Wellness, persistence, and retention in higher education have a common goal of student success. Colleges and universities explore various methods to help students succeed and continue towards degree completion. Most of the research has focused on traditional predictors (e.g., high school GPA, ACT/SAT scores) of persistence and success. There is…

This inquiry explores Integral Theory's prospective value to assist interpreting student teachers' communicated awarenesses for how they make sense of their own pedagogies, acknowledging student teachers' partial existence within post-secondary teacher education circumstances along with emerging twenty-first century conditions. Accordingly, this…

In the last couple of years, a new aspect of online social networking has emerged, in which the strength of social network connections is based not on social ties but mutually shared interests. This dissertation studies these "curation-based" online social networks (CBN) and their suitability for the diffusion of electronic word-of-mouth…

This dissertation is a qualitative study of a curriculum I designed for composition students in the Fall of 2012. The curriculum I created is informed by the Freirean edict that a self-generated desire to "create knowledge" is far more likely to result in meaningful, holistic learning than simply "banking" information. In the…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore possibilities for transformational coaching in education through the collaboration and cooperative argumentation of two researchers, one using appreciative inquiry to look at its transformative potential and the other using critical inquiry to investigate possible hegemonic and non-hegemonic…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore possibilities for transformational coaching in education through the collaboration and cooperative argumentation of two researchers, one using appreciative inquiry to look at its transformative potential and the other using critical inquiry to investigate possible hegemonic and non-hegemonic…

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore the experiences of professors participating in an institution-wide effort to educate students for engaged citizenship at Drake University, a Midwestern private institution that explicitly claims to prepare students for citizenship as part of the university mission statement. The…

A persistent mathematics achievement gap between African American, Hispanic, and European American students at one elementary school was the focus of this investigation. The research questions of this single site case study involved understanding why an achievement gap exists, and to identify the instructional strategies and best practices used to…

The study herein compares students in a metropolitan community college on dimensions of wellness based on age, sex/gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. The Five Factor Wellness Evaluation of Lifestyle-Adult Version (Myers & Sweeney, 2005), which is based on the Indivisible Self model (Myers & Sweeney, 2005), along with the Barratt…