The COVID-19 pandemic created significant disruption across the world. These two studies provide a mixed methods approach to understanding how undergraduate college students at one university were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The first, a quantitative study, examines changes in mean, median, and standard deviation of GPAs in the semesters…

In an era of education defined by standards and accountability, teacher retention continues to be a major factor contributing to student achievement levels. Particularly in under-resourced, Title I-funded schools the challenge of maintaining adequate staffing of highly qualified educators, especially in mathematics, remains a pressing challenge…

This study investigated the factors influencing retention among Catholic private school teachers in the Pacific Northwest, focusing on motivational and external elements. Employing a mixed-methods approach, including surveys and interviews with five teachers, I delved into the impact of intrinsic motivators like leadership and school culture as…

There is an underrepresentation of African American males in K-20 education. The problem is that resiliency could be a factor that contributes to the underrepresentation of African American male leaders. Research suggests that American students could obtain their high school diploma without learning from an African American male instructor. Yet,…

First-generation college students are a prominent higher education student population and are well-represented at the community college. Unfortunately, many first-generation community college students do not persist for degree completion. These students face many academic and social challenges that impact their persistence. However, research has…

The primary audience for this book is first-generation college students. Whether they are in two-year or four-year colleges, I give the readers an example of the power of a parent's dream, the positive and negative outcomes of a student's hard work, the stuff caring teachers and supportive school administrators are made of, and the significance of…

This study intends to better understand the experiences of poor and working-class undergraduate college students who are enrolled full-time at state flagship universities and who hold on-campus leadership positions within high-intensity student organizations. This study explores how poor and working-class students come to high-intensity…

Career technical education (CTE) in the 21st century has been a highly visible component of the American public educational framework, with the majority of graduates estimated to have taken at least one CTE course during their time in school. Yet as CTE continues to benefit from atypically broad levels of support in both legislative circles as…

This dissertation investigates first-year college students' academic, personal, and spiritual expectations at a Utah university, focusing on the available resources to help them meet these expectations. Using a qualitative descriptive approach, the study highlights the gap between students' anticipated and actual experiences, significantly…

Orientation programs have traditionally been implemented to share information about the institution and typically involve consistent goals that connect new faculty to other colleagues, clarify and establish expectations, expose new faculty to the culture of the institution, and introduce each to the available services at the institution.…

With the rise of positive psychology (PP) in 1954 and its flowering in the last decade of the 20th century, the focus of psychological and educational studies has shifted from examining negative health-related outcomes to their positive counterparts. In line with this new research agenda, several L2 researchers have studied different positive…

Purpose: This paper seeks to illustrate how interventionist education reforms shape dis/trust-building processes and their impact on teacher professionalism in vocational education and training (VET) across national contexts. Using trust as the object of analysis, we discuss the affective mechanisms of becoming a professional in a standards-based…

This study is a conceptual replication of Teimouri et al.'s (2022) investigation into the validity of the second language (L2) grit scale (the L2-Grit scale). There are several concerns about the generalizability of the findings of Teimouri et al. (2022), especially regarding the discriminant validity of the scale and the relation of L2 grit with…

Dating back to the late 1980s in the United States, a popular assertion in the field of education has been that about half of all new teachers will leave the profession within their first five years. The lack of quality new-teacher retention programming contributes to the qualified teacher shortages faced by many school districts across the…

School systems have long faced teacher shortages, with high turnover rates exacerbating the shortage, particularly in Career and Technical Education (CTE). Teachers who enter CTE through alternative licensure (AL) face unique obstacles transitioning from industry to teaching. This study addressed the retention challenge among AL CTE teachers by…