Young learners were observed in a summer literacy program at a southern university in order to identify and understand literacy entanglements and how they contributed to the way children developed literacy. Data collection consisted of observations, researcher journals with extensive field notes, and a collection of artifacts relating to…

The purpose of this quasi-experimental study was to investigate the use of specific vocabulary instructional strategies during a six-week summer program to determine if the iReady universal screener measured an impact on student vocabulary and reading comprehension. The study utilized a treatment group (n = 34) and a control group (n = 40) from…

This dissertation is an effort to better understand Black children's conceptions of smartness and the ways that teachers communicate smartness through their practice. Here, I reimagine smartness as a verb rather than a noun--that is, smartness is about what one does that is smart. I develop a conceptual framework that attends to race, mathematics,…

This case study describes a professional learning opportunity for educators of adolescents, namely the Literacy for Adolescent Teachers (LAT), at a regional midsize university in Kentucky. The LAT is a year-long experience that enrollees undertake to grow professionally by gaining specific literacy skills. This study focuses specifically on…

This study investigates the instructional practices of a chemistry professor during an immersion summer program, with a focus on employing multimodal discourse within a studio-based learning environment. For this study, multimodal discourse includes natural language, gestures, mathematical expressions, symbolic visual representations, and manual…

This dissertation is primarily concerned with nature-human relations -- how human people relate with and see themselves in relation to the rest of nature. Nature-human relations are part of how we make sense of the world around us, and these relationships therefore affect our broader reasoning and decision-making. The magnitude of environmental…

In the United States, research on reading difficulties is predominantly carried out by scholars who project findings on L1 English reading difficulty to generalized difficulty in learning a second language (L2; e.g., Galuschka et al., 2020; Shaywitz & Shaywitz, 2020; cf. Sparks, 2023). This research extrapolation creates a negative feedback…

In the United States, adult education for emergent multilingual language learners (EMLL) is governed by the American Education and Family Literacy Act (AEFLA). The AEFLA defines literacy as an individual's ability to read, write, and speak in "English." This definition erases the multilingual and multicultural assets that adult EMLLs…

This mixed methods study explored the development of technological, pedagogical, content knowledge (TPACK) of Chinese teachers who attended the STARTALK Chinese Teacher Institute, a 10-day residential summer professional development program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. A sequential explanatory design was adopted in which quantitative and…

For the purpose of this research, a concurrent multiple baseline design was used to measure the effects of a Constant Time Delay (CTD) intervention. CTD was implemented as an intervention to support four transition students' abilities to recognize functional sight words. The sessions were held during a summer transition program on a large…

Prior to instruction, students often possess a common-sense view of motion, which is inconsistent with Newtonian physics. Effective physics lessons therefore involve conceptual change. To provide a theoretical explanation for concepts and how they change, the triangulation model brings together key attributes of prototypes, exemplars, theories,…

The flipped classroom has been implemented within the nursing curricula to promote increased student classroom satisfaction, student engagement in the classroom, and improve retention of complex nursing concepts. This research study evaluated how the implementation of the flipped classroom contributed to the overall perception of a new…

This study sought to determine the implications of using lesson study as a professional development model to support graphical literacy in second grade students. This mixed methods embedded study gathered information from 3- second grade teachers and 50- second grade students in a rural public school in Central Alabama. The study collected data…

Data-rich activities provide an opportunity to develop core competencies in both science and mathematics identified in curricular standards. Perhaps even more importantly work with data puts learners in the position to use data to ask and answer questions, a potentially empowering capability. Research on work with data has focused on cognitive…

Alternative teacher credentialing programs (ATCPs) have grown over the last two decades to address persistent staffing shortages in high-need schools. Today, nearly a quarter of new teachers are prepared though these programs. Nonetheless, there are few studies that examine teacher candidates' learning as facilitated by these programs, or their…