This study presents the lived experiences of eight African American male recent high school graduates in their mathematics classes. These young men are currently attending various colleges across the United States in pursuit of obtaining a college degree. A few of the young African American men who were interviewed faced challenges during their…

This dissertation consists of two chapters on topics in economics of education. In the first chapter, I develop and estimate an equilibrium model of endogenous instruction and student effort in order to empirically investigate the relationship between instructional choices, classroom composition, and student achievement in elementary school. The…

This classroom-based case study examines how Spanish-English emergent bilingual children in a second grade one-way immersion classroom draw on prior knowledge and experiences and use comprehension strategies to discuss and comprehend three texts with different levels of cultural relevance. Through an examination of the rich range of cognitive,…

The purpose of this dissertation was to analyze the social and educational contexts that impact students' perceptions of their mathematical learning and students' use of resistance in regard to these social and educational impacts within the sixth grade environment. Specifically, this study addressed the following overarching questions: (1) What…

This study evaluated the influence of general and mathematics-specific classroom instructional quality on the mathematical development of a sample of Head Start preschool children. It also examined whether children's age, pre-test mathematical knowledge, and English language learner status influenced the quality of their curricular…