Beginning with the 2017-2018 school year, the Kansas State Department of Education implemented the Kansans Can School Redesign project (Redesign, hereafter) with the aim of fundamentally changing teaching and learning. The project was borne out of the feedback Kansans from across the state provided about what they believed education should be for…

The globally shared pandemic experience forced schools to shut their doors and required communities to examine their education systems. An important part of that examination is the evaluation of online learning education options. Online K-12 learning continues to grow, so examining how it can work better for students is important. This…

Perceived self-efficacy is an important aspect that educational leaders must possess to be successful in the public-school setting. Constant changes in legislation require principals to have high levels of self-efficacy to perform their duties as administrators. Principal preparedness programs have failed to completely prepare candidates to be…

Culturally relevant pedagogy aims to build on students' individual and cultural experiences and to allow diverse populations opportunities to access a generalized curriculum. The purpose of this action research study was to create a culturally relevant teaching framework to integrate curriculum texts and evaluate for effectiveness. The…

Efforts to improve technology integration for K-12 teaching and learning focus on professional development for teachers. This research study, however, implemented a professional development course in technology integration for educational content writers at a publisher in the Southeastern United States. This research is strategic because most…

The current study applies a qualitative research design to explore the perceptions of curriculum and technology leaders in regards to the integration of 1:1 technology into the written curriculum within their respective districts. The current study reviewed the thinking of curriculum and technology leaders separately to look for similarities and…

This study investigates what teachers believe to be the purpose of school curriculum, which is also called their curriculum orientation. Eisner and Vallance (1974) proposed five curriculum orientations and subsequent research has found that many teachers favor at least two or three orientations, not just one. There were three goals to this study.…

The "Computer Science for All" (CS for All) movement launched in 2016, following a decade of increasing support for broadening access to computer science education in K-12. In the years since, it has grown into a broad-based effort to equip all students with the skills they need to thrive in a digital society. CS for All follows a long…

In this dissertation, I explore how researchers, teachers, and students can learn together across various contexts in K-12 computing education. These explorations are situated within the development and implementation of the Getting Unstuck curriculum, a set of educative curriculum materials (Davis et al., 2017) designed for upper elementary…

The achievement gap is a topic that has plagued the education research field for a long time. This persistent quandary is often rooted in disparities along racial, socioeconomic, and other demographic lines, such as geographical location. This study focuses on the achievement gap within the context of the Mississippi Delta. This rural region of…

This qualitative case study conducted under the informed exploration phase of design-based research explored the design process of an online teacher professional development (OTPD) prototype course for Korean language teachers to adopt a multiliteracies-based pedagogy in the K-12 context. This study is a response to the lack of research on…

The demand for virtual learning environments in K-12 educational systems has grown exponentially in the past twenty years. The need for model K-12 learning environments became evident when the Covid-19 global pandemic caused an unparalleled closure to in-person learning environments that sent traditional school settings on a tailspin trying to…

Recent studies suggest that preservice music teacher educators (MTEs) had more experience in assessment preparation at the graduate level than during their undergraduate experience. Although music standards and assessments emphasize providing information about student learning, research investigating what assessment strategies music faculty are…

As VR becomes increasingly mainstream due to lowering hardware costs and increased access to VR content, it becomes critical to fill the gap in learning sciences literature that explains how this content may be developed in alignment with targeted learning outcomes. It also becomes imperative to study the integration of VR outside the…

Educational reform in the United States is often focused on upgrading school curricula in response to evolution in science, technology, and society. Wyoming is no exception. A 2001 Wyoming Supreme Court decision granted constitutional protection to every K-12 student in the state for a "fair, complete, and equal education, appropriate for the…