Education Commons^™

Responsibilities And Leadership Styles Of Radiologic Technology Program Directors: Implications For Leadership Development, Laura S. Aaron

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Leaders in higher education serve in a variety of roles and many times have very little administrative experience for the positions in which they serve. Radiologic technology program directors are the types of leaders who need strong leadership skills to meet the challenges of their role as program chairs. This study examined the responsibilities of program directors and their satisfaction with their leadership skills in relation to the responsibilities. In addition, the leadership styles of program directors were investigated to determine how those styles are related to the responsibilities and their satisfaction with their leadership skills. This study utilized a …

Civic Orientation Predictors Of Black Students: An Exploratory Study, Joe Lee Lott Jr

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Institutions are becoming more cognizant of preparing students for global leadership through measures such as service-learning and community service. Colby and her colleagues (2003) suggest that institutions should guide students to believe that they are members of a shared social structure. Black students are a group whose civic participation has sharply declined between the 1970s and 1990s (Putnam, 2000) when 50 years ago they were one of the most active civic groups (Davis, 1993). This exploratory study investigated the relationships between Black students’ citizenship perspectives and independent variables such as institution type, racial identity, gender, classification, major, age, and socioeconomic …

A Case Study Inquiry Into The Relative Impact Of Balanced Reading Instruction On Hispanic Students In A Highly Culturally Diverse Elementary School, Rita Ramirez

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research explores the relative impact of Balanced Reading instruction upon Hispanic students in a highly culturally diverse elementary school. This case study inquiry focuses on Hispanic students learning to read in English in kindergarten, first and third grade, how these Hispanic students are affected by the classroom setting within the context of the Balanced Reading instructional framework of each respective grade, and what are the similarities and differences in the learning methodologies and strategies that impact the learning curve of these Hispanic students. The researcher collects qualitative data to determine the methods and strategies found to be most effective …

An Examination Of Teacher Migration In A Large, Urban School District, Christine C. Arab

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Teaching is professional work that as an occupation is characterized by many of the same rules of employment as other white-collar jobs. It is typically steady work with predictably rising pay, requires limited physical effort, a fixed amount of work time, and occurs in organizations that are rule-bound. Teaching is also uniquely complex, in that it requires a high degree of autonomy, responsibility for others, and extensive management activities. It is also work that has been the focus of significant public criticism for more than twenty-five years as students test scores have declined, the achievement gap among the races has …

Technology Adoption Into Teaching And Learning By Mainstream University Faculty: A Mixed Methodology Study Revealing The 'How, When, Why, And Why Not', Pamela Stone Nicolle

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The field of educational technology has been and continues to be an influential component within the vast array of educational strategies, pedagogies, plans, and processes designed to enhance student learning. Faculties are realizing the relevance and potential of educational technologies in their teaching and professional and personal growth. However, the distance between envisioning technological use and actual implementation is often a long, winding road for many educators.

University faculty members are in the midst of a strong emphasis by various stakeholders to travel that road and to travel it with speed and accuracy. The mainstream members of tertiary level faculties …

Propelled By Faith: Henriette Delille And The Literacy Practices Of Black Women Religious In Antebellum New Orleans, Donna Marie Porche-Frilot

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The ability to imagine literacy influences the way we historicize literacy and research its dilemmas and challenges. Recent trends in literacy theorizing and research forwarded by New Literacy Studies scholars such Deborah Brandt and Brian Street have converged around contextualized approaches to literacy, directing educators to new imaginings of both our literacy-present and our literacy-past. This study draws upon this expanded literacy framework to theorize literacy in the lives of antebellum black women religious of New Orleans. The focus of the study is Henriette Delille (1812-1862), a free woman of color who founded the Sisters of the Holy Family (1842), …

A Correlational Study Examining The Relationship Between Invented Spelling And Beginning Reading, Jane Mcdaniel Grove

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research study was designed to investigate correlations between invented spelling patterns and beginning reading for low-performing and on-level boys and girls in kindergarten. Two research questions were examined: (1) Is there a statistically significant relationship between invented spelling as displayed in task and reading skills as measured by DIBELS? and (2) Does the performance displayed in task and reading skills as measured by DIBELS differ significantly for boys and girls in kindergarten? Student performance data was gathered using extant school Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) benchmarks at collected at midyear of kindergarten. It was hypothesized that …

Teacher Beliefs And Practices Survey: Operationalizing The 1997 Naeyc Guidelines, Kyung-Ran Kim

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study examined the psychometric properties of a revised measurement, the Teacher Beliefs and Practices Survey, devised for teachers of 3- to 5-year-old children. The measure was designed to reflect the concepts of DAP (developmentally appropriate practices) as presented in the revised 1997 NAEYC guidelines and consisted of 2 scales. Three hundred seventy five surveys completed by public kindergarten teachers in Southeast Louisiana were utilized in the study. Reliability was examined using internal consistency method. Cronbach¡¯s ¥á was .858 for the Beliefs Scale and .787 for the Instructional Activities Scale. Validity of the measure was examined in its content, criterion, …

The Effectiveness Of Student Support Services At A Research Extensive University In The South, Eric Lyle Penalber

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The primary purpose of this study was to determine the influence of level of participation in services provided by the Student Support Services (SSS) Program on the grade point average, retention, and the six-year graduation rate of first-time entering freshmen who also entered the SSS program at a research extensive university in the South. Participants in the study were one hundred, fifty-two (152) SSS students who entered this university in the fall of 1996 and fall of 1997. Tinto’s (1987) longitudinal model of institutional departure was used as the conceptual framework for this study. Services provided by the SSS program …

Conceptualizing Describing And Contrasting School Cultures: A Comparative Case Study Of School Improvement Processes, La Tefy Schoen

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

What is school culture? How can it be measured, described and contrasted? Is school culture related to school improvement? This dissertation investigates school culture and its relationship to school improvement. The study is organized into three phases and employs a mixed methods approach to study the cultures of three pairs of matched schools over a 15 month period. Phase I consists of a multi-disciplinary literature review across the fields of psychology, sociology, business management, anthropology, and educational administration. This process resulted in the development of a new conceptualization of school culture based on merging complementary theories. As defined here school …

"I Cried Out And None But Jesus Heard!" Prophetic Pedagogy: The Spirituality And Religious Lives Of Three Nineteenth Century African-American Women, Elecia Brown Lathon

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

African American women represent a long line of prophetic women. Women who fought for space in the religious world of the nineteenth century, and who fought to have their voices heard in America. The lives and experiences of such women have been excluded, ignored, and dismissed from academic discourses. This study adds a new dimension (the spirituality of African-American women) to the field of curriculum theory and builds on the scholarship of literary scholars who have and are currently recovering the lost lives of African American women and their spirituality. Therefore, this research examined the spirituality and rhetorical strategies utilized …

Advising Perceptions In Student Support Services Programs, Kim Andrepont Warren

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study seeks to understand the perceptions of advisors and students about the TRIO Student Support Services they provide or receive, with particular attention to how their perceptions relate to best practice theories of developmental and prescriptive advising behaviors. By comparing the perceptions of stakeholders to the theory behind the services, a better understanding of the current advising practice of Student Support Services (SSS) is obtained. Data for this study were derived from the Academic Advising Inventory (AAI), a compilation of both advisors’ and students’ perceptions of services in SSS. Observations and quantitative data were used in this study. Five …

Using The Biodatamation Strategy To Learn Introductory College Biology: Value-Added Effects On Selected Students' Conceptual Understanding And Conceptual Integration Of The Processes Of Photosynthesis And Celluar Respiration, Jewel Jurovich Reuter

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this exploratory research was to study how students learn photosynthesis and cellular respiration and to determine the value added to the student's learning by each of the three technology-scaffolded learning strategy components (animated concept presentations and WebQuest-style activities, data collection, and student-constructed animations) of the BioDatamation™ (BDM) Program. BDM learning strategies utilized the Theory of Interacting Visual Fields™ (TIVF) (Reuter & Wandersee, 2002a, 2002b; 2003a, 2003b) which holds that meaningful knowledge is hierarchically constructed using the past, present, and future visual fields, with visual metacognitive components that are derived from the principles of Visual Behavior (Jones,1995), Human …

An Investigation Of Selected Academic And Nonacademic Predictor Variables Of Academic Performance Of Student-Athletes At Louisiana State University, Derek Jerone Morgan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study investigated the effects of selected predictor variables of academic achievement on the academic performance of student-athletes at Louisiana State University. This study attempted to identify cognitive and noncognitive variables that might explain the variance in the cumulative college grade point average (GPA)among student-athletes at LSU enrolled during the 2003-04 academic year. Cognitive variables included ACT composite score, high school GPA, and cumulative college GPA. Noncognitive variables included positive self-concept, support of academic plans, and community involvement. In addition, data were collected for two sport variables--type of sport participation (revenue and non-revenue generating sports) and time spent on sport …

The Language And Politics Of Place: Autobiographical Curriculum In The American South, Michael Brian Casemore

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Place is central to the study of the American South. The question of the meaning and power of place underpinned the earliest efforts to define and understand the region, and place remains a crucial concept in an ongoing process of regional identification and inquiry. This study explores southern place autobiographically, historically, and theoretically in order to illuminate the subjective and social dimensions of place and to promote progressive conversation in the region. My inquiry is interdisciplinary. It draws on psychoanalysis, Southern studies, and the philosophy of place-as well as on theories of curriculum, literature, and art. If places can inspire …

Using Partial Least Squares Approach To Predict Factors That Contribute To The Impact Of E-Folios On Pre-Service Teachers' Learning, Tasha Hoover Christmas

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Teacher-education programs have the responsibility to prepare their future teachers by instilling in them the desire, confidence, and ability to be reflective practitioners, lifelong learners who continues to grow and develop professionally after graduation (Klenowski, 2000). In an effort to fulfill this responsibility, Teacher-education programs are beginning to make reforms to adhere to national standards, which prompt them to create alternative means for assessing pre-service teacher's performance and the success of the teacher-education program. One such alternative is the electronic portfolio. This study investigated the use of Louisiana colleges and universities' electronic portfolio system known as PASS-PORT. The purpose of …

Designing Online Instruction For Postsecondary Students With Learning Disabilities, Andrew Patrick Simoncelli

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This case study investigates the methodologies used to deliver online course content to postsecondary students with varying learning disabilities. The research provides a holistic picture of the students in their actual learning environment. Two college students diagnosed as learning disabled were studied with three non-disabled classmates in an online college learning environment. The purpose was to attempt to explain how the design of the course affects the students’ attitudes and performance. The design of the course featured instructional methods that research has shown to be beneficial to students with learning disabilities. Some of these included digitally delivered instructional audio, various …

Schoolin' Women: Hip Hop Pedagogies Of Black Women Rappers, Nichole Ann Guillory

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The curriculum studies field has much to gain from an analysis of black women rappers’ texts. The knowledge black women rappers offer through their songs is worthy of study in schooling spaces and is too valuable for educators to continue to ignore if they want to become better teachers. Through their lyrics, black women rappers situate themselves in a public context and construct texts that represent young black women’s complex identities. Black women rappers create a space in hip hop discourse from which their stories enrich and complicate the public conversation about the representation of black women’s identities. This study …

Complexifying The Poetic: Toward A Poiesis Of Curriculum, Donna Lynn Trueit

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Inspired by philosopher Richard Rorty’s assertion that we need poetic imagination to move beyond modernity, this pragmatist inquiry seeks to understand the poetic, not as it is rationally defined, but rather as a historically situated discursive practice. In western cultures modernist discursive practices are characterized by rationalist reasoning. Traced to Aristotelian re- interpretations of mimesis (this is that), which structure modernist forms of representation, mimesis operates on a principle of equivalency between the specific and the universal, based on Euclidean, geometric reasoning. Likewise, mimesis underlies poetic representation as an imaginative expression of an objective reality, ideally, a form that moves …

Teaching The Progressive Era Through The Life And Accomplishments Of Jane Addams, Kacy J. Taylor

LSU Master's Theses

Because of standardized testing in Louisiana, the high school American history curriculum has been reduced to a long list of facts. Students no longer learn the story of American history – the people and events that have defined America as we know it. Instead, it is presented to them in fragmented pieces. Teachers move so quickly from subject to subject that they fail to explain the origin and transformation of ideas. This paper proposes teaching a period of history through the life of an important historical figure, in this case, Jane Addams. Through the life of Jane Addams, students can …

Self-Determination Of Students With Disabilities In Post-Secondary Education, Laura Schexnayder Brackin

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research study sought to discover how students with disabilities utilized self-determination in the pursuit of and participation in post-secondary education. Qualitative methods were employed in this study, specifically the use of multiple case studies with embedded units of analysis. Students with a disability, who possessed self-determination and were currently enrolled in an institution of higher education, were the primary participants in this study. Additional information was gathered from parents, professionals, or other individuals who were familiar with the student's pursuit of and participation in postsecondary education. Embedded units of analysis for study consisted of information and skills designed to …

Putting Down Roots In Environmental Literacy: A Study Of Middle School Students' Participation In Louisiana Sea Grant's Coastal Roots Project, Rachel L. Somers

LSU Master's Theses

Few people realize that in Louisiana land is lost to open water at about a rate of 24 square miles a year, faster than anywhere else in the world (Barras, Beville, Britsch, Hartley, Hawes, Jonston, Kemp, Kinler, Martucci, Porthouse, Reed, Roy, Sapkota, & Suhayda, 2003). Not only is the public low to moderately environmentally literate, there is a need to reach students early on to ensure the greatest benefit. This is the main reason why Louisiana Sea Grant¡¦s Coastal Roots Wetland Seedling Nursery Project (Coastal Roots) came into inception. The goal of the project is to improve environmental literacy of …

This Corner Of Canaan: Curriculum Studies Of Place And The Reconstruction Of The South, Reta Ugena Whitlock

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

If place is crucial to understanding the self and society, then it is central to curriculum studies that relate the individual and the social. This theoretical autobiographical research seeks to encourage progressive conversation and social political movement in the South by attending to the anomalous forms of Southernness that emerge in the interrogation of feeling Southern. Toward that end, in this dissertation I explore and foreground a marginalized Southern curriculum of nostalgia, homeplace, grace, and queerness. I investigate aspects of Southern place and feeling Southern that are submerged in conventional white patriarchal notions of Southern identity. My narrative allows some …