Children with intellectual and developmental disabilities have historically been at high risk for social exclusion and other vulnerabilities. The Western world has shifted away from institutionally-based services and toward community-based services that allow for greater social inclusion as well as for meeting individual developmental needs, and…

In their study of the educational ecosystems that surround schools, the authors recognized a growing global trend that has positioned "intermediary organizations," and particularly non-system intermediary organizations, or those not involved in the formal governmental education system, in an oversized ecosystem role. Through their direct…

Problems associated with time-cost trade-offs in project networks, which are commonly referred to as crashing problems, date back nearly 60 years. Many prominent management science textbooks provide a traditional linear programming (LP) formulation for a classic project crashing problem, in which the time-cost trade-off for each activity is…

The assessment of program functionality can generally be accomplished with straight-forward unit tests. However, assessing the design quality of a program is a much more difficult and nuanced problem. Design quality is an important consideration since it affects the readability and maintainability of programs. Assessing design quality and giving…

Students with disabilities across the united states are not achieving at the same rate as their non-disabled peers. With their flexibility and capacity for innovation, charter schools offer an opportunity to improve these outcomes. However, data from the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), parent focus groups and surveys, and research on schools'…

While school closures resulting from the pandemic in spring 2020 created challenges for every school district, districts serving predominantly rural communities faced even greater obstacles. Lack of access to broadband internet connectivity in rural and remote areas complicated many students' efforts to participate in remote learning. In addition,…

The UIC Center for Urban Education Leadership conducted a study in collaboration with the Qatar Foundation. As the research and work on educational ecosystems has grown, we now recognize a growing global trend that has positioned "intermediary organizations" in an oversized ecosystem role. Through their direct work with schools,…

The Hispanic population was the largest minority group within the US in 2017. Yet gaps existed for Hispanic college students and degree obtainment. The problem of this phenomenological study was that First-Year Experience (FYE) Hispanic college students had low retention rates in their college courses, especially when there were not effective…

Belonging and shame find themselves on a spectrum. Shame is on one end belonging the other. In the university setting belonging is widely researched. However, it is not known how shame resilience effects a college's students sense of belonging. This study tapped into shame resilience theory and self-authorship to start the conversation about shame…

This dissertation in practice created a new form of educator development called the Virtual Educator Network (VEN) and examined its impact on educators' attitudes towards inclusion, feelings of support, and incorporation of new strategies to solve problems of practice they find important. The VEN is a form of professional development that pulls…

This Dissertation in Practice (DIP) was a group dissertation as required by the Doctorate in Educational Leadership program and created a new form of educator development called the Virtual Educator Network (VEN). This DIP examined the VENs' impact on educators' attitudes towards inclusion, feelings of support, and incorporation of new strategies…

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised a wide range of challenges for school leaders that they now (rapidly) have to address. Consequently, they also turn to informal learning networks, in order to share and collect information and reach out to their communities. In this context, the current study investigates the underlying networks structures among…

This dissertation formulates and investigates a set of hypotheses about the mechanisms that support the successful implementation of partnership models in K-12 public education. The research study is conducted within a rapidly growing type of partnership model known as "teacher residencies," in which a partnership between a higher…

The burgeoning research on contemporary educator movements provides insight into what activist educators know and believe, what they learn through their collective organizing and activism, and how they conduct inquiry to generate new knowledge for praxis. Yet, although this work suggests that these educators engage, generate, circulate, and…

This article explores whether a learning community can affect students' learning achievement and engagement. Besides, this study also analyzed whether degree centralities of peer interaction affect learning achievement and learning engagement based on social network analysis. While the experimental group combined the English learning system with…