Education Commons^™

Other People’S Families: How Social Ties Shape Entrance Into The Medical Profession, Lillian Sims

Theses and Dissertations--Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation

Not enough members of low-income, rural, and minoritized populations are successfully prepared for and recruited into medical school, exacerbating issues of unequal access to healthcare and limiting access to the profession. While a multitude of factors contribute to this problem, early social exposure to others in a field can act as a key contributor to career interest and a key advantage for entering the profession. Meanwhile, students without early social exposure to healthcare may take unconventional paths to medical school or may struggle to fit into the unique culture of medicine when they do enter training, especially if they belong …

The Efficacy Of Accelerating Underprepared Community College Students Using A Corequisite Liberal Arts Mathematics Course, Drew Wilkerson

Theses and Dissertations--Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation

Every year, millions of first-time students enroll in community colleges underprepared for college-level work in mathematics. Typically, these students are referred to a sequence of developmental courses designed to remediate their skills and prepare them for college-level work. Recently, educators and policy makers have questioned the efficacy of these courses, especially since most students assigned to remedial courses never complete the sequence and enroll in college-level courses. Calls to reform developmental mathematics have included changes to how institutions determine whether students are college-ready and the elimination of the remedial course sequences themselves. The corequisite model, in which students enroll in …

First-Generation Doctoral Students’ Experiences Navigating Graduate School, Leah K. Vance-Berg

Theses and Dissertations--Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation

First-generation students who pursue graduate programs face a unique set of challenges and rely on their strengths to help them navigate their graduate programs. This study will look at how first-generation students have navigated their graduate course work. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 19 doctoral students at Magnolia University where participants discussed the challenges they have faced during graduate school and how they have navigated these challenges. This exploratory study uses social and cultural capital along with community cultural wealth as a framework to analyze how these students navigate not only their coursework but other academic and social aspects of …

Orienting New International College Students During A Global Pandemic: Spatiality’S Contributions To Staff Work Practices, Thomas W. Teague Jr.

Theses and Dissertations--Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation

U.S. colleges must increasingly respond to a wide range of complex forces and simultaneously fulfill their missions and support students. To address many of these forces, some have turned to internationalization efforts like recruiting and enrolling international students. In light of these efforts, critics have called for institutions to better, more appropriately support these students, given their challenges and needs. This call has amplified during the recent COVID-19 global health pandemic.

Traditional student support services tend to center around Tinto’s Theory of Student Departure. Examples of support programming are frequently shared, yet rarely detail how institutional staff actually perform them …

Adverse Childhood Experience And Undergraduate Student Success: A Longitudinal Investigation Into The Relationship Between Childhood Stress And Success In Higher Education, Sarah E. Cprek

Theses and Dissertations--Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation

Institutions of higher education have long worked to understand factors that influence or predict student success and degree completion. Childhood experiences including potential exposure to toxic stress have been found to impact student success in K-12 schools yet have rarely been evaluated among undergraduates. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and undergraduate degree completion among a random sample of 1,894 students at a state-funded university in the US. Participants completed a web-based survey assessing ACEs in spring 2015. Results from the survey were linked to student academic records for each …

Faculty Perceptions Of Accreditation In The Field Of Educator Preparation, Lauren Bell Graves

Theses and Dissertations--Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation

Accreditation is a measure the federal government, states, and other stakeholders utilize to determine the quality of an institution or a program. Educator preparation providers in Kentucky are required to obtain programmatic accreditation to offer educator preparation programs leading to certification or licensure. The Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) is the national accrediting body with which Kentucky has an agreement for joint programmatic accreditation. The Kentucky Education Professional Standards Board (EPSB) adopted the 2013 CAEP initial standards in 2015 and those standards remain in effect today. Faculty in educator preparation programs are largely responsible for carrying out …

Utilizing A Theory Of Change Process To Establish Framework For A Student Success Course, Sy Bridenbaugh

Theses and Dissertations--Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation

The student success course has become a staple of the college experience. As the academic and social environment continues to shift with each new incoming cohort, having a designed and evaluated framework to utilize during student success course development can be a useful tool. Research surrounding student success in college is abundant. Having a framework that draws on this research for setting learning objectives and determining high impact practices for a student success course could assist in current and future curriculum development.

This study focuses on a student success course offered through the College of Education at the University of …

The Lives Of Others: Describing And Predicting Job Satisfaction Among Faculty Working At The University Of Sarajevo, Nina Marijanović

Theses and Dissertations--Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation

This study examined the topic of faculty satisfaction among faculty employed at the University of Sarajevo (UNSA) in Bosnia and Hercegovina (BiH). BiH has endured a difficult transition from a socialist regime to a market economy following the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early 1990’s and its higher education sector has been particularly affected by this transition. Scholarly research has focused mostly on the impact of discrimination of certain groups at the primary and secondary levels (Pašalic-Krešo, 2008). Research into issues affecting tertiary education is still an emerging field, and research on faculty is especially sparse.

Utilizing survey methodology, this …

“I’M Like Their Gps”: How Mathematics Faculty Support Underprepared Community College Students In Corequisite Courses, Bonita B. Tyler

Theses and Dissertations--Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation

As American community colleges replace prerequisite developmental mathematics courses with corequisite courses, the work of faculty to support underprepared students merits attention. This curricular change means underprepared students are enrolling directly in both college-level content courses with required corequisite support courses for necessary remediation, thus broadening the range of student skills and abilities in the classroom. Faculty work is significantly impacted by this change. Previous research indicates that corequisite course configurations have mitigated some problems with the traditional multi-course sequence of developmental courses. Noticeably, scholars described course structures in detail but failed to describe adequately how students were actually supported. …