Colleges face growing pressures to maintain or enhance the quality of what they offer while being challenged to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse range of students. Staff in higher education face the challenge of supporting students to feel they belong and are valued. The co-creation of teaching and learning is one model in which we may be…

The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to explore how students develop cultural competency through participation in an experiential learning-embedded college course. Existing literature often addresses career readiness, student success, cultural competency, and faculty-student affairs collaboration as distinct areas of research. However,…

The goals of nonmajor science education are to improve scientific literacy and produce pro-science attitudes. Together, these goals are expected to improve an individual's ability to make evidence-based decisions based on newer understandings of the natural world as well as developing technologies. In a post-COVID-19 world, public understanding of…

To this day, Columbia College maintains one of the most robust liberal arts curricula among the tertiary education landscape, an institutional decision that has been both lauded and denounced by students, professors, and cultural critics alike. As this dissertation examines, high tensions from all angles largely stem from the Core Curriculum's…

In higher education, significant efforts have been made to improve student success outcomes. In this dissertation, two important problems related to student academic success are considered. The curriculum plays a crucial role in shaping student success. Curricular complexity has been shown to be inversely related to the graduation rate of…

The purpose of this action research study was to improve the implementation of a large-scale redesign of teacher preparation programs at Arizona State University. This was a highly complex redesign that impacted over 150 courses across 27 programs, involving more than 200 faculty and 2,500 students annually. As a result, implementing the redesign…

Over the last decade, secondary schools around the United States have rapidly adopted ethnic studies courses. For instance, California's governor mandated ethnic studies as a high school graduation requirement in 2021 (Magcalas, 2023). According to scholars, ethnic studies courses offer educational experiences that disrupt the erasure and…

International curriculum is a scholastic model to implement international and intercultural dimensions within teaching and learning strategies across disciplines. However, theorists emphasized that IoC is not an independent institutional strategy rather it is tied to internationalization of higher education as a complex and institutionally…

Many colleges and universities take a "weeding out the weak" approach to teaching STEM, despite substantial literature that emphasizes the values and effectiveness of various other approaches. Introductory, foundational, STEM courses which are often taken by students during their first and second years of college, have been shown to…

This dissertation focused on sustainable development (SD), curricular development, and practices in the health professions, specifically in occupational therapy practice. It is divided into five chapters. The first chapter provides background information, the second chapter uses the [C]STAUNCH tool to analyze the degree of sustainable development…

The purpose of this qualitative interpretive study was to understand the ways teachers were influenced in their curricular and instructional decision-making processes in a freshman level mathematics class. Understanding what influences teachers' decision-making processes, and how (the ways) these processes were influenced, may lead to improved…

The focus of this qualitative descriptive study was on what undergraduate faculty at 4-year Christian universities or colleges in California have experienced and what recommendations they have pertaining to the use of scripted syllabi in teaching online courses. Ted Aoki's theory on curriculum implementation as a situational praxis was used as the…

The purpose of this teacher-practitioner research study was to examine how elementary teacher candidates engaged in sensemaking about the learning process within the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and to further examine how they engaged in sensemaking about NGSS teaching and curriculum development. Interviews and course artifacts from 14…

The problem addressed in this study was that there was the likelihood of a mismatch between preprimary teachers' racial, ethnic, and cultural make-up and the children and families they educate and care for in the preprimary classroom from birth to 5 years. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to examine early childhood education (ECE)…

Many things can influence a student's success in a course. Previous research has shown that students are more successful when they complete the course reading, but students may not always comply with reading requirements for multiple reasons, such as other time pressures or financial costs. Issues with reading requirements may be compounded if an…