Social networks have been investigated as an important factor to understand social and language innovations for decades. Most researchers focus on one-language-dominated societies when studying social networks' influence on language practice while studies on bilingual societies remain scarce. In this study, we examine how Chinese graduate students…

The COVID-19 pandemic brought life to an unexpected halt, and all levels of education including higher education had abrupt changes from face-to-face teaching to emergency remote teaching to sustain the continuity of education. English preparatory schools that provide newly-enrolled university students with one-year intensive English language…

Language proficiency testing serves an important function of classifying examinees into different categories of ability. However, misclassification is to some extent inevitable and may have important consequences for stakeholders. Recent research suggests that classification efficacy may be enhanced substantially using computerized adaptive…

The California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office is pleased to present the 2021 Report on Course Section Offerings and Plans for Future Instruction for California Community Colleges. Pursuant to Senate Bill 129 (Skinner, 2021), California community college districts are required to report on the total number of course sections offered, broken…

This research project sought to explore the influence of English L2 on Spanish L1 in an environment where the L1 (Spanish) is the dominant language. Participants were recruited through voluntary response sampling at the University of Puerto Rico Secondary School (UHS). They completed a language survey on Google Forms that collected general…

Students classified as English learners (EL) are a protected class of students with core legal rights. There are clear opportunities to strengthen education policies and practices to improve opportunities and outcomes for EL-classified students. This dissertation is comprised of three studies examining key issues in EL education with the goal of…

This study examines the effects of English Learner (EL) status on subsequent Special Education (SPED) placement. Through a research-practice partnership, we link student demographic data and initial English proficiency assessment data across seven cohorts of test takers and observe EL and SPED programmatic participation for these students over…

This paper is a critical investigation of a group of eight Muslim religious education (RE) teachers' views of fundamental British values in education (FBV). Findings demonstrate that as teachers of multicultural RE, they experience dissonance accommodating the requirements of FBV, and are critical of its divisive effects upon their students. They…

Abstract The purpose of this study is to investigate the extent that there is a typology of high schools based on their orientation toward science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), as well as the extent to which school-level demographic variables and student high school outcomes are associated with subgroup membership in the…

Prior studies have shown that students have difficulty understanding the role of mutation in evolution and genetics. However, little is known about unifying themes underlying students' difficulty with mutation. In this study, we examined students' written explanations about mutation from a cognitive science perspective. According to one cognitive…

High frequency words have been suggested to benefit both speech segmentation and grammatical categorization of the words around them. Despite utilizing similar information, these tasks are usually investigated separately in studies examining learning. We determined whether including high frequency words in continuous speech could support…

This paper explores multiple logics of accountability by examining patterns of control of various school functions under different accountability systems. Research has shown that accountability is a global phenomenon, but how accountability is understood and enacted is locally contextualized, which implies the existence of multiple logics of…

Students' difficulties in interpreting what counts as knowledge have been addressed in past research on science education. The implementation of progressivist pedagogy in terms of more student-active classroom practice and the introduction of a variety of discourses into the science classroom deepens students' difficulties. The integration of…

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation Development (OECD) created the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) as a political actor in global education through a logic of governance by numbers (Grek, 2009). This article discusses how PISA has became a major showcase for the OECD as an assessment tool par excellence while also…

Although reading is an essential skill for college success, little is known about how college students with and without disabilities read within their actual college curriculum. In the present article, we report on two studies addressing this issue. Within study 1, we developed and validated curriculum-based oral reading fluency measures using a…