Education is a moral enterprise, and higher education has the accountability to produce skilled learners with cognitive, psychological, and social-emotional competences. Formal and informal approaches of character education increase in demand. On the one hand, students should be guided to gain character strength and moral compass to confront the…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the positional identity of outdoor educators (OE) within educational spaces. Numerous studies have reported the myriad benefits of outdoor learning, but do not address the factors, contexts, and experiences that impact OEs' identity formation and professional trajectory. Through an embedded mixed methods…

There is a gap in research focusing on how leaders implement complex policies such as Response to Intervention/Multitiered Systems of Support (RTI/MTSS). Response to Intervention/Multitiered Systems of Support (RTI/MTSS). To address this gap, this phenomenological case study examined school leaders' perceptions of their roles as leaders…

This research examines the reasons why parent(s)/guardian(s) have chosen to enroll their child in a Catholic high school in the New Orleans area. Currently enrollment in Catholic high schools in the area is down post-Hurricane Katrina. This research is a qualitative study utilizing Grounded Theory methodology. An anonymous survey was sent to…

Attitudes and values are considered an important component of learning in higher education, but natural resources and environmental education programs typically emphasize cognitive gains in the design of instructional activities and subsequent assessments. This research suggests that greater consideration of affective learning outcomes should be…

In this dissertation study, we investigated professional learning practices common to tiered systems, with specific focus on the Comprehensive, Integrated, Three-Tiered (Ci3T) model of prevention. First, we outlined tiered models and how they address the rising, multiple needs of students, and the fitness of Ci3T for the current educational…

Title 1 principals face many day-to-day challenges due to the complexity and demands of their jobs. Research has found (Levin et al., 2019) that principals valued professional development (PD) more if it allowed them to address their school's specific needs and circumstances and increase their leadership capacity. This research aims to explore the…

The purpose of this mixed methods dissertation is to examine the impact of the Professional Learning Community Continuous Improvement Model (PLCCIM) on school-based instructional coaches (SBICs) within a large school district in one of the nation's southeastern states. The effect of the implementation, along with coaches' perceptions, was measured…

In this dissertation I defend the thesis that consumer education should be an essential component of public education on the basis of civic, economic, and environmental ethical frameworks. The first task of the dissertation is to define what is meant by the concept of consumer education in the context of the American educational system. I use a…

Special education team members have shown an inability to write rigorous individualized education program (IEP) goals that meet students' needs. Researchers have focused on special education team members' ability to write IEP goals, and the phenomenon continues to be a vital concern. This basic qualitative study was conducted to examine the…

Curriculum, and the teaching and learning that stem from it, is at the heart of each higher education institution. Faculty have the responsibility for developing curriculum in higher education contexts, yet little is known about the beliefs faculty hold of curriculum that underpin how they engage in the curriculum development process. Using…

In 2014 the Virginia General Assembly passed legislation replacing end-of-course, multiple-choice assessments with locally developed alternative assessments in five courses, including two middle school social studies courses. This policy allowed Virginia school divisions the autonomy to develop the format, quantity, and focus of their assessments…

Although there is consensus on the relevance of the feedback given to student teachers, few instances in the literature have addressed this topic. Even less is said about feedback to mathematics lesson plans and how to characterize it. Lesson plans are artifacts that help establish a link between theory and practice, relate to a broader sense of…

Higher education in post-independence Africa remains trapped in foreign knowledge systems, despite decades of strong cries to replace them with Afrocentric systems. The purpose of this dissertation-in-practice was to evaluate the Africanization of an undergraduate program at a college in Southern Africa. Using the CIPP Model of evaluation, a…

The digital turn in higher education has been described as potentially transformative for students' access, participation, and learning in higher education. However, for undergraduate students, digital literacy practices and genres are often repurposed to scaffold the reproduction of historically dominant academic literacy practices and…