Over the past two decades, efforts to support school improvement have transitioned from top-down prescriptive approaches to more collaborative and flexible approaches. A number of studies have investigated the effects of these newer "turnaround programs" on student and school outcomes. In Colorado, two recently implemented turnaround…

Arts entrepreneurship educational efforts within U.S. university music departments vary between institutions. Music history and theory course sequences and content remain relatively unchanged over the decades. Set against this, arts entrepreneurship is still in its conceptual phase as administrators and educators navigate elusive definitions and…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the perceptions, roles, practices, and characteristics of a high-performing suburban school district's implementation of a kindergarten through grade 12 visual arts program. Additionally, this study intended to understand how the school district implemented a kindergarten through grade 12 visual arts…

Across the United States, hundreds of universities house dance programs, and the vast majority of degrees offered through these programs focus on modern dance. Despite the mainstream popularity and cultural esteem of the dance genre of ballet, fewer than fifteen university programs offer ballet-focused degrees. From this relatively small number of…

Higher order thinking skills have been embedded into state teaching standards, including Standard 9 of the New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards (NJCCCS) for 21st Century Life and Careers. These standards aim to encourage problem solving, critical thinking, reasoning, and real-world application in order to prepare students for the workplace…

This qualitative study sought to understand how enrolling and graduating in a secular and nonsectarian postsecondary institution in the United States affected the beliefs, personalities, social and intercultural competencies, and careers of a group of male Orthodox Jewish students from the Yeshiva program at Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU).…

The ability to read proficiently is a comprehensive skill necessary for success at all academic levels. Students who consistently read below grade level continue to struggle throughout their school years with little chance of recovery. The administrative leaders of the Ocean View School District (a pseudonym) noticed a decline in reading scores…

This dissertation maps the landscape of the cross-national educational transfer of American higher education in the Arabian Gulf region, with a case study of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Doha, Qatar. It examines how and why Qatar has borrowed, and Georgetown has lent, the American model of higher education, specifically…

The Luther College Concert Band has enjoyed nearly 150 years of success. International tours, regional tours, concerts, service to the college and recording projects aided the success of this small college band that retained its Lutheran, liberal arts identity. Published documents exist about the Luther College band before 1948 but no…

The purpose of this study was to explore and to compare the programs at two Pennsylvania Universities for students with intellectual disabilities (ID). The study explored how each university began the program from idea to implementation, including why and when it was started. The first university in this study was a four-year private school that…

Higher education institutions are well positioned to provide students with meaningful educational opportunities, to prepare them for lives of impact and service to their communities by investing their acquired knowledge to address critical societal needs. Furthermore, a sound college education is particularly important to students' personal,…

The urgent environmental issues of today require science-literate adults to engage in business and political decisions to create solutions. Despite the need, few adults have the knowledge and skills of science literacy. This doctoral dissertation is an analytical case study examining the science-learner identity development of Exploratorium Field…

The Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing, usually housed within the English Department, has become a progressively more popular field of study among students and budget conscious administrators. But for all its popularity, it is a field that has been left generally unexamined by scholars. While there have been numerous scholarly studies…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore and describe the visual arts beliefs and practices of eight K-1 teachers in four schools and in two different school districts in a southern state. Using a phenomenological framework (Creswell, 2007; Leedy & Ormrod, 2005), the research revealed the teachers' understandings of beliefs and how…

This research concerns the culture of design education in the context of great change in the social and professional conditions of practice. Findings illuminate interrelationships among pedagogy, professional identity and the design of the instructional setting in programs that teach visual communication and interaction design. Participants'…