I investigate the nexus of gender, student ability, and post-baccalaureate (PB) program quality. This is the first general empirical study of graduate and professional educational investment to consider inter-field differences in quality and gender composition. A primary goal of this dissertation is to establish whether admissions policy can…

Boyer's (1990) seminal and influential discussion, "Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate," challenged the existing views of faculty roles and responsibilities and generated considerable discussion regarding the way colleges and universities evaluate and train faculty (Golde, et al., 2008). In response, institutions of higher…

The self-directed learning (SDL) in all of its characteristics measured in students and in various learning contexts continues to have a very important role in educational research and requires new explorations. Contemporary research indicates that there is a direct positive relationship between the level of student self-directed learning…

In this dissertation, I argue that curricular choices in Composition are overdetermined by the academic labor system and its negative effect on the status of composition theory. Despite the growth of disciplinary knowledge, composition programs are still staffed largely with underpaid and under supported faculty and graduate students, many of whom…

The relation between education and democracy is a difficult one. Even the wealthiest countries with highly educated populations have failed to develop educational systems that provide adequate educational experiences and opportunities for individuals within all social groups. Since the mid 1960s, higher education institutions in the US have made…

Educators must often decide how many points to use in a rating scale. No studies have compared interrater reliability for different-length scales, and few have evaluated accuracy. This study sought to evaluate the interrater reliability and accuracy of mini-clinical evaluation exercise (mini-CEX) scores, comparing the traditional mini-CEX…

Educational leadership program evolution naturally creates tensions among institutional, national, regional, departmental, practitioner, and student cultures. Learning that has occurred during University of South Florida's educational leadership program's change process will be shared as well as national survey documentation examining student…

This article evaluates ways in which students on an online Master's programme are learning about citizenship and developing intercultural awareness in spite of the lack of face-to-face interaction. There is still debate about the effectiveness of online courses and whether they provide an adequate substitute for, or even an improvement on,…

In this essay, the author explains how teaching assistant (TA) unions work to the benefit not only of the graduate students who are their members but also of the writing programs that employ them. While university administrations understand unions to be bothersome at best and forces of evil at their worst, unions are essential to the maintenance…

Poor nutrition is a major risk factor affecting proper development of children. However, there is limited knowledge about the way in which this subject is being integrated into professionals' work in early childhood education programs dealing with situations of children-at-risk. A study on this subject was conducted with 60 professionals who…

The focus of this article is a mixed methods naturalistic research project investigating the relationship between learners' time working within multimedia cases and learners' outcomes. Research was conducted across multiple delivery contexts in four universities. Participants were undergraduate and graduate teacher education students completing…

This study examined performance of Master's-level students in an online course in Cognition, Learning and Assessment and compared it with the performance of students in a face-to-face classroom setting of the same course (N = 70). Data were collected from six sections of the course over a two-year period. The same professor taught all sections.…

Community psychology theorists underline the importance of promoting sociopolitical empowerment, but few studies have been conducted on the evaluation of the efficacy of empowering programs among university students. The authors report two studies: the first, with 216 psychology majors, compared the efficacy of face-to-face and online community…

This study is a third in a series of studies that examined students' information seeking and problem solving behaviors while interacting with one of two types of web-based representations of an ill-structured instructional design case: hierarchical (tree-like) and heterarchical (network-like). A Java program was used to track students' hypermedia…

The purpose of this article is to evaluate a social studies teacher education vision statement as it relates to Parker's (2003) "advanced" conception of citizenship education for democratic society. The vision statement, titled "Powerful Vision of Social Studies," was created by a group of practicing teachers and teacher educators as part of a…