Education Commons^™

Mentoring As A Pathway To Addressing Chronic Absenteeism In Urban High School Academies, Tyeshia A. Hilbert

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Chronic absenteeism is a rising concern for schools across the country. There are a host of reasons why students miss school: internal factors that can push students out of school and external factors that can pull students out of school. Districts have been mandated to implement strategies and supports that will combat this issue by increasing student attendance and decreasing chronic absenteeism.

The concept of mentoring has been around for centuries and recently has been associated with improvement in the attendance of chronically absent students. This dissertation intended to examine attendance and chronic absenteeism rates of students in two urban …

Text Messaging Between School Counselors And Students: An Exploratory Study, Nicholas R. Gilly

Graduate Theses & Dissertations

This exploratory case study examines the impact of text messaging on mentoring relationships when used as an outreach between school counselors and high school students, where established relationships are lacking. An SMS gateway was used to mediate communication between school counselors (N=2) and students (N=5) over a three-month timeframe. The SMS gateway converted email, sent from counselors, to text messages, which were received on mobile devices of students and allowed students to respond back to counselors. Findings indicate that the use of text messaging may ease scheduling of face-to-face meetings between counselors and students, but evidence does not support any …

Mentoring Secondary Novice Teachers To Develop Academic Language Of English Language Learners, Susan O'Hara, Joanne Bookmyer, Robert Pritchard, Robin Martin

Journal of Educational Research and Practice

This exploratory, qualitative study examines the foundational knowledge and instructional methods needed for academic language teaching of English language learners (ELLs). It also examines how mentoring practices can build secondary content-based novice teachers’ instructional capacity in this area. The study uses synthesized data from two independent studies to contextualize findings on essential instructional practices within the process of mentoring new teachers. Three themes emerged: novices need the foundational, theoretical and practical knowledge underlying essential practices for academic language development; essential practices must be articulated in detail for enactment by teachers; and balancing explicit and immersive academic language instruction is a …

'We’Re Like Family And Stuff Like That': Relationships In After-School Programs, Alan English

Educational Considerations

After-school programs have been demonstrated or theorized to be associated with a wide variety of positive youth outcomes and have become a more widely-accepted aspect of the greater educational system. One of the most commonly-cited vehicles for these positive outcomes is relationships developed within the after-school program. This paper investigated youth perception of after-school program relationships through a phenomenological case study. Analysis of interview, observation, and artifact data indicated the potential for the individual positionalities with which youth approach involvement in after-school program relationships to dramatically impact youth outcomes. Consequentially, these individual positionalities need to be considered when developing conceptualizations …

Tennessee Promise Mentoring And Its Impact On Social Capital Of Disadvantaged Students, Tara Laroy

Ed.D. Dissertations

Disadvantaged students (i.e., students characterized by first generation status, low socio-economic status, or racial minority) in the United States enrolled in college at higher rates but still faced a significant college graduation gap. Research has shown that a close, personal relationship with a mentor can increase the social capital of disadvantaged students in post-secondary education. The Tennessee Promise Program was a scholarship program for high school students, designed to remove the financial barriers while also supplying them with an adult mentor to guide them through the college process. In this qualitative study, the researcher aimed to investigate the experiences of …