Education Commons^™

An Emerging Hispanic Serving Institution Looks Toward The Future: A Case Study On A Collaborative, Community-Based Systemic Change Effort At An Urban Land-Grant College, Eric Dunker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many higher education organizations face the issue of structural isolation (Ruben, 2004) based on a lack of integration and functional coordination between faculty, staff, and students. Community-based research (CBR) offers higher education a more collaborative, wider reaching avenue of organizing a variety of stakeholders around social change. The CBR model is an atypical change model due to its interdisciplinary, participatory, and collaborative structure that values multiple sources of knowledge and focuses on social justice action. As opposed to serving as the 'experts' who were performing research on a community of people, academics and community members who utilize CBR focus on …

Mixed-Methods Exploration Of Teacher Perceptions: Background, Practices, And Attitudes Related To Student Achievement, Deborah Isabell Faust

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Education policy has focused on teacher quality and student achievement since the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act, which defined teacher quality in terms of teachers' professional qualifications and certification. This is consistent with a history of econometric studies examining the effects of teacher background characteristics on student achievement. More recently, researchers have argued that investigations of teacher effectiveness should examine what actually happens in the classroom, and that teacher attitudes and instructional practices are conspicuously missing from the prior research.

This study uses a two-phase parallel mixed methods design to explore teacher perceptions of the influence of …

Successful Urban Adolescent Writers: A Study Of A Collaborative Model Of Teaching Writing, Erin Mander

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The goal of the research study was to explore the cognitive, social, and affective factors that contribute to the development of 8th grade writing skill. The central research question for this study was: How does a collaborative model of teaching writing prepares students for high achievement on Florida Writes? The researcher successfully answered this inquiry by asserting the following supporting questions: How does school culture impact teacher collaboration and student engagement in teaching writing? What is the relationship between engaging in a collaborative model of teaching writing and improvement of writing skill in middle level students? The study determined how …

Parent Perceptions Of The Georgia Special Needs Scholarship, Charity C. Roberts

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Author's abstract: The purpose of this study was to understand both contributors and barriers to use of the Georgia Special Needs Scholarship (SB10). Although SB10 was designed to offer parental choice of schools for students with disabilities, it has diminished the capacity of parents to access due process granted through IDEA. Perspectives in this study were provided by parents who chose to rescind their child's participation in the voucher program and parents who continued to access the voucher. Analysis of the lived experiences of parents of students with disabilities in Georgia revealed both similar and diverse experiences, perceptions and concerns …