Education Commons^™

Entering The Virtual Teacher’S Lounge: The Efficacy Of Community In Computer-Mediated Communication Based Environments For Professional Educators, Randall S. Dunn

Faculty Dissertations

This study seeks to illuminate an understanding of naturally forming online communities of professional educators in the context of off-line communities. Essentially, an online discussion forum for educators is evaluated for the purpose of determining whether the forum provides a “space” conducive for the development of a community of professional educators as benchmarked against an understanding of offline community formation and existence. The foundational works of Ferdinand Tonnies, James Coleman, and Ray Oldenburg are used to develop 13 characteristics of community - as understood in the context of informal social communities as opposed to the types related to more formal …

Relationship Between Select Variables And Teacher Rentention, Connie Sue Greiner

Faculty Dissertations

The major purpose of this study, conducted during the spring and summer semesters of 2003, was to determine the relationship between the following variables and teacher retention: Professional Development Examination for the Certification of Educators in Texas (PD ExCET) scores, Texas Academic Skills Program (TASP) reading scores, age at time of passing the PD ExCET, ethnicity, completion of a field-based teacher education program or emergency permit teacher education program, gender, and undergraduate grade point average.

The quantitative study identified students from a single Texas senior-level university who passed the PD ExCET between September 1, 1996 and August 30, 2000. Five …