In this qualitative study, the authors examine the advisory program of a Horizon Schools to Watch middle grades school. Horizon Schools to Watch is the Illinois affiliate of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle School Reform national Schools to Watch (STW) program, meaning schools with the STW designation have made significant inroads in…

Five chief academic officers (CAOs) represented their institutions and served as a purposeful sample to qualitatively explore how they used National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) results to facilitate institutional effectiveness and promote undergraduate student success. All these private Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) participated in…

Since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, which reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, there has been an increased national focus on accountability in education (Jacobs, Gregory, Hoppy, & Yendol-Hoppey, 2009). This focus has developed into a movement that has become one of the central themes of the…

This dissertation aims to explore how students think about atomic absorption and emission of light in the area of introductory quantum chemistry. In particular, the impact of classical ideas of electron position and energy on student understanding of spectra is studied. The analysis was undertaken to discover how student learning can be…

This dissertation examines theories of emotion in politically contentious discourse in order to better understand the implications for teachers and students in composition classrooms where critical pedagogical practices lead to contentious political work. I suggest that partly as a result of the social and political turn in composition studies,…

This qualitative-exploratory research study seeks to understand the following research question: How is hope generated in students from the perceptions of school counselors? Data were collected from a convenience sample of five high school counselors from two public and two private schools. This study focused on the existential phenomenological…

This work develops a constructivist grounded theory describing the influence of family and those that serve a role similar to family on the academic decision making of undergraduate first generation in college (FGC) students majoring in engineering. FGC students, in this study, are students with neither parent having attained a bachelor's…

Critical thinking continues to be an educational concern even though many school systems, educators, and academic articles have stressed its importance. To teach critical thinking, teachers need to learn what it is and how it is taught. It is unknown to what extent critical thinking skills are taught and assessed in classrooms. The purpose of this…

This study focused on presenting the fieldwork findings derived from studying North-American missionaries' relational dynamics with the Japanese people, and the strategies that impacted their language-culture learning. This study also focused on applying the fieldwork findings towards the creation of a coaching model designed to help missionaries…

There is a hunger for effective teacher equipping programs for adult volunteer teachers in the educational ministry of today's churches. In addition, these programs for volunteer teachers need to be well-suited for adult learners and relevant to their real-life situations. The purpose of this qualitative study is to explore the effects of…

Latinas and Latinos are currently underrepresented in terms of our 21 st century student academic attainment and workforce, compared to the total U.S. Hispanic population. In a field such as mathematical sciences, Hispanic or Latino U.S. citizenship doctoral recipients only accounted for 3.04% in 2009-2010. While there are various initiatives to…

This article provides insight into how computing majors experience the process of doing programming assignments in their first programming course. This grounded theory study sheds light on the various processes and contexts through which students constantly assess their self-efficacy as a programmer. The data consists of a series of four…

High profile documents in early childhood education describe Intentional Teaching (IT), yet little research has been undertaken to give specificity to the definition so that application is possible, for example, to determine and prioritize information to include in professional development, assess fidelity of the implementation of that…

Evidence-based outcomes in the literature have caused adjustments in neuro-psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives that indicate a need for a current model of education. Implications from research suggest the new model of education should use a multilingual framework: L3 enhances and reinforces L2 and L1, if L2 and L1 are supported. The…

In this study, we used an exploratory methodology to determine what cultural models African American emerging adults use to understand infidelity/cheating. Cultural models are defined as "cognitive schema[s] that [are] intersubjectively shared by a social group" (D'Andrade, 1987, p. 112). We interviewed 144 participants ages 19-22 from three…