As the enrollment cliff of 2025 looms closer, colleges and universities are compelled to explore alternative student populations to counteract the substantial decline in traditional-age college students. Transfer students emerge as a promising demographic to help sustain enrollment numbers and financial stability for colleges and universities.…

Many teachers have become dissatisfied with their jobs, leaving their school district or the field of education to purse other careers outside of education. Recently, teacher attrition has been a problem for schools in Tennessee. The shortage of teachers in Tennessee led to the elimination of the Teacher Performance Assessment by the Tennessee…

High school dual credit programs have risen to prominence in the last decade and seek to solve the critical issue of academic under-preparedness in graduating high school students. However, current research suggests that as the number of students participating in dual credit courses increases, dual credit pass rates decrease. This current…

This descriptive correlational study examined the predictive relationships between ACT composite scores, high school GPA, ACT testing attempts, and gender with teacher candidate's overall performance on the edTPA and each of the three edTPA instructional tasks (Task 1, Task 2, and Task 3). The edTPA is a portfolio-based subject-specific teaching…

While students have enrolled in college at increased rates since 1996, graduation rates have remained mostly stagnant (NCES, 2022). First-generation Appalachian students, specifically, had lower college completion rates but higher college enrollment rates than their peers (ARC, 2018). Since 2007, researchers have supported the use of non-cognitive…

Policy implementation research indicates that local contexts and school factors shape how teacher collaboration efforts are implemented in schools. By evaluating a statewide teacher collaboration initiative in Tennessee known as the Instructional Partnership Initiative (IPI), this article provides insight on the school-level factors that are…

Policy implementation research indicates that local contexts and school factors shape how teacher collaboration efforts are implemented in schools. By evaluating a statewide teacher collaboration initiative in Tennessee known as the Instructional Partnership Initiative (IPI), this article provides insight on the school level factors that are…

Facility with learning from multiple text documents is critical for college and career readiness. However, children with reading difficulties and disabilities have been largely excluded from research on multiple document comprehension. Accordingly, little is known about how children with reading difficulties and disabilities perform on…

Teacher retention is a foundational issue and schools have historically struggled to retain teachers. Previous research indicates that teachers leave the profession at high rates before year five of teaching expertise. Lack of teacher retention contributes to instability and lack of trust in school districts. This secondary data study explores…

This quantitative, correlational study aims to determine if a predictive relationship exists between teacher perceptions of Tennessee's teacher evaluation and the linear combination of teacher gender, years of experience, and school-level taught (elementary, middle, high). Although teachers have recognized the current teacher evaluation system,…

We develop a conceptual framework for understanding and predicting teacher shortages at the state, region, district, and school levels. We then empirically examine how teacher shortages vary geographically and by subject using data on unfilled teaching positions in Tennessee traditional public schools during Fall 2019. We find that teacher…

School principals are challenged by school districts to answer the call for change and improvement in their schools by promoting teacher efficacy. The purpose of this research study was to gain insight into teachers' perceptions of their principals' leadership attributes and analyze how their perceptions of those leadership attributes impact their…

In January 2022, music teacher shortages accounted for eight percent of all vacancies in U.S. school systems. After emerging from COVID-19 lockdowns, many education stakeholders began to reconsider the ways in which teaching and learning have shifted. By committing to a strong understanding of teacher self-efficacy and empowerment, administrators…

The unprecedented growth of Spanish-English dual language learners (DLLs) in new destination states (e.g., Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, Tennessee) calls for better understanding of the relation between their bilingual vocabulary skills and English reading achievement. The current study focused on school-age Spanish-English DLLs (N = 60) in…

We develop a unifying conceptual framework for understanding and predicting teacher shortages at the state, region, district, and school levels. We then generate and test hypotheses about geographic and subject variation in teacher shortages using data on unfilled teaching positions in Tennessee during the fall of 2019. We find that teacher…