Alternative schools often receive a bad connotation when it pertains to student success academically and behaviorally. The implementation of restorative practices can aid in the restoration and building of relationships between students and teachers, which can lead to an increase in student success academically and behaviorally. The purpose of…

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that jobs within the life and physical sciences will grow by 8% between 2020 and 2030; therefore, it is imperative that students receive an engaging, rigorous, and comprehensive science education. Many urban and minority students have been denied this opportunity as evidenced by their poor performance on…

This research seeks to determine the possible impact the use of mandated scripted curriculum has on veteran teachers' professional identity. This qualitative study used an interpretivist lens and a narrative methodology. Narrative inquiry (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988) will be used to understand veteran teachers' professional identities as…

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…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore teachers' and counselors' perceptions of the challenges of implementing service learning with fidelity to best practices consistently in a school district in the U.S. Virgin Islands and to identify resources necessary to support the implementation of best practices in service learning. With only…

This study sought to determine (a) the decision-making processes administrators and teachers followed when purchasing and implementing a sensory path intervention in elementary schools and (b) the perceived supports and barriers to the effective use of the sensory path as a means to positively impact student outcomes. Five elementary school…

Research has supported multiple reading strategies and interventions for students with Emotional and/or Behavioral Disorders (EBD). These include systematic and explicit instruction and multicomponent interventions that address phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency. Some of these reading interventions also included…

The UTeach program, a national model for undergraduate teacher preparation, includes "Perspectives on Science and Mathematics," a class designed to share content about the History of Science (HOS) with preservice teachers. UTeach provides a model curriculum as a sample for instructors teaching "Perspectives." The purpose of…

Transition age youth with disabilities are at an elevated risk to experience depression and anxiety compared to youth without disabilities. The current study evaluates the implementation feasibility, acceptability, and potential efficacy of the "Think, Be, Do" curriculum (a mental health curriculum) for transition age students in special…

The topic of this research is inference for effect size of a curriculum intervention, which is an important research topic in education. The linear relationship between the outcomes of an intervention and teachers' fidelity, the extent to which the intervention was actually delivered by teachers as intended, is an important component for…

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate how educational research, specifically Research-Based Instructional Strategies (RBIS), is adopted by education practice, specifically within the engineering Statics classroom. Using a systematic approach, changes in classroom teaching practices were investigated from the instructors' perspective.…

Lead educational agencies (LEDs), school administrators, and teachers do not appear to grasp the influence of curriculum audits on students' academic performance relative to the level of recommendations that are implemented. Failure to comply fully with audit recommendations can have negative implications on a district's financial status and…

While professional developers have been encouraging teachers to plan for discourse around problem solving tasks as a way to orchestrate mathematically productive discourse (Stein, Engle, Smith, & Hughes, 2008; Stein, Smith, Henningsen, & Silver, 2009) no research has been conducted explicitly examining the relationship between the plans…

Fidelity of implementation (FOI) is the extent to which delivery of an intervention adheres to the original intent of the program designer. FOI in educational studies is hindered by the lack of a universally agreed upon definition or set of criteria for measurement. With the increasing need for justification of reliability and validity of…

This dissertation presents my explorations in both molecular biology and science education research. In study one, we determined the "ADIPOQ" and "ADIPORI" genotypes of 364 White and 148 Black BrCa patients and used dominant model univariate logistic regression analyses to determine individual SNP and haplotype associations…