This grounded theory dissertation explores the educational experiences of funeral service students as they matriculate through the college of funeral service. Student interviews were utilized to explore the world of funeral service education. The analysis of the data led to the discovery of the theory, "Sustaining the Image of Life." The…

The need is urgent for reducing literacy achievement gaps--both morally to ensure that all students receive a high-quality education as well as economically to build our nation's workforce with the requisite skills needed for the 21st century. Taken together, changes to the economy, divergent literacy skill distributions, and changes to the…

The purpose of this study was to explore the lived experiences of students enrolled in noncredit workforce education programs as preparation for ongoing education. Ten students enrolled in a noncredit welding class were interviewed and the interview transcripts were subjected to analytic induction. Notable findings indicate that students were…

Some intensive quantities, such as slope, velocity, or likelihood, are perceptually privileged in the sense that they are experienced as holistic, irreducible sensations. However, the formal expression of these quantities uses "a/b" analytic metrics; for example, the slope of a line is the quotient of its rise and run. Thus, whereas students'…

Sentence position and word length have been claimed to contribute to the perceptual salience of words. The perceptual salience of words in turn is said to predict L2 developmental sequences. Data for such claims come from sentence repetition tasks that required perceptual re-encoding of input and that did not control for focal accent. We used a…

Establishing life purpose is a key developmental task; however, how it is linked to adolescents' everyday family, school, extracurricular, and leisure experiences remains unclear. Using daily diary data from 180 Asian American ninth and tenth graders (50% ninth; 58% female; 25% first generation), daily purpose was positively related to daily…

This project investigates whether learners of Russian perceive the sociocultural weight of the two personal pronouns for "you", "ty" (informal/intimate) and "vy" (formal/polite) when they listen to native speech. Research on address pronoun use shows it to be an important sociocultural variable and, while there is some general consistency in use,…

A comprehensive working memory battery and tests of mathematical skills were administered to 90 children--41 in Year 1 (5-6 years of age) and 49 in Year 3 (7-8 years of age). Working memory could explain statistically significant variance in number writing, magnitude judgment, and single-digit arithmetic, but the different components of working…

This article briefly reviews the coverage of higher education in the pages of this journal since its inception. It reflects on the changing role of the academic journal during this period, on some of the related changes which have taken place in academia itself as well as changing fashions in the study of history of education. Its central…

Despite the influx of immigrants in the American workplace, little is known about their well-being. The authors built on literature pertaining to gender-specific stressors and organizational support theory to examine a model of stress for immigrants. Analysis of a national, archival data set (N = 150) demonstrated that, consistent with research…

This longitudinal study explored the rate of language growth of children in an early intervention program providing auditory-verbal therapy. A retrospective investigation, the study applied a linear growth model to estimate a mean growth curve and the extent of individual variation in language performance on the Preschool Language Scale, 4th ed.…

This article describes the initial implementation of an innovative program for elementary-age children involving origami and pop-up paper engineering to promote visuospatial thinking. While spatial ability measures correlate with science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) success, a focus on spatial thinking is all but missing in elementary…

This study focuses on the development of face recognition in typically developing preschool- and school-aged children (aged 5 to 15 years old, "n" = 611, 336 girls). Social predictors include sex differences and own-sex bias. At younger ages, the development of face recognition was rapid and became more gradual as the age increased up…

Beginning readers' reading latencies increase as words become longer. This length effect is believed to be a marker of a serial reading process. We examined the effects of visual and phonological skills on the length effect. Participants were 184 second-grade children who read 3- to 5-letter words and nonwords. Results indicated that reading…

Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) affect 1 in every 88 U.S. children. ASDs have been described as neurological and developmental disorders impacting visual, motor, and visual-motor integration (VMI) abilities that affect academic achievement (CDC, 2010). Forty-five participants (22 ASD and 23 Typically Developing [TD]) 8 to 14 years old completed…