The focus of the present study is the use of complex noun groups, in the dissertations written 100 EdD and 100 PhD degrees in educational leadership. Four research questions were investigated: Research Question 1: What, if any, differences exist in the frequency of attributive adjectives that function as noun modifiers in the corpora of PhD and…

Teacher dignity has been a topic of discussion among teachers and in society since the inception of schools in the United States. Yet even as the word "dignity" is referenced by educators, administrators, and community members, the term lacks clarity in understanding. As schools and society seek to understand the problem of the…

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted teaching and learning, causing schools to close and to move students to remote learning. Many principals sidestepped the guiding principle for schools, the mission statement, and were instead on a mission to salvage teaching and learning. Environmental entities became crucial to school survival. The open system…

The researcher examined literature and data related to policies and organizational structures of special education case management within California public schools. A review of literature exposed issues related to special education teacher attrition, burnout, role ambiguity, and growing expectations all while lacking support. Previous studies also…

Between the decades of 1970 through 1999, there were major shifts in higher education in New Jersey. Utilizing a grounded theory approach this dissertation created a database of legislation, hearings transcripts, and education reports. Searching this database for commonly used terminology, this dissertation was seeking a pattern in language use…

In this three-paper dissertation project, I explore how 'English' becomes a recognizable object within the context of adult ESOL education. Building on scholarship on named languages (Garcia, 2019; Makoni & Pennycook, 2006), the historical construction of languages (Bonfiglio, 2010; Irvine & Gal, 2000), and raciolinguistic ideologies…

Understanding how young children are socialized to the process and products of storytelling as part of everyday family life is important for language and literacy instruction. A language socialization framework was used to understand storytelling practices on the Navajo Nation. This study examined how three young English-speaking Navajo children,…

This study examined the 2011 New York State Common Core Learning Standards. At the time of this study, these standards were new and just being introduced to teaching and learning. The goal of the study was to critically analyze and compare the content of the new standards for grades kindergarten through fifth grade by using content analysis…

Rater variation in performance assessment can impact test-takers' scores and compromise assessments' fairness and validity (Crooks, Kane, & Cohen, 1996). Rater variation can also undermine a test's validity and fairness; therefore, it is important to investigate raters' scoring patterns in order to inform rater training. Substantial work has…

The proliferation of new media has created significant changes to how students interact with cultural diversity in the twenty-first century. No longer limited to interactions available only in their local contexts, many students connect online to highly diverse places, peoples, and texts. This dissertation describes these interactions as…

This study describes the grammar of the Ch'orti' Maya language as it appears in a collection of oral literature. I collected the stories that form the basis of this study in and around Jocotan, Guatemala, during 2004 and 2005. I worked with bilingual story-tellers to make audio recordings of the original Ch'orti'-language tales, produce textual…

In times of mass emergency, users of Twitter (a popular microblogging service) often communicate information about the event, some of which contributes to situational awareness. Situational awareness refers to a state of understanding the "big picture" in time- and safety-critical situations. The more situational awareness people have,…

The transition from preservice teacher to classroom teacher occurs rapidly, requiring that teacher candidates assimilate into the field quickly. In order to do so, these teachers must demonstrate appropriate language development as it relates to the teaching profession. Not only do novice teachers need to be able to articulate what they and their…

The purpose of this study was to examine the equivalence or non-inferiority for comparisons of telephone focus group venue to face-to-face focus group venue, Internet video-based focus group venue to face-to-face focus group venue, and Internet video-based focus group venue to telephone focus group venue. Research questions examined the…

Research in the area of academic writing has demonstrated that writing varies significantly across disciplines and among genres within disciplines. Two important approaches to studying diversity in disciplinary academic writing have been the genre-based approach and the corpus-based approach. Genre studies have considered the situatedness of…