In the village of Pine lies Pine School. While the school has historically been considered a quality school, the proficiency levels in math MAAP assessments have been lower in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade than 6th grade, by a substantial margin. In this action research program evaluation study, a mixed-methods approach was utilized to discern the…

This study addresses low literacy achievement in students in kindergarten and first grades. The study was designed to help identify how general education teachers can use specific daily research-based oral vocabulary acquisition strategies to close the literacy gap. This quantitative research helped to determine if the implementation of an oral…

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are becoming a promising solution for delivering high-quality education on a large scale at low cost in recent years. Despite the great potential, today's MOOCs also suffer from challenges such as low student engagement, lack of personalization, and most importantly, lack of direct, immediate feedback channels…

With the recent emergence of online professional development (PD), such opportunities are increasingly available to educators. It is important, then, to assess whether and how such options can be valuable and effective for them. The goal of this study was to assess whether and how a Massive Open Online Course for Educators (MOOC-Ed) can serve as…

The purpose of this study is to investigate differences between traditional conventional professional development and high quality reflective professional development and curriculum implementation of classroom practices. This study examined the extent to which professional development activities were associated with increased levels of curriculum…

The National Reading Panel has identified 5 essential components of reading instruction, all of which are needed to achieve the complex skill of reading, one of which is oral reading fluency (ORF). The Alabama Reading Initiative endorses teaching a scientifically research-based reading program to fidelity to raise ORF scores. In a rural Alabama…