Students who attend school possess their own "funds of knowledge" from their home life and prior experiences (Moll et al., 1992). Yet, learners from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds are not viewed from a strengths-based perspective but rather a deficit perspective. The deficit perspective perpetuates the oppression and…

For this case study (Yin, 2018) dissertation, I used mixed methods (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2017; Guetterman & Fetters, 2018) to investigate how an elementary school special education teacher, who used a direct instruction (di) reading curriculum, incorporated culturally informed practices (CIP) in her small group reading instruction. In…

Despite the increasing number of elementary and secondary school students with language and learning disabilities and federal laws mandating ongoing collaboration among diverse school professionals, the implementation and maintenance of Interprofessional Collaborative Practices (ICP) and classroom-based therapy services among teachers and…

The purpose of this research was twofold: (a) to assess educator self-reported knowledge, skills, and perceptions of twice-exceptional children's characteristics for best practices in identification and (b) to develop strong educator competencies through professional development sessions for serving and nurturing twice-exceptional learners in…

This dissertation consists of two chapters on topics in economics of education. In the first chapter, I develop and estimate an equilibrium model of endogenous instruction and student effort in order to empirically investigate the relationship between instructional choices, classroom composition, and student achievement in elementary school. The…

Although teachers' use of quality teacher-student interactions is important for the academic and social development of their students, these types of interactions are not used consistently by teachers in early childhood classrooms. This study was used to explore the education of the classroom teacher as a potential reason for this inconsistency.…

The purpose of this evaluation was to understand how a literacy program based on 21st-century learning skills and social emotional learning was implemented and if it exemplified the 21st-Century Classroom Learning Community Framework. The results were used to learn how to improve the implementation of the Collaborative Literacy. Results were also…

In 2006, the California legislature released $14 million to the schools of California to create school gardens through the California Instructional School Garden Bill (CA Assembly Bill 1535, 2006). This study examined the differences and similarities of school gardens as learning spaces by exploring a fifth grade school standards-based mathematics…

Many authors recommend various praise to reprimand ratios for teachers to use to manage their classrooms (e.g., Flora, 2000; Nafpaktitis, Mayer, & Butterworth, 1985; Wheldall, 2005); however, these recommendations are based on correlational data or secondary findings from studies not directly manipulating the praise to reprimand ratio. The…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether looping, a multi-year teaching arrangement where the teacher remains with the same group of students for two or more years is a practicable alternative, as assessed by teacher opinion, to the typical one year grouping of students. Because the teacher is the pivotal figure within the classroom and…