the hypothesized factor structure obtained from Study 1. Although the Persistence, Attentional Focusing, and Impulsivity dimensions possessed adequate to high levels of reliability and stability, psychometric data obtained for the Attentional Shifting factor was poor. EC's divergent validity from Impulsivity was demonstrated through the constructs' differential relationships to indices of internalizing and externalizing problems. The moderating influence of some of the EC factors on levels of NA, but not PA, to decrease the risk for internalizing and externalizing problems, was partly supported. Some of the EC factors' were also demons (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Michael Vasey (Advisor); Steve Beck (Other); Herbert Mirels (Other) Subjects: Psychology, Clinical

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2007, Psychology (Arts and Sciences)

Current measures of sexual risk taking are either too narrowly focused to be used with college students or do not have adequate psychometric properties. The goal of the current study was to develop a broad and psychometrically sound measure of sexual risk taking. Three hundred and ten undergraduate students at a mid-sized Midwestern university were surveyed to develop and gather reliability and validity information on a new measure of sexual risk, the Sexual Risk Survey. Sex differences were also explored throughout the study. The measure was found to be multidimensional with five factors. The measure demonstrated good internal consistency and test-retest reliability as well as convergent, discriminant, and concurrent validity. Although there were no sex differences in total sexual risk taking behaviors reported over the past 6 months, differences emerged in the variables that predicted sexual risk taking. Implications for these findings are discussed.

Committee: John Garske (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Akron, 2008, Counseling Psychology

The goal of this study was to create a questionnaire designed to measure the barriers to career choice that exist for individuals who have criminal records (i.e., ex-offenders). This measure was based on the social cognitive career theory (SCCT; Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994) choice model, which postulates that barriers related to three components of the model (i.e., person inputs, background contextual affordances, and proximal contextual influences) may limit career choice. Items for this measure were developed based on a review of literature related to barriers to career choice that exist for ex-offenders, ethnic minority group members, women, low socioeconomic status group members, individuals who abuse substances, and individuals who have mental illness. After preliminary efforts were taken to refine the measure (i.e., having it reviewed by experts on the population of ex-offenders, researchers who have developed barriers measures, an SCCT expert, and a small group of ex-offenders, as well as a pilot test with 50 ex-offenders), it was given to individuals who have at least one criminal conviction and have searched for a job while having that conviction on their records. An Exploratory Factor Analysis was used to determine whether the underlying factor structure of the measure's items was consistent with the principles of social cognitive career theory. Contrary to this hypothesis, the measure demonstrated eight factors that consisted of more complex factor structures than the general constructs of person and environment, or even the separation of distal and proximal environmental influences.

Committee: David Tokar PhD (Advisor) Subjects: African Americans; Behaviorial Sciences; Criminology; Demographics; Gender; Law; Mental Health; Occupational Psychology; Psychology; Social Psychology; Social Research; Social Structure; Social Work; Sociology; Therapy; Vocational Education; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Akron, 2006, Psychology-Industrial/Organizational

Feedback orientation, a construct proposed by London and Smither (2002), is an individual's overall receptivity to feedback. The current research developed and validated a multidimensional measure of feedback orientation. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses found support for four dimensions: utility, accountability, social awareness, and feedback self-efficacy. Substantial support was also found for the reliability and validity of each of these dimensions across two distinct samples. This new instrument, the Feedback Orientation Scale (FOS), is a valuable tool for researchers and practitioners to better understand individual differences in the feedback process.

Committee: Paul Levy (Advisor) Subjects:

PHD, Kent State University, 2013, College of Education, Health and Human Services / School of Foundations, Leadership and Administration

This study examined the multilevel factors that influence mathematics and English performance on the Primary Leaving Examinations (PLEs) among primary seven pupils (i.e., equivalent to the United States [U.S.] 7th graders) in Uganda. Existing student state test data from the Wakiso District were obtained. In addition, a newly created Teacher Quality Measure (TQM) was used to collect teacher data from the same district. Pupil data from primary seven (7th grade) and the TQM data were analyzed via Rasch Analysis, Analysis of Covariance, and Hierarchical Linear Modeling to investigate the following two main objectives: (1) Developing a behavioral frequency measure of teacher quality for Ugandan teachers, (2) Examining the relationship between pupil-, teacher-, and school-level factors on pupil achievement on the PLEs in Uganda. Specific to the first objective, it was found that a psychometrically sound measure of teacher quality can be developed. The results rendered a 38-question measure focusing on four domains: (1) Teacher Planning and Preparation, (2) Classroom Environment, (3) Teacher Instruction, and (4) Teacher Professionalism. The second objective found that there are no significant differences between boys and girls on English achievement controlling for prior ability in English. However, there were significant differences between the sexes on mathematics achievement, with boys having higher scores. Additionally, the results showed that there is a significant relationship between student SES (i.e., boarding and day schools) and student achievement, with higher SES students (i.e., boarding schools) having higher achievement. It was also found that teacher TQM scores were a significant predictor of student PLE mathematics and English test scores, with higher teacher quality rendering higher student mathematics and English scores. There was also a significant difference between school types (i.e., urban and rural) on student achievement in mathemati (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Aryn Karpinski Dr. (Committee Chair); Tricia Niesz Dr (Committee Member); Andrew Lepp Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Educational Evaluation