Teacher Education and Professional Development Commons^™

The Impact Of A Professional Learning Community On Student Achievement, Brandon S. Carter

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Professional learning communities (PLC) have the potential to strengthen students' academic achievement. An academic pyramid of interventions, one aspect of PLCs, may be especially helpful in schools where subgroups of students are underperforming relative to other students on standardized testing. This quantitative, one-group, pretest-posttest study examined the impact of implementing an academic pyramid of interventions as part of a PLC on middle school student academic achievement. The 100 students from grade 7 and 8 who participated in the study were identified by teachers as being at-risk for success on the Criterion Referenced Competency Test (CRCT). The reading and math test …

Intrinsic Motivation Of Students With Disabilities In The General Education Setting: What Teachers Should Know And Be Able To Do, Beverly Stinson Faircloth

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) requires that students with disabilities (SWD) be educated in the least restrictive environment, while the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) requires that these students meet minimum criteria on statewide testing by 2014. This sequential explanatory mixed methods action research study, situated in Bandura's self-efficacy and Atkinson's drive theories, examined the effects of teacher training and subsequent implementation of strategies on the intrinsic motivation of SWD. Intrinsic motivation was measured using the Children's Academic Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (CAIMI) before and after the training. A repeated measures t-test analyzed the mean difference in the students' …

The Effects Of Teacher Race In The Elementary School On Student Achievement Test Scores, John Stortz

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The racial and gender composition of elementary school teachers does not match those of the students and this may be contributing to an inequity of achievement scores between African American and European American students. This ex post facto causal comparative study compared three levels of elementary school diversity personnel staffing on Grade 4 African American student Criterion-Referenced Competency Test (CRCT) scores and differences between male African American scores and female African American scores in a suburban Atlanta county. Nine intentionally selected elementary schools were chosen representing 3 racial diversity personnel staffing levels including 39% to 50%, 25% to 27%, and …

Dialogue Within Professional Learning Communities And Its Impact On The Professional Growth Of Teachers In The Elementary School Setting, Melanie Spradley

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The implementation of professional learning communities is a professional development practice that uses collaborative interactions within a constructivist framework to increase teacher and student learning. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore the question of how the dialogue of grade level meetings within professional learning communities impacts the professional development of teachers using the constructivist theory of learning as the conceptual framework. The researcher gathered data through hour-long interviews over a 4-week period with 6 learning community participants, one from each of the 6 grade levels at the elementary school research site. A thematic analysis of the …

The Impact Of Daily Writing On Kindergarten Students' Phonemic Awareness., C. A. Snell

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine whether or not a significant relationship exists among daily writing and student growth in phonemic awareness. The study also considered the impact of writing on the phonemic awareness development of students at different literacy levels. Although studies exist on the importance of phonemic awareness development in reading acquisition, a deficit exists examining the correlation among daily writing and the phonemic awareness development of students representing different literacy levels. Forty students in an experimental group engaged in daily writing opportunities, while 37 students in the control group engaged in less frequent writing …

A Program For The Training Of Elementary Art-Music Teachers, Edward A. Boynton

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The writer has had experience as a supervisor of music at the elementary and secondary levels. This experience combined with the development of courses to suit the program for an elementary teacher training institution provided the background for the development of this project.

The problem, as it appeared to the writer, was that in spite of valiant efforts on the part of music supervisors and art teachers’ elementary students did not comprehend music or art as an aesthetic whole. The methods in use, in most Maine schools, presented the arts as a technical skill to be mastered by the student …