Educational Administration and Supervision Commons^™

Promoting Social Involvement To Increase The Graduation Rate Of At-Risk Students, Kenya Waters Miller

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Graduating from high school is a step in preparing students for positive life outcomes, enabling them to participate in the economy and to engage in civic life. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to understand the perceptions of administrators, teachers, and student support staff regarding cocurricular learning and extracurricular activities and their influence on the graduation rate of at-risk students. Astin’s student involvement theory served as the framework for this study. The research questions addressed how administrators, teachers, and student support staff perceived how programs at an urban high school in a southeastern state influenced the graduation rate …

Using Distributed Leadership At The Middle School Level To Improve Academic Outcomes For Students With Disabilities, Kalisha Miller

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The achievement gap between students with disabilities and their nondisabled peers continues to be a major issue in most school systems across the United States, with this gap expanding as students move from elementary to middle school. Using the distributed leadership framework, the purpose of this basic qualitative study was to explore middle school principals’ perspectives on leadership practices within their instructional leadership teams that improved the academic achievement of students with disabilities. Researchers have demonstrated that distributed leadership is embodied through the collaboration of school leaders, followers, and their situation to influence organizational and instructional changes. The research question …

Teacher Perceptions Of Disproportionate Suspensions Between Minority And White Students, Tanika Rachelle Barr

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Throughout public schools in the United States, minority students continue to receive more disciplinary consequences compared to other groups of students. The problem addressed in this study was the persistence of discipline disproportionality between minority students and White students at a public U.S. middle school, even with recent efforts such as the implementation of the positive behavior interventions and supports (PBIS) framework. Guided by the theory of behaviorism, the purpose of this basic qualitative study was to investigate teachers’ perceptions about the persistence of this discipline disproportionality between minority and White students and ways to improve the use of PBIS …

Exploring Student Loan Borrower’S Financial Decisions After Florida Enacted Statute 1009.45, Vijantie Michelle Boodoo

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Florida implemented Statute 1009.45 as of July 1, 2017, to require colleges and universities to provide annual student loan debt notifications to students to inform them about their student loan obligations. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to examine how college students in the State of Florida make financial decisions about their education, focusing on the influence of the notifications and what additional supports would help them improve their decision-making. There was a gap in the literature in identifying what information students were using from the notification. Rational choice and human capital theories were used for the conceptual …

Teachers’ Experiences Using Phonics Instruction In Korean Elementary School Classrooms, Jung-Hye Choi

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Public elementary schools in the Republic of Korea (Korea) do not reliably include phonics in their third and fourth grade English language curriculum. Therefore, examining how teachers are currently including phonics instructions in the classroom could significantly impact the level of reading skills acquired in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes in Korea. This basic qualitative study addressed what teachers needed to reliably and competently teach phonics in Korean public elementary school districts, what difficulties they encountered, and what kind of support could effectively ameliorate said difficulties. The conceptual framework for this research was provided by Vygotsky's sociocultural theory …

Reducing Family Risk Factors Caused By Poverty Through Family Support Services, Aaliyah C. Williams

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This study aims to determine whether preventative measures are effective if implemented while a family is in crisis, through Family Support Services (FSS), to alleviate Risk Factors, prevent family separation and ensure prolonged family stability, instead of as services to reunify a family that already separated due to a lack of resources. This study examined the Poverty Related Risk Factors of Homelessness, Single Parenthood, and Unemployment as Risk Factors that families enrolled in Ozarks Area Community Action Corporation (OACAC) Head Start experience as negative influences on child development and Family Unity and analyzed OACAC Head Start’s implementation of FSS as …

Building Administrator Preparation And Readiness To Lead Inclusive Practices For Special Education, Nikki Jo Whiting

Dissertations and Theses

The role of the building administrator as the special education leader of inclusion is one of major importance when supporting students with disabilities. The building administrator may face a multitude of decisions dealing with areas of special education such as eligibility, least restrictive environment, services, discipline, and instruction. Being able to make special education decisions that demonstrate an inclusive focus while maintaining an equitable environment for all students is a challenge faced by many building administrator, regardless of experience. This study aimed to determine the perceptions of building administrators regarding their knowledge for leading inclusive practices for special education. This …

Native American Women Superintendents’ Self-Efficacy Beliefs During The Covid 19 Pandemic, Janet Jeannine Metzger

Dissertations and Theses

This multiple case study focused on three Native American women superintendents’ self-efficacy beliefs and the impact of the Indigenous culture on their decision making as they led their school district through the Covid 19 pandemic. Albert Bandura’s self-efficacy theory served as the underpinning theory of this study. The qualitative research design for the study relied on data gathered from individual interviews and written responses to journal prompts. All participants had at least two years of superintendent experience in public school districts during the time of the pandemic. The researcher analyzed the data through open coding/In Vivo coding. The data were …

How Do Parents Of Typically Developing Children Perceive And Interact With Children With Exceptionalities?, Zurisaday N. Decker

Theses and Dissertations--Early Childhood, Special Education, and Counselor Education

The purpose of this study was to examine how parents with children displaying typical development, perceive and interact with children who have exceptionalities or disabilities and explore parents’ openness to having discussions about exceptional children in inclusive classrooms. Given that parents function as foundational sources of knowledge to children in their early childhood years, understanding parents’ perceptions of and interactions with children with disabilities may help to understand how these parents’ children will, in-turn, perceive and interact with classroom peers with disabilities. This line of inquiry is supported by Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, which views microsystems such as the family, …

Building Resilience In Ctls: Reflections On Practice, Lisa J. Hatfield, Julie Maxson, Jennifer Marshall Shinaberger, Hanna E. Norton, Cynthia (Cia) H. Demartino, Annette Finley-Croswhite, Gigi Gokcek

History Faculty Publications

What are the qualities of the “now” that make teaching and learning an urgent, if not a moral, imperative? A group of faculty, administrators, and educational developers respond to this question with individual narratives bound together by a common theme of reflective practice in times of crises to help faculty become more resilient in preparing for ongoing upheavals and unexpected crises while pursuing more inclusive communities. Our personal narratives reflect on the subjects of flexibility in the face of crises, technology and ethics, study abroad exposure to ethical challenges, students’ growing anxiety and mental health, modeling metacognition with peers and …

Using Algorithmic Imaginaries And Uncanny Pedagogy To Facilitate Interdisciplinary Research And Digital Scholarship, Philip L. Frana

Honors in Practice Online Archive

An interdisciplinary honors course titled “Minds, Machines, and Meaning” incorporates the notion of the algorithmic imaginary, which explains how people make use of algorithms to create new information infrastructures and communities and how these algorithms shape us in turn. Describing a culminating writing assignment in speculative research, the author explains how this course facilitates interdisciplinary research while fostering student and faculty growth, and he reflects on the possibility of its future variation, the uncanny valley of algorithmic anti-humanism.

Professional Transitions In Honors: Challenges, Opportunities, And Tips, Suketu P. Bhavsar, Jill Granger, Marlee Marsh, Matthew Means, John Zubizarreta

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Authors reflect on ways that honors practitioners have experienced various professional transitions and provide insights to help others successfully manage such changes.

Honors transitions are inevitable. Many of us in honors, for example, have relocated from other disciplines, moving from the prescribed boundaries of our academic areas to the diverse and challenging demands of honors, quickly learning new leadership skills and approaches to navigating challenges and prospects within and outside our institutions. Some of us have relocated to different institutions; some have negotiated growth from programs to colleges; some have advanced to positions in higher administration; some have witnessed changes …

Disrupting The Way We Work: An Honors Summer Vacation, Lexi Rager, Mollie Hartup

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Authors describe how a summer respite introduces alternative ways and spaces in which to work, positing how collaborative discourse and dismantled hierarchies can affect positive change and productive outcomes for honors programs.

While some assume that the summer is our off-season, the team at the Sokolov Honors College at Youngstown State University knows that it is the time we have to be most “on,” tackling all that we don’t get to do in the semester and positioning us for a strong start to the upcoming fall. Summer 2021 seemed particularly daunting with a laundry list of items to catch up …

Honors In Practice, Volume 18: Frontmatter Materials, National Collegiate Honors Council

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Cover

Indexing

Editorial Board

Contents

Editorial Policy, Deadline, and Submission Guidelines

Dedication to P. Brent Register

Editor’s Introduction • Ada Long

Mapping The Hero’S Journey Into Thinking: Assigning A Geo-Literacies Multimodal Assignment In A First-Year Honors Seminar, Amy Lee M. Locklear

Honors in Practice Online Archive

By incorporating visual mapping into students’ thinking and writing processes, a narrative assignment in geo-literacy creates a reflective and agency-based learning experience for student writers in a first-year honors seminar.

At Auburn University at Montgomery (AUM), I ask my first-year honors students to reflectively examine and practice habits of thinking and knowledge-building in a series of interrelated writing projects and readings. Each reading and writing task is designed to give students the opportunity to build their synthesis-level critical and creative thinking habits. The course theme of “Hero’s Journey” challenges students to consider the idea of the heroic, especially as it …

Using Issues In Honors Education To Teach Argumentation, Annmarie Guzy

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Topics and resources from honors education are used to teach argumentation in writing composition. The author discusses efficacies for increasing student awareness of, and reflection on, issues in honors education while engaging first-year students in honors issues that directly affect their lives.

In my first-year honors composition course, I frequently use materials and topics from honors education, ranging from National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) publications to local campus honors issues, to demonstrate rhetorical analysis and argumentative genres. Rather than using a composition reader, I pair textbook chapters with relevant websites and selected essays from Journal of the National Collegiate Honors …

Serving Through Transcribing: Preserving History While Building Community, Julie Centofanti, Mollie Hartup

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Community is a foundational element in honors education. During the global pandemic, students reimagined ways to connect in order to build community and serve one another. Authors describe a virtual collaboration in transcription, where honors students gathered to participate in digital transcribe-a-thons. These informal groupings evolved into a transcribing club that met three times a week (collectively logging more than 1,600 hours) and transcribed over 16,000 historical documents. A study of participating transcribers reveals enhanced historical knowledge, skill building, and opportunities for relationships with students of varying interests and backgrounds despite edicts for social distancing. While a common feature of …

Embracing New Opportunities In And Beyond First-Year Honors Composition, Teagan Decker, Scott Hicks

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Authors describe course-embedded research experiences at a diverse, rural, regional university. Emphasizing the capacity for conventional teaching and learning in first-year honors composition, these experiences provide relationshiprich education through faculty and peer mentorships. Positing that first-year honors composition is undervalued as a means for establishing programmatic foundations that resonate with students throughout their honors experience, the authors reinforce its importance as a place for disciplinary research and thus for opportunities in mentoring. By addressing an urgent need for mentoring underrepresented students, the authors consider how a research-based first-year honors composition course might help such students make meaningful disciplinary connections. A …

Building Community During Covid-19 And Beyond: How A Community Garden Strengthened An Honors Community, Steve Garrison

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Amid social distancing restrictions, community gardening becomes a focal point of one honors program. While providing fresh produce to the campus food pantry, this student-run initiative generates a new setting for experiential and service learning.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, honors programs across the U.S. struggled to maintain community as higher education moved largely to a virtual setting. Although this shift produced numerous innovations in creative programming, real social interaction greatly diminished. For young adults, social interaction is especially crucial to intellectual and social development, and with community as a key pillar of honors education, compensating for this …

Disorientations And Disruptions: Innovating First-Year Honors Education Through Collaborative Mapping Projects, Nathan W. Swanson

Honors in Practice Online Archive

A series of courses on the Evolution of Ideas introduces interdisciplinary study, develops collaborative discourse, and promotes a sense of community among first-year honors students. The curriculum encourages faculty to use a range of strategies to help students understand an idea and its history while also fostering awareness as to its social, political, economic, and broader contexts. Using the social history of maps as an example, the author demonstrates how disrupting students’ understanding of the map itself and, through creative group projects, disorienting emergent understanding of campus spaces, fosters a questioning atmosphere and makes room for growth. Through planned disorientation …