Effective communication between home and school is known to increase student achievement. Although technology has the potential to change how schools communicate with parents, most existing research focuses on how schools use technology as a pedagogical tool. The purpose of this generic qualitative study was to address the identified gap in the…

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the way Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programs operate in unprecedented ways. This brief has two purposes: (1) To capture some of the adaptations and innovations that programs designed to meet the rapidly evolving circumstances of the pandemic; and (2) To highlight promising practices and pose…

This study explored the effects that social networking sites use has on the academic performance of middle school-aged students in a small district in California. It identified risks and benefits associated with social networking site use and how those affect student achievement. The study examined parental usage guidance and scrutinized…

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, schools in California were forced to shut their doors to students and staff during spring semester 2020. The school closures forced teachers to migrate their lessons to online platforms and forced students to learn using various online modalities. Students no longer had the traditional access to their teachers,…

This mixed-methods dissertation examines the experiences of academic counselors in the California community college (CCC) system who have provided distance/online counseling. As online education increases and is seen as a way to provide access to higher education at a lower cost to institutions, the need for online support services such as…

Our case study explored the role of technology in education among low-income Latino residents living in a mobile park in Silicon Valley. Through surveys and in-person interviews with parents and children, we report qualitative data on home Internet access and availability of technological devices utilized for school-related purposes. The results…

Investigating task-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) interaction has increasingly received scholarly attention. However, studies have focused on negotiation of meaning and the quantity, focus and resolution of language related episodes (LREs). This study aims to broaden our understanding of the role of audio, video, and text…

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many instructors were forced to adjust from in-person to emergency remote teaching; however, classroom observation protocols, like the Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS), have only been developed and validated for in-person instruction. Therefore, we developed and validated an…

Characterizing the nature of students' affective and emotional states and detecting them is of fundamental importance in online course platforms. In this paper, we study this problem by using discussion forum posts derived from large open online courses. We find that posts identified as encoding confusion are actually manifestations of different…

Distance ed and information technology (IT) have had to teamed up to boost Wi-Fi on campus and provide students with face-to-face tutoring due to COVID-19. While the relationship between IT and distance-learning staff is often necessity-driven, changes wrought by the coronavirus resulted in more of a "hand-and-glove" approach, where most…

The purpose of this mixed methods research study was to explore the practice of academic advising and the challenges associated with virtual advising in California higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic. Advising is a retention practice recognized as critical to student success because advisors are one of few personnel interactions students…

Research indicates that when instructors interact with students online their academic engagement increases, yet there is little research on student peer interactions and its effectiveness in terms of academic engagement. This study evaluates peer deliberations on a collaborative website for students enrolled in an American politics course at two…

The rapid and impressive development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in less than half a decade has generated contrasting arguments about their social dimension. This paper investigates how the socio-economic background of learners affects their own experience and chances of course completion. The analyses test whether learners with a low…

The researchers examined the online social networking attitudes of underperforming Latino high school students in an alternative education program that uses technology as the prime venue for learning. A sequential explanatory mixed methods study was used to cross-check multiple sources of data explaining students' levels of comfort with utilizing…

The scholarly field of the digital humanities has recently expanded and integrated its fundamental concepts, historical coverage, relationship to social experience, scale of projects, and range of interpretive approaches. All this brings the overall field (including the related area of new media studies) to a tipping point where it has the…