Assessing the Roles of Student Engagement and Academic Emotions within Middle School Computer-Based Learning in College-Going Pathways

This dissertation research focuses on assessing student behavior, academic emotions, and knowledge from a middle school online learning environment, and analyzing their potential effects on decisions about going to college. Using students’ longitudinal data ranging from their middle school, to high school, to postsecondary years, I leverage quantitative methodologies to investigate antecedents to college-going outcomes that can occur as early as middle school. The research first looks at whether assessments of learning, emotions and engagement from middle school computerbased curriculum are predictive at all of college-going outcomes years later. I then investigate how these middle school factors can be associated with college-going interests formed in high school, using the same assessments during middle school, together with self-report measures of interests in college when they were in high school. My dissertation then culminates in developing an overall model that examines how student interests in high school can possibly mediate between the educational experiences students have during middle school technology-enhanced learning and their eventual college-going choices. This gives a richer picture of the cognitive and motivational mechanisms that students experience throughout varied phases in their years in school.