Qualitative researchers often turn to focus groups as an efficient and effective way to gather data in a collective context. A common critique is that they play into power dynamics present at the site, privileging dominant, high status, and more vocal participants. Traditional focus group structures also rely on participants to trust the…

University libraries have had to provide acceptable noise levels for many years and this pressure has not diminished in the twenty-first century. Library space has to be utilized to ensure noise levels are best managed. A study was undertaken across four university libraries in South Florida to determine how universities utilized their limited…

A quasi-experimental, pretest-posttest, non-equivalent control group design was used to examine the effect of a mobile gamification application on third and fourth grade students' Spanish language achievement and student academic self-efficacy. In this study, the treatment group's Spanish language instruction was through the use of…

BlendKit is a 5-week course designed by the University of Central Florida in an open, online format specifically for the professional development of higher education faculty and designers preparing to design and teach blended learning courses. The evaluation of this course provides us with interesting and valuable information on the success of…

Ninth Grade Academies (NGAs)--also called Freshman Academies--have attracted national attention as a particularly intensive and promising approach for supporting a successful transition for high school freshmen. An NGA is a self-contained learning community for ninth-graders that operates as a school within a school. NGAs have four core structural…

City Year is a learning organization committed to the rigorous evaluation of its "Whole School Whole Child" model, which trains and deploys teams of AmeriCorps members to low-performing, urban schools to empower more students to reach their full potential. A third-party study by Policy Studies Associates (PSA) examined the impact of…

Teachers who are efficacious persevere through challenges in the learning environment and put forth more effort in designing learning activities. The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of mathematics teaching and integration strategies (MTIS) on preservice agricultural teachers' personal mathematics efficacy, mathematics teaching…

As software becomes more ubiquitous and complex, the cost of software bugs continues to grow at a staggering rate. To remedy this situation, there needs to be major improvement in the knowledge and application of software validation techniques. Although there are several software validation techniques, software testing continues to be one of the…

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 guides school policies on teaching and assessment and promotes school interventions that focus on learner-centered pedagogy. Despite this emphasis on learner-centered pedagogy, significant numbers of Title I elementary students in Florida achieved below state standards from 2006 to 2009. This study used…

Why do construction projects fail? Ineffective communication and collaboration, and poor pre-planning processes are among the reasons given by building owners in a recent survey. To avoid those pitfalls, colleges and universities need to take a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach to preplanning, financing and carrying out their master plans…

A study of 308 communications professionals in south Florida investigated interest in graduate programs, both formal degree programs and professional continuing education. Results indicate the primary reason for enrollment in a formal degree program is not economic but perceived benefit to the employer. More minority group members wanted formal…