Interest in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education is more important than ever since the Pandemic ravaged our nation's medical resources and personnel. This exploratory study, intended to establish and characterize potential identifiers and markers of student interest development in an inquiry-driven learning…

This dissertation consists of three papers about quantitative research methods in education. Each paper is a response to potential limitations of the current approach to building evidence for effective education -- an approach that is dominated by Randomized Controlled Trials of school programs, with mathematics and English achievement as primary…

School climate is a well-studied issue in educational research. However, surveys of school climate tend to be analyzed using item-centered as opposed to person-centered methods. The current study evaluated the 2018 South Carolina School Climate Survey using advanced applications of mixture modeling in an attempt to identify latent profiles at the…

Implementation fidelity is considered an indicator of an intervention's internal validity. In reading research, while student outcome measures are often well described, measures of implementation fidelity have received far less attention. Although researchers have become interested in the relation between implementation fidelity and student…

This dissertation examined the impact of the CREST-MECIS community of practice on K-12 STEM teachers and undergraduate and graduate students, addressing the urgent need for innovative approaches in science education to meet the challenges of the 21st century. The study was grounded in response to three primary problem statements: 1) the…

This study employed a quantitative, ex-post facto non-experimental design to examine the effect of whether teaching honors, regular, or special education classes in either an elementary or middle school setting influenced the experience of teacher burnout. Participants included 69 teachers from two counties in a Southern state. The study survey…

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to understand how utilizing the Core Knowledge Sequence and aligned curricular resources influenced teachers' perceived self-efficacy for a sample of Arizona elementary charter school teachers. The sample for this study was a convenience sample of 15 elementary teachers, who were currently…

The purpose of this qualitative research study was to understand teachers' perceptions of differentiated instruction and the rationale behind their resistance to implementing this strategy on a regular and consistent basis in an elementary school in the state of Maryland. Based on data collected from the state assessment in mathematics in Grades 3…

I theorize teaching and researching as practices of "blurred translating" that center antioppressive education (Kumashiro, 2002) and storytelling (e.g., Frank, 2010; Zipes, 1995, 2004). Based in listening, research and teaching as blurred translating are relational, contextual, and ongoing processes oriented toward transformation and…

Rarely is a school-based speech language pathologist (SLP) thought of as an active contributor to the achievement of students or to the learning community in general. Researchers have found benefits for students when members of the learning community collaborate, and the SLP should be a part of this community collaboration. This qualitative case…

While school safety prevention and intervention efforts have been a recent focus of research and policy, the prevalence and impact of violence against educators in schools has been largely understudied. The present study completed a critical review of the research from 1988 to 2015 on violence directed against educators in elementary, middle, and…

This paper is a research dissertation based on a qualitative case study conducted on Teachers' Experiences within a Data-Driven Decision Making (DDDM) process. The study site was a Title I elementary school in a large school district in Central Florida. Background information is given in relation to the need for research that was conducted on the…

The public school system in the United States is facing severe criticism. There exists today, a constant stream of negative messages through media coverage, news articles and charter school marketing campaigns claiming the failing of the public school system specifically in the content area of mathematics. Current research exposes alarming…

Conceptually, Response to Intervention (RtI) is a multi-tiered problem solving process rooted in special education yet designed as a framework for early and on-going instructional interventions for students across a continuum of academic need. In recent years, however, RtI has become an increasingly significant part of the discourse on school…

The primary purpose of the study was to investigate the extent to which students who entered kindergarten are deficient in reading readiness skills; to determine the outcome of parental involvement in children's early education; and to gain a clear, holistic understanding of the research problem. The research methodology selected for this study…