In schools today, teachers are part of a learning environment in which they are the teachers of their students, as well as students themselves. There are a plethora of traditional models for professional learning, however, professional learning is often disconnected from the realities of the classroom or lacks the elements necessary to lead to…

Increasing a teacher's well-being may decrease the chance of burnout. The purpose of this study was to understand the lived experienced of educators who are teaching social and emotional learning (SEL) skills to promote students' resiliency. This study was viewed through the lens of the Resiliency Theory. The research question guiding this study…

I combine micro-level data and structural models to study the interaction between trade, innovation, and human capital. In the first chapter, I examine how China's expansion of college education since 1999 affects innovation and exports' skill content. This policy change is interesting because of its sizable scale: the annual quota on the number…

Teachers' continuous improvement and its impact on student academic achievement has been the focus of initiatives and efforts toward reform and research throughout the history of education, particularly in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The purpose of this study was to examine whether a professional development program grounded…

Despite teachers' perceptions playing a key role in professional learning efficacy, little is known about teachers' perceptions of professional learning effectiveness or the factors that influence these perceptions. This study was designed to explore teacher perceptions of professional learning effectiveness. Data were collected from 107…

Education faces a severe crisis when it comes to the ability to staff every classroom with a highly qualified educator (Darling-Hammond, 2003; Ingersoll & May, 2011; Liu & Johnson, 2006). Teachers who have substantial experience and expertise in their field of study are needed for maintaining stability within the education system. They…

This multi-case study analyzed the formal and informal development of adaptive capacity in fire service leaders within the context of increasingly complex situations driven by urbanization and climate change. Triangulating interviews, observations, and documentation review, this study included two urban fire service cases impacted by past complex…

This study examined whether an intervention facilitating student-athletes' awareness of their transferable skills increased their career adaptability and positive career outcome expectations. This study also explored whether the strength of student-athletes' athletic identities was associated with changes in scores on the career outcome variables…

This study investigated the theoretical connection between student thriving and academic advising (Louis & Schreiner, 2020; Schreiner, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2020) and sought to provide a better understanding of the relationships between satisfaction with academic advising and other college experiences that are associated with thriving. This study…

I explain changes in the wage structure favoring more skilled workers since 1980 using job task data from the Occupational Information Network and wage data from the March CPS. Using recently developed partialling out estimators including debiased machine learning, I obtain wage effects for a suite of tasks, including a novel computer task…

Despite the importance of teacher educators in influencing the quality of teacher education and by extension, the teacher quality, teacher educator preparation and professional development has received little attention from researchers and its pedagogical knowledge domain is often generalized from that of teachers. This study therefore explored…

The current study adopted a case study design with mixed methods to examine the multiple features in child development course syllabi in early childhood teacher education programs in two countries, China and the US. This study provided insights into the twenty syllabi through document review and questionnaires. Twenty-six participants, viewed as…

Nationally, the 4-H Youth Development Program utilizes more than 350,000 adult volunteers annually, and 25% of the nation's K-12 students identify as Hispanic or Latino; however, there is a dearth of published literature on Latino volunteerism in the 4-H Youth Development Program. Developmental relationships, a critical component of realizing…

This study focused on the process of how the staff at the Thompson Scholars Learning Community, a comprehensive college transition program, tailored the programmatic offerings to meet the needs of low-income, first generation, and racialized minority students. Because college students are complex individuals, each of whom faces a unique set of…

The program known as Trust Based Relational Intervention® (TBRI®) began as an exploration into the detrimental behaviors of foster and adopted children placed in homes with unsuspecting caregivers who assumed their living environment would result in positive results rather than fear based emotions and behaviors. The researchers at the Karyn Purvis…