Middle grades students have developmental needs that are unique from those of younger children and those in late adolescence. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how middle grades teachers create a sense of belonging with their students and the ways in which their knowledge of early adolescent development influences that process.…

School choice is a means to achieving numerous important goals: It fosters upward economic mobility, instills civic values, engenders an appreciation for the arts and humanities, and imparts students with the knowledge and the skills necessary to pursue their life and career goals. Education choice, at its essence, serves as a vehicle through…

The National Implementation Research Network (NIRN) and the National Center for School Turnaround (2018) published the "Four Domains for Rapid School Improvement: An Implementation Framework" as a companion to the Center for School Turnaround's (2017) recent publication of "The Four Domains for Rapid School Improvement: A Systems…

In the United States, higher education institutions assess the impact of program- level educational experiences through the process of program-level student learning outcomes assessment. The final step of the assessment cycle is to use assessment interpretations to make changes to educational programming. Nevertheless, few programs can demonstrate…

There is a dearth of empirical research on the efficacy of integrated teacher professional development (PD) models, ones that synthesize both online learning and face-to-face teacher PD experiences and interactions. The purpose of this explanatory mixed-methods study was to determine how teachers perceived an integrated PD experience that…

Phishing has become a preferred method among cyber criminals looking to gain access to confidential information. Although most businesses and governmental organizations provide employees with some sort of cyber security training, there is a lack of research examining whether such training methods work to actually reduce susceptibility to…

Collaborative international partnerships offer important benefits for institutions of higher education, both domestically and abroad. Recently, a Midwestern institution formed an important partnership with a sister institution in Vietnam that provides opportunities for cultural and academic exchange across cultures that differ dramatically. Very…

Scaling up educational interventions in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) field is critical but under-researched. We review and draw implications from a series of studies investigating the long-range impact of an implementation of an early mathematics scale-up model based on learning trajectories. Lasting effectiveness…

Black and Latino sexual minority men (BLSMM) scholars are well positioned to draw on their unique perspectives and expertise to address the health status and life opportunities (HSLO) of BLSMM. Increasingly, research related to the positionality of scholars of color suggests that the scholar's stance in relation to the community being researched…

This descriptive narrative depicts an academic program that deploys a collaborative project model for delivering concurrent multimedia courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Applying this model, online master's students who are studying the management of technical communication activities remotely manage teams of on-campus undergraduate…

Wide variation exists with respect to how Literacy by 3 is implemented. Though the Literacy by 3 program has been in the Houston Independent School District (HISD) since the 2014-2015 school year, there remains wide variation with respect to which aspects of Literacy by 3 are implemented in classrooms and to what extent the practices are utilized.…

Speech and language development in children are crucial for ensuring effective skills in their long-term learning ability. A child's vocabulary size at the time of entry into kindergarten is an early indicator of their learning ability to read and potential long-term success in school. The preschool classroom is thus a promising venue for…

This study develops a model for students and graduates of Soft Skills, Hard Skills, and Competitiveness (SHC) and seeks user validation after the development process. The development process uses the Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation (ADDIE) model. A quantitative survey using questionnaires and descriptive quantitative…

Human adults will sometimes help without being asked to help, including in situations in which the helpee is oblivious to the problem and thus provides no communicative or behavioral cues that intervention is necessary. Some theoretical models argue that these acts of "proactive helping" are an important and possibly human-specific form of…

Chapter 1 investigates asks the question how do financial frictions affect the type of human capital investments that students make in college? To study this question, I build a novel dataset covering more than 700,000 U.S. students, merging commencement records with address histories, credit bureau records, and professional resumes. I document…