This dissertation investigates the role of multimedia applications in enhancing student engagement in higher education, with a particular focus on the dynamics of asynchronous discussion forums and lurking behaviors. Leveraging multimedia applications facilitates dynamic, inquiry-based discussions that promote deeper cognitive engagement and learning. Despite the potential benefits, current higher education practices often fail to optimally integrate discussion forums with video learning content, the structure and nature of the online discussion seem play an important role in its effectiveness. Through two empirical studies, this research explores the impact of discussion types, the strategic placement of multimedia content, and the nuances of lurking behaviors on student engagement and learning outcomes. Study 1 validates the Lurking Engagement Survey (LES), distinguishing lurking behaviors across superficial to deep cognitive levels using the ICAP framework. It identifies lurking as a multifaceted behavior influenced by personal, technological, and social factors. Study 2 examines the interplay of discourse modes and position layouts in multimedia learning environments, revealing no significant effects on learning outcomes but highlighting the importance of aligning multimedia design with learners' prior knowledge and task structure. The findings challenge prevailing assumptions about the effectiveness of spatial contiguity in multimedia learning and suggest that other factors, such as learner characteristics and content complexity, play more crucial roles. This dissertation contributes to educational literature by offering a nuanced understanding of lurking, not merely as passive participation but as an agentic, context-dependent form of engagement. It underscores the variability of lurking behaviors across educational contexts, advocating for educational strategies that recognize and leverage both visible and invisible forms of engagement to enhance learning efficacy. Practical implications of this research include the need for instructional designs that accommodate various forms of engagement and align multimedia elements with individual learning needs. Future research directions are suggested, focusing on the exploration of additional contextual factors and the development of methodological innovations to measure lurking more effectively. Overall, this dissertation advances our understanding of multimedia learning environments in higher education, providing valuable insights into the complex dynamics of student engagement and the strategic design of learning interactions.

Choosing a video streaming service to subscribe to involves a complex decision-making process consisting of multifaceted factors that consumers must carefully consider. This dissertation identifies and examines the factors influencing consumers’ decisions by reviewing research from diverse fields such as human factors, psychology, economics, and human-computer interaction. The identified factors shaping consumers’ choices, in order of importance, are advertisements, social value, price, content, and content discovery methods. Additionally, this study assesses consumers’ willingness to pay for each factor and examines whether their perceived explanation of their choice of platform aligns with the behavior in the choice experiments. Opportunities for future research are discussed including, the potential for developing an algorithm to determine one’s likelihood of subscribing to a streaming platform based on the choice heuristics outlined in this study.

Encouraging women’s pursuit and retention in higher education has been an important movement in the United States over the last several decades. While there has been considerable progress, women are still underrepresented in fields related to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). The most significant gender gap being engineering, where women make up only 21% of all engineering majors. Lack of self-efficacy is one variable that has been implicated as a barrier for women in engineering, due to implicit and explicit biases and discrimination women experience relating to engineering in higher education. Self-compassion has been shown to be strongly correlated with self-efficacy, with explanations theorized at the level of each positive subcomponent: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness. The current study investigates the effects of a self-compassion mindstate induction (SCMI) intervention on engineering self-efficacy compared to a control group. This study also explores gender and race discrimination from faculty and peers in the participants' environment to observe if this plays a role in the effect of the intervention. Women (N = 73) majoring in engineering were recruited from a large southwestern university to participate. A multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) was conducted, revealing a significant three-way interaction for condition type (SCMI or control), discrimination scores, and engineering self-efficacy from Time 1 to Time 2 (F(1, 69) = 6.51, p = .01). The results of this study suggest that participants in the SCMI condition experienced a significant increase in engineering self-efficacy from Time 1 to Time 2 when controlling for discrimination in the women's environment. Self-compassion based interventions that have the potential to increase engineering self-efficacy may be particularly helpful to women who experience more gender and race discrimination in their environment. Future work should be done to examine discrimination more directly in the context of self-compassion and engineering self-efficacy. These results show promise for using brief, accessible, cost-free, positive psychology interventions to support women pursuing engineering in higher education. This research contributes to the literature aiming to address gender disparities in engineering higher education, laying the groundwork for future interventions that support underrepresented populations in STEM.

This dissertation features three pieces of scholarship which showcase and demonstrate an ethic of queerness for engineering education research (EER). The concept of an ethic of queerness is introduced and constructed in Chapter 1 using tenets from the philosophy of pragmatism, systems thinking, critical theory, and the personal and collective experiences of queered communities immersed in normative spaces, such as engineering and engineering education. Chapter 2 is a scoping literature review on the state of research on the LGBTQIA+ engineering student experience compared to other relevant fields, revealing that EER is still nascent on the topic. Chapter 3 leverages arts-based qualitative inquiry to explore the opportunities and limitations of mixed-initiative creative interfaces (MICIs) when used as a tool for self care by queer(ed) subjects. Chapter 4 connects Patricia Hill Collins’ insider/outsider paradox framework to recent engineering education research through collaborative autoethnographies, illuminating the ways in which normative, oppressive social discourses are embedded within the EER system. Although Chapters 2-4 feature their own unique methodology and topic of inquiry, they are united through a motivation to deconstruct and re-imagine sociotechnical systems throughout engineering and EER through the lens of radical queerness. Chapter 5 summarizes how each of the prior chapters aligns with queerness as an ethic and explores avenues of future work from this dissertation. More specifically, each chapter represents a way of queering engineering education research methodology through the embrace of ambiguity and ephemerality, particularly with regard to the ways in which the author’s subjectivity and relationality to the roles of researcher, student, engineer, and engineering education researcher emerged throughout their doctoral education.

The current study explores the extent to which literacy game performance can be used to assess reading comprehension skill and vocabulary knowledge. Standardized reading assessments have the benefit of years of validation across different age groups and reading comprehension levels, allowing teachers to evaluate students’ reading performance and relate it to a national standard. However, these assessments reduce classroom time for learning activities, which may be more authentic indicators of student progress. Students’ reading skills can be measured during learning activities by using game-based stealth assessment of literacy. Game-based assessment may be more enjoyable and less likely to invoke test anxiety than traditional assessments, but enjoyment may also impact the validity of the assessment. The current study recruited participants (n=405) to play five literacy games: CON-Artist, Paraphrase Quest, Fix It, Map Conquest, and Vocab Flash. Students also completed the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test (GMRT), which serves as a validated measure of reading comprehension skill and vocabulary knowledge. Students answered enjoyment questions after each game and the GMRT, and they completed the Cognitive Test Anxiety questionnaire, which measures trait-level negative thoughts about test-taking. The results indicate that Vocab Flash predicted 31% of variance in reading comprehension and 21% of variance in vocabulary knowledge. The other games were not predictive beyond Vocab Flash, but each of them was weakly correlated with reading comprehension skill and vocabulary knowledge. Three games were more enjoyable than GMRT Reading Comprehension, but no games were more enjoyable than GMRT Vocabulary. Cognitive Test Anxiety was negatively correlated with the GMRT and Vocab Flash, but not with the other games. Game enjoyment moderated the relationship between game performance and reading skill, albeit in differing directions. Paraphrase Quest was less predictive of reading comprehension for students who enjoyed the game, and Vocab Flash was more predictive of reading comprehension for those who enjoyed the game. The findings of this study suggest that a simple vocabulary game can be used to measure reading comprehension skill and vocabulary knowledge. Future research is needed to better understand how game-based assessments can be designed to minimize the effects of test anxiety and enjoyment on performance.

Past research on knowledge has differentiated between dimensions of knowledge, for example amount or coherence. This dissertation introduces a novel dimension of knowledge, the Motivational Utility of Knowledge (MUK), that is based on hierarchies of human needs (e.g., physical safety, status/esteem, actualization, reproduction). The effects of MUK are tested in a set of four studies on the topic of houselessness. All four studies used the same dataset. Adults in the United States (N = 190) were recruited from an online survey platform and paid for participation. They were first asked about their conceptions of houselessness. Next, they read a set of four texts arguing different views of houselessness, and administered a comprehension test, an emotion while reading test, and asked if the text conflicted with their beliefs. They were then reassessed on their conceptions and administered the MUK scale. Finally, they were given a demographics questionnaire, including questions about their personal experience with houselessness, and were administered a general prior knowledge test and a vocabulary knowledge test. Study 1 examined MUK as a construct and assessed the factor structure of the scale. The analyses showed that the subscales of MUK loaded onto a single factor – overall value of houselessness knowledge. Study 2 situated MUK within the domain of conceptual change. The results demonstrated that participants’ conceptions of houselessness were related to MUK, and that their propensity to engage in conceptual change depended on MUK. Study 3 situated MUK within the domain of text comprehension research and demonstrated that the text-belief consistency effect is enhanced when participants have high MUK. Finally, Study 4 examined MUK as a mediator between conceptions and comprehension and examined the role of MUK in predicting negative emotions. Overall, the findings suggest that MUK plays a role in conceptual change and text comprehension such that participants with high MUK are less likely to revise their knowledge and have worse comprehension when the text conflicts with their beliefs. In addition, MUK may predict emotions while reading about controversial topics, as participants with high MUK were more likely to report negative emotions while reading.

Cyber operations are a complex sociotechnical system where humans and computers are operating in an environments in constant flux, as new technology and procedures are applied. Once inside the network, establishing a foothold, or beachhead, malicious actors can collect sensitive information, scan targets, and execute an attack.Increasing defensive capabilities through cyber deception shows great promise by providing an opportunity to delay and disrupt an attacker once network perimeter security has already been breached. Traditional Human Factors research and methods are designed to mitigate human limitations (e.g., mental, physical) to improve performance. These methods can also be used combatively to upend performance. Oppositional Human Factors (OHF), seek to strategically capitalize on cognitive limitations by eliciting decision-making errors and poor usability. Deceptive tactics to elicit decision-making biases might infiltrate attacker processes with uncertainty and make the overall attack economics unfavorable and cause an adversary to make mistakes and waste resources. Two online experimental platforms were developed to test the Sunk Cost Fallacy in an interactive, gamified, and abstracted version of cyber attacker activities. This work presents the results of the Cypher platform. Offering a novel approach to understand decision-making and the Sunk Cost Fallacy influenced by factors of uncertainty, project completion and difficulty on progress decisions. Results demonstrate these methods are effective in delaying attacker forward progress, while further research is needed to fully understand the context in which decision-making limitations do and do not occur. The second platform, Attack Surface, is described. Limitations and lessons learned are presented for future work.

The bilingual experience is an often-studied multivariate phenomenon with a heterogeneous population that is often described using subtypes of bilingualism. “Bilingualism” as well as its subtypes lack consistent definitions and often share overlapping features, requiring researchers to measure a number of aspects of the bilingual experience. Different variables have been operationalized to quantify the language proficiencies, use, and histories of bilinguals, but the combination of these variables and their contributions to these subtypes often vary between studies on bilingualism. Research supports that these variables have an influence not only on bilingual classification, but also on non-linguistic outcomes including perceptions of self-worth and bicultural identification. To date, there is a lack of research comparing the quantification of these bilingual subtypes and these non-linguistic outcomes, despite research supporting the need to address both. Person-centered approaches such as latent profile analysis (LPA) and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) have been applied to describe other multivariate constructs with heterogeneous populations, but these applications have yet to be used with bilingualism. The present study integrates models of bilingualism with these analytic methods in order to quantitatively identify latent profiles of bilinguals, describe the sets of conditions that define these subtypes, and to characterize the subjective experiences that differentiate these subtypes. The first study uses an existing data set of participants who completed the Language and Social Background Questionnaire (LSBQ) and performs LPA and fsQCA, identifying latent profiles and the sets of conditions that these subtypes. The following studies use a second set of bilinguals who also completed the LSBQ as well as a supplementary questionnaire, characterizing their identification with biculturalism and their feelings of self-worth. The analyses are repeated with these data to describe the profiles within these data and the subjective experiences in common. Finally, all analyses are repeated with the combined datasets to develop a final model of bilingual subtypes, describing the differences in language use and history within each subtype. Results demonstrate that latent models can be used to consistently characterize bilingual subtypes, while also providing additional information about the relationship between individual bilingual history and attitudes towards cultural identification.

This research aimed to analyze and ultimately understand the relationship between the four dimensions of the Technology Readiness Index (TRI) 2.0 (optimism, innovation, discomfort, and insecurity) when compared to self-efficacy and learning. The experiment design was a one-group pretest-posttest where a participant’s TRI 2.0 acted as a subject variable. This information was then correlated to changes in self-efficacy and content mastery (learning) from pre-/post-test scores pertaining to Google Sheets functions for introductory statistics. In-between the pre- and post-tests, a learning activity was presented which asked participants to analyze quantitative statistics using Google Sheets. Findings of this research demonstrated a statistically insignificant relationship between technology readiness and self-efficacy or learning. Alternatively, significance was observed in changes from pre- to post-test scores for both learning and self-efficacy where a relationship was found between the degree to which participants’ content mastery and self-efficacy change before and after a computer-supported learning activity is assigned. These findings directly contribute to current understanding of how and why individuals can effectively learn and perform in computer-supported learning environments.

This paper documents a study of the relationship between heads up display (HUDs) customization and player performance. Additional measures capture satisfaction and prior gaming experience. The goal of this study was to develop a framework on which future Human Systems Engineering studies could create games that are tailor made to examine a given area of interest. This study utilized a two-by-two design, where participants play a two-dimensional (2D) platformer game with a mechanic that incentivizes attention to the HUD. This study successfully developed a framework and was moderately successful in uncovering limitations and demonstrating areas for improvement in follow-on studies. Specifically, this study illuminated issues with the low amount of usable data caused by design issues, participant apathy, and reliance on self-reporting data collection. Extensions of this study can utilize this framework and should look to recruit beyond crowdsourcing platforms, collect more diverse data, reduce participant effort, and address other considerations that were found during execution.