In order to assist higher education institutions and their students during the pandemic, the federal government established the Higher Education Emergency Relief (HEER) Fund, which directed over $75 billion to institutions of higher education--including nearly $25 billion to community colleges--over a three-year period. The U.S. Department of…

Since the early 2000s, federal, state, and local lawmakers and educators have worked to combat the "wait to fail" mentality and support higher student grade level academic achievements. Educators were tasked with finding teaching methods that better served academically struggling students, some of whom had specified learning…

Conjoint Behavioral Consultation (CBC) is an indirect intervention delivered by a consultant, wherein parents and teachers engage in collaborative problem-solving. This small-n study investigated the effects of remote videoconference delivery of CBC (Tele-CBC) in a rural region. The effectiveness of Tele-CBC was tested using a concurrent multiple…

Guided by the theory of differentiated instruction, this quantitative study evaluated the effectiveness of Achieve 3000, a technology-enhanced program for differentiating reading instruction. Achieve 3000 was fully implemented with fidelity in a local middle school that has a large percentage of advanced learners. Archived reading scores of 120…

College can be a challenging time for freshmen students; but for freshmen college students with disabilities, there are additional challenges to overcome. The purpose of this case study was to analyze freshmen students' perceptions of the various student support programs available for college students with mental or cognitive disabilities and the…

Last spring, the Covid-19 pandemic upended routines for over 56 million students and challenged more than 3.7 million teachers in over 130,000 schools nationwide to continue educating kids in an online format. This transition to "virtual learning" was understandably trying for all educators, schools, and districts, but some managed to do…

This paper shares the perceptions of a group of 11 successful online students regarding the value of the collaborative learning community that developed as part of their participation in the first cohort of the WebIT online Master of Science Degree in Instructional Technology program, at The University of Tennessee at Knoxville during 2008-2010.…

Almost half of Tennessee's students are not on grade level in reading and math by the time they complete third grade, and very few of those students achieve proficiency in later grades. To combat this trend and support the skill development and academic achievement of all students, Tennessee has adopted a framework for addressing individual…

This study focused on the association between 3 school-level supports for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students and teachers' knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors toward LGBT youth. Framed within social support theory, the study used survey method with a sample of 98 teachers in Grades 6-12. The purpose was to examine the relation…

Almost two-thirds of students who enter community colleges every year are judged to be academically not ready to engage in college-level coursework. In order to enroll, these students typically must take one or more "remedial" or "developmental" math or English courses that will not count toward their college degree. The…

In 2013, the Tennessee Board of Education adopted Response to Intervention and mandated that districts begin implementing the framework by the summer of 2014. With only a year to begin the model, no state funds to help with implementation, and limited research on implementing school-wide Response to Intervention in poor rural districts and…

In this paper, the authors explore the use of learning analytics as a method for easing the cognitive demands on teachers implementing the HALF instructional model. Learning analytics has been defined as "the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts for the purposes of understanding and…

This study examined a mentoring program entitled: LISTEN (Linking Individual Students To Educational Needs). The LISTEN mentoring program was a district-sponsored, school-based program in which at-risk, middle school students were identified by the school system and mentors were recruited specifically to assist these students with school…

This research examined the impact of collaborative teaching (co-teaching) on the Reading/Language Arts and Math achievement of Middle Tennessee students in grades 5-8, as measured by the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) Achievement test. Within the context of this study, the co-teaching model of instruction is defined as the…

Since the inception of the Individual with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 1975, an increasing percentage of children between the ages of 3-21 have been identified as students with learning disabilities (LD). Reports from the National Center of Learning Disabilities (2000) have suggested that monitoring of student learning is frequently…