People interested in the field of Rhetoric and Composition are far more likely now than in the past to pursue a career in writing program administration (WPA). Preparation for this work can be both difficult to find and difficult to provide which is problematic for prospective graduate students and WPA professors alike. The purpose of this study…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the alignment of teacher preparation program courses on effectively teaching early literacy skills to best practices in foundational literacy instruction. This study identified current best practices for instruction on foundational literacy skills and compared course syllabi provided by…

Accredited schools of public health are required to prepare graduate students to competently discuss how racism undermines health equity. A systematic assessment of academic public health norms is needed to clarify how graduate education structures the profession of public health to address racial health inequities. Three aims guided my…

This dissertation presents the first known Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) investigation of how marginalized students are included in syllabi. This study fills a gap in the literature due to the changing demographic of college students, the absence of faculty who share these marginalized identities, the syllabus being the first…

There has been an increase in racial and other minority students in higher education in the US in the past two decades. Additionally, the socio-political events in the past couple of years have highlighted the racial injustice present in the institutional systems urging educators to re-assess diversity and inclusion in pedagogical approaches.…

The focus of this qualitative descriptive study was on what undergraduate faculty at 4-year Christian universities or colleges in California have experienced and what recommendations they have pertaining to the use of scripted syllabi in teaching online courses. Ted Aoki's theory on curriculum implementation as a situational praxis was used as the…

The purpose of this study is to explore why academic faculty opt to incorporate service-learning into their coursework for students and how individual spirituality at work contributes to SL design in experiences. A qualitative single case study design was used. Publicly available documents, syllabi, and semi-structured interviews with 20 previous…

Lecture-only style teaching where a teacher delivers content and students are tested on the retained information is the predominant approach in higher education. Alternatively, active learning is an instructional method in which students become engaged participants in the classroom through the use of in-class written exercises, games, problem…

Statistics & data science are growing, rapidly evolving, and increasingly important for an informed citizenry in a data-saturated world. In this dissertation, I address two central questions: (1) who is taking statistics? and (2) what are statistics courses teaching? I estimate that 920,000 US students take statistics in high school each year,…

The purpose of this action research study was to improve the implementation of a large-scale redesign of teacher preparation programs at Arizona State University. This was a highly complex redesign that impacted over 150 courses across 27 programs, involving more than 200 faculty and 2,500 students annually. As a result, implementing the redesign…

More than 40 years ago, Hicks and Ridley (1979) asserted the need for Black Studies in psychology across American colleges and universities. Their study is one of few, if not the only, that has examined the frequency and types of course offerings in Black Psychology. Thus, the purpose of this study is to evaluate the current state of Black…

The purpose of this descriptive case study was to examine the impact of the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) on student engagement in the CHEM 100 course at Rider University. The action research study was conducted during the fall semester of 2022 with seven participants. The QFT protocol was taught separately from classroom instruction.…

Recent research showed that college-level instructors' implicit theories about intelligence, or mindset, have a direct impact on student learning outcomes. The current study sought to discover how instructor mindset instantiates in the course syllabus. Through a document analysis and semi-structured interviews, patterns of language choice and cues…

Diversity in classrooms across the United States continues to grow. In order to evaluate teacher education programs and explore how they prepare pre-service teachers with culturally responsive teaching practices; the researcher conducted a mixed-methods study. After analyzing teacher education programs through course syllabi, conducting interviews…

This exploratory study aims to contribute to the limited literature regarding the characteristics of STEM gatekeeper courses (Seymour & Hewitt, 1997; Suresh, 2006; Weston et al., 2019; Vyas & Reid, 2023) and their role in student retention and attrition by centering issues of ableism and racism (Annamma et al., 2013). I argue that…