Curriculum and Instruction Commons^™

The Impact Of Using Avid And Avid Schoolwide On Achievement, Equity, Access, And Opportunities For High School Students: A Program Evaluation Project, Patra Cooks, Patra W. Smith

Dissertations

The purpose of my research was to determine if the use of AVID strategies had any impact on academic achievement and college and career readiness. Additionally, I evaluated whether AVID school-wide can support all students. The context of this study included AVID Teachers and AVID Coordinators across the United States. The outcomes indicated that 80% of AVID students enrolled in the AVID Elective successfully completed rigorous course work. Furthermore, the study outcomes disclosed which strategies supported students the most with academic success. The AVID coordinators often used writing strategies, while the AVID teachers used collaborative strategies to support student learning.

Life Is Complicated: The Urgent Call To Support Student Wellbeing Through Social Emotional Learning, Taya Kinzie

Dissertations

Abstract:

Students face increased mental health challenges, including depression, anxiety, trauma, racial trauma, and suicide risk, in addition to opportunity gaps. Despite educators’ work to support students through mental health services and despite the existence of social emotional learning (SEL) programs within the school environment, the impact on student learning and long-term post high school outcomes can feel overwhelming. There is also a perception that the responsibility for SEL belongs only to social workers, psychologists and counselors. The primary research question is; how does embedding of SEL practices vary within instructional, non-instructional, and leadership roles? The related questions are: to …

Vocational Education: Cna Students’ Perspectives Of Soft Skills In Training And The Workplace, Kimberly S. Mcclendon-Payton

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this quantitative study was to identify CNAs’ perceptions about the most important soft skills used by CNAs in training and the workplace.

Methodology: This quantitative research study identified CNAs’ perceptions of the most important soft skills they used based on the composite model for soft skills. CNAs were selected based on purposeful sampling. Likert scores were collected from the survey responses.

Findings: Examination of the quantitative data from the 35 CNAs revealed that brainstorming is the most important collaboration soft skill in CNA training and the workplace.

Conclusions: Results based on the findings of this study …

Social-Emotional Supports For African American Males: An Examination Of Strategies And Practices That Inform Persistence For College And Career Readiness, Kamilah Hampton

Dissertations

African American males are faced with many challenges because of the lack of social-emotional supports and current society. African American males experience trauma as a result of their exposure to violence, mistreatment in most environments, and implicit biases in obtaining an education. Social-emotional programming designed specifically for African American males is proven to positively impact their learning outcomes. This study found that the implementation of programming can have a direct impact on African American male’s ability to achieve at high levels. This must be addressed through continuous professional learning and support to challenge and improve a teacher’s instructional practice with …

Ready To Engage? Urban Middle School Teachers’ Responsiveness To Targeted Engagement Interventions On Their Virtual Instructional Practices: An Action Research Study, Svetlana Nikic

Dissertations

Teachers’ effectiveness is associated with their instructional practices and is ultimately linked to students’ learning outcomes. In order to impact teachers’ effectiveness, schools focus substantial effort and resources on professional development led by an assumption that teachers’ classroom practices can be improved through targeted interventions. Even if this premise is correct, little information is available about how much a teacher’s practice may change through interventions, or which aspects of instructional practice are more receptive to improving teacher effectiveness (Garret et al., 2019).

This study took place at an urban middle school and examined teachers’ responsiveness to targeted engagement intervention in …

Equity And Ability Grouping: A Study Of Whole-School Practices And Reflections On Vocal Music Education, Daniel Glossenger, Andrew Cowell

Dissertations

This co-authored dissertation is a macro-level case study of a public high school tracking system and a micro-level autoethnography from a music educator about vocal music placement practices. The case study sought to comprehensively describe and analyze the characteristics of a tracking system in all core subjects at a single school, including the extent of differentiation of levels, placement practices, student mobility, teacher tracking, and inclusiveness by race, class, and gender. It also used network analysis software to map more than 75,000 connections among students created by their course-taking; it used this to quantitatively identify student communities, which then were …

Barriers To Post-Secondary Success, Douglas Swanson, Najeana Henderson, Maritza Sloan

Dissertations

This study reviews factors that prior studies have identified or failed to consider as barriers to post-secondary success. The three main areas include academic success for Latinx students after high school, organizational systems and their impact on African-American students’ postsecondary readiness, and what workers think of their high school education with regards to career preparedness.

Five factors are identified as major barriers for Latinx students to continue in a higher education system. A survey of former students from Saint Louis, Missouri, and Dallas, Texas, metroplex area identified 56 Latinx students that participated in an initial survey. This led to a …