Education Commons^™

Reimagining Technology Preparation For Pre-Service Teachers: Exploring How The Use Of A Video Self-Analysis Instructional Component, Based On The Evidential Reasoning And Decision Support Model, Impacts Pre-Service Teachers’ Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge, James Jang

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Teachers often teach on their own in their individual classrooms and thus have to mostly rely on themselves to reflect on their teaching practices and make improvements. This study explores how the use of a video self-analysis instructional component, based on the evidential reasoning and decision support model (ERDS), impacts pre-service teachers' technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK). Using the explanatory sequential mixed methods design, the researcher first collected quantitative data. The collection of qualitative data then followed. This two-step process helped explain and elaborate on the quantitative results of this study. Participants in this study were 21 pre-service teachers enrolled …

Knowing Leaders: Centering Gender And Identity Among Women Leaders In Higher Education, Meredith Harper Bonham

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This dissertation centered the experiences of women academic leaders – their backgrounds, educational experiences and leadership styles – to illuminate the intersection of identity and leadership. Using narrative inquiry as a methodological framework (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Creswell, 2013), the researcher conducted a qualitative study by interviewing seventeen women presidents and chief academic officers in a semi-structured format. In exploring and analyzing the stories of women leaders, the researcher avoided unidimensional characterizations and binary comparisons with male leaders. To incorporate the interlocking components of identity, the researcher considered the impact of race, class, gender, and first-generation status, as well as …

How Does A Gamification Design Influence Students’ Interaction In An Online Course?, Jiaming Cheng

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This study created and examined a gamification design that aimed at improving students’ interaction in a graduate level online course. By using a design-based research approach, the study investigated the application of principles from Self-Determination Theory in the gamification design and its influence on students’ interaction in discussion forums in terms of quantity, interaction dynamic, and interaction quality. The gamification design included a positive feedback system, contextualized in a narrative environment that was based on the original course project design. Participants were 49 students enrolled in the online course in three versions of the course, which were the non-gamification version …

Early-Year Undergraduate Research Experiences: How Students Are Mentored, How Valuable They Find This Experience, And What Kinds Of Costs They Associate With It, Gaye D. Ceyhan

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Undergraduate research has been considered as a high impact practice. Engaging in research in early college years are crucial to attracting and retaining students in research-related STEM careers. However, undergraduate research literature mostly focuses on the research experiences of students that are later in their undergraduate years. This dissertation is formed in an article-style format, which is a compilation of two separate research efforts to explore undergraduate students’ research experiences in their freshman and sophomore years. This article-style dissertation is part of a larger investigation into the academic and social experiences of high-achieving low-income undergraduate students. The context of the …

Cruising, Crossings & Care: Sounds Of Collective Black Girlhood, Blair Ebony Smith

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This dissertation is an autoethnography of my three-year and ongoing participation in Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), a creative organizing collective that focuses on envisioning and creating spaces within the local community that celebrates the complex lived experiences of Black girls with Black girls. In this project, I argue sounds of collective Black girlhood, created in SOLHOT, reveal the importance of collective music-making practices in Black girlhood studies and girl programming. Cruising, Crossings and care, as sounds of collective Black girlhood created in SOLHOT, resound us towards 1) being with Black girls and women across difference in deep …

A Quantitative Analysis Of The Effect Of Integrated Co-Teaching On The Growth Of English Language Arts And Mathematics Achievement In Elementary School Students Using Student Growth Percentiles, Amy Sue Divita

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This causal-comparative study provides a descriptive analysis of the impact of participation in co-taught classrooms compared to traditional classrooms on the academic growth of students with and without disabilities. This issue is examined in English language arts and mathematics using the New York State testing program results. A quasi-experimental design and a post hoc statistical analyses using t-tests was used to look for statistical differences between identified groups. Achievement growth was operationalized as the student growth percentile on the NYS New York State assessments, and group means were compared by grade level over five years. The findings from this study …

"And Then You Can Prove Them Wrong": The College Experiences Of Students With Intellectual And Developmental Disability Labels, Katherine Vroman

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This dissertation chronicles the college experiences of students with intellectual and developmental disability labels enrolled in an inclusive postsecondary program, as told by them. Using student-generated digital photographs as visual supports around which to organize focus group conversations, I employ a participatory, phenomenological methodology to garner and represent the students’ experiences. The study design, and data collection are informed by both feminist and Disability Studies epistemological and theoretical frameworks, while the analysis foregrounds Disability Studies, seeking to privilege and center the voices of a population of students who have been largely left out of scholarship to date. This study lives …

Pathways To School Success: An Examination Of Perspectives Of African American And Latino/A Low-Income Students, Uzoamaka Chinyelu Unobagha

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This research study examines the perspectives of African American and Latino/a students from low-income families who are especially successful in an urban, public school to elicit and gain insights into factors that mediate their academic success, conditions and contexts that nurture these factors, and the process through which these factors mediate their academic success. Utilizing a qualitative, phenomenological theoretical framework (Van Manen, 1990), this study bridges critical gaps in the empirical research literature on the academic success of such students by centering and validating the marginalized, yet authentic, voices, perspectives, and lived experiences of the adolescents (Gayles, 2005; Howard, Dryden …

Experiences Of Entrepreneurs With Disabilities: A Critical Disability Theory Perspective, Mirza Tihic

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This dissertation explored the experiences of entrepreneurs with disabilities who participated in entrepreneurship programs that were developed for people with disabilities. The study uncovered ableist barriers and challenges that entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs face regularly. The case study (n=5) and survey (n=188) recorded, analyzed, and summarized the respondents’ lived experiences. The summary of the researched data provides insights into how entrepreneurs with disabilities navigate challenges and barriers through the aid of the customized entrepreneurship training that was developed for them and with them within entrepreneurship programs for people with disabilities. The two programs for people with disabilities were the Entrepreneurship …

A Validation Of Critical Constructs Of Essential Evaluator Competency And Evaluation Practice: An Application Of Structural Equation Modeling, Jie Zhang

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The study aims to examine the interplay of two critical constructs in evaluation: essential evaluator competency and evaluator practice. The research questions in this study, according to Smith (2008), are essentially, what he defined as “fundamental issues in evaluation.” These issues fall into one or multiple of the four aspects identified in the fundamental issues in evaluation framework: theory, practice, method, and profession. The intertwined nature of these aspects implies the interactive relationships between the two constructs. The study utilizes the structural equation modeling (SEM) methodology, first to examine construct validity and psychometric properties of the measurement scales, and then …

Off The Rural Back Road: Describing The Experiences Of Rural Students Who Enrolled At An Urban 4-Year University, Michaele Elizabeth Webb

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Tinto (1993) argued that all students have different needs and require different resources and services to enable them to persist at the university level. One group of students that requires individualized attention is students from rural areas. During the 2010-2011 academic year, 57% of public school districts in the U.S. were in rural areas (U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, 2013). These rural school districts serve a quarter of the students who attend public schools in the U.S. (Schiess & Rotherham, 2015).

Rural students have lower college enrollment and persistence rates than non-rural …

How High School English Teachers Make Sense Of And Instruct With Narrative Film In The English Classroom, Joseph Goldberg

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Although English teachers have integrated narrative film into their classroom instruction for over a century, the medium remains highly vulnerable to suspicion of its pedagogic value. While film has become ubiquitous in the English classroom, training for teachers in instructing with the medium remains nearly non-existent. This has led to the regular misuse of film as a time-filler, babysitter, reward, or mere break for student and teacher, alike. Such malpractice has only reinforced skepticism of film’s instructional value in the classroom despite the ample scholarly literature supporting its inherently cognitive nature and literary and linguistic likeness. Though film has been …

Mentor Teaching In Four Communities Of Catholic Sisters In The Mid-Twentieth Century (1940-1965), Melanie Nappa-Carroll

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This dissertation is a qualitative study that explores mentoring experiences of Catholic teaching nuns– hereafter called sisters and/or women religious– who served in parochial schools in the mid-twentieth century in the Diocese of Syracuse, NY. Teaching sisters comprised the majority of the professional workforce in Catholic schools through ministry as classroom teachers, building principals, diocesan-level administrators, service providers, and more. The purpose of this qualitative study was to develop an understanding of how teaching sisters engaged in mentoring to develop instructional and pedagogical skills in the mid-twentieth century, specifically 1940 through 1965.

In addition to researching archival records, this study …

How Do Teachers Experience Lesson Study?, Francis Kevin Moquin

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For the past 20 years, an increasing number of American educators have employed the Japanese model of lesson study as a process to structure their professional development experience. This study endeavored to understand how teachers experienced this relatively new and foreign process in their local contexts, using the overall research question, “How do teachers experience lesson study?” Leveraging hermeneutic phenomenology, the research was based on semi-structured phone interviews of 15 educators. These educators were from various regions in America, two from the Far East, and one from Europe. In describing their professional development experiences prior to lesson study, participants overlapped …

Producing The Global Classroom: Exploring The Impact Of Us Study Abroad On Host Communities In San Jose, Costa Rica And Florence, Italy, Julie Ficarra

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This project draws attention to a disconnect between US higher education internationalization policy rhetoric which centers ideas of mutual cross-cultural exchange, and study abroad research, which focuses almost exclusively on the educational and experiential outcomes of the US based participant. Using neoliberalism as a theoretical framework, this comparative case study utilizes qualitative interviews with 57 host community members in the popular study abroad destinations of San Jose, Costa Rica and Florence, Italy, to focus on how those who engage with US study abroad students understand and are impacted by those encounters. Each descriptive case explores: a) what motivates locals to …