This dissertation, "Old Constraints, New Possibilities: Genre Theory, Student Reflections, and ePortfolios in the First Year Writing Classroom," explores the findings of an IRB-approved study on the reflective practices employed in FYW multimodal ePortfolios. The University of Alabama (UA) FYW conducted an ePortfolio Initiative in 2019…

This qualitative research study adopted an ethnographic approach with a realistic design to conduct this inquiry. This method was used because the inquiry focused on the documentation and interpretation of students' beliefs and experiences with the SBA within a school culture. The inquiry also entailed exploring whether their self-efficacy was in…

Educational technology (EdTech) hardware and software solutions are continually evaluated by decision makers to determine which should remain as part of their organization's educational technology portfolio and which should not. Often these decisions are based on factors or criteria that may or may not lead to effective continuity decisions. The…

There is consensus around the fact that quality of teaching is one of the most important school-level factors to influence student achievement at school. Evidence from research suggests that better-qualified teachers can be the determining factor for student achievement and development (Jordan et al., 1997; Sanders & Rivers, 1996; Wright et…

In recent years, there has been a large increase in college programs for crime scene investigations. In order for college graduates to be competitive when applying for these highly sought-after jobs, graduates must be able to demonstrate the skills and knowledge they have acquired during their college coursework in lieu of on-the-job experience.…

This study examined the lived experiences of premedical advisors employed in four-year institutions of higher education in the northeastern U.S. advising premedical students about the gap year options between undergraduate education and medical school. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews of 17 premedical advisors and analyzed…

This study seeks to illuminate and describe the experience of students engaging in mathematical portfolios. In particular, this study reveals key insights into how students demonstrate their mathematical identity and metacognition. Portfolio assessment has been described as an intentional collection of evidence that captures student…

The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze, from a Public Administration (PA) perspective, the provision of public education using the portfolio model, in which a school district employs autonomy-accountability tradeoffs to oversee a collection of schools operating under a variety of governance structures. The study relies on the New Public…

In early childhood classrooms, there is a lack of consistency in training and support in the implementation of ePortfolios, which may lead to frustration, lack of implementation, and improper use of portfolios as an assessment tool. There is a significant amount of research about teachers using ePortfolios from Grade 3 through higher education,…

Prior Learning Assessment (PLA) is a term for various methods by which universities accredit student experiential learning. One such method is the academic portfolio, a written reflective process in which students demonstrate that their personal or professional learning fulfills university outcomes. Proponents of academic portfolios claim that…

Simulation-based methods are becoming a promising research tool in financial markets. A general Complex Adaptive System can be tailored to different application scenarios. Based on the current research, we built two models that would benefit portfolio management by utilizing Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) in Agent-based Modeling (ABM) approach.…

This practitioner inquiry dissertation is situated within the context of U.S. education policy that persists in defining literacy as print-based and privileges standardized literacy assessments as the singular measure of what students "know". Decades of literacy research have shown that such orientations to education policy and resulting…

This case study examined co-curricular portfolios and transcripts at two institutions to investigate the use of co-curricular portfolios, how they are developed, how institutions utilize them, and how they shape student learning. This research contributed to the literature by documenting evidence of student learning, describing how students and…

This dissertation explores how a group of first-year graduate teaching associates (TAs) at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) accounts for embodied performance in teaching first-year writing (FYW). Guided by a feminist community-based teacher-research methodology, I conducted a mixed-methods case study of BGSU's Fall 2017 composition practicum…

We consider an optimal investment-consumption portfolio optimization model in which an investor receives stochastic dividends. As a first problem, we allow the drift of stock price to be a bounded function. Next, we consider a stochastic volatility model. In each problem, we use the dynamic programming method to derive the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman…