Our children come to school every day to learn, participate, and prepare for what the future will bring. Others come to school to find refuge and help from those who dedicate their lives to ensure they are well and safe. They come with their minds filled with hopes and dreams, while others walk around the hallways with their hearts filled with…

SWLD are often underperforming in STEM courses compared to their peers without learning difficulties. Furthermore, how students perform in 9th grade is found to be a strong predictor of high school success, graduation, enrolling, and persisting in college (Easton et al., 2017). The study aimed to investigate whether the use of PBA, a…

There is an ever-increasing need for technologically literate citizens to find creative ways to solve societal problems. STEM, the integration of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics subjects continues to be a popular topic as schools grapple with how to best prepare students for an ever-evolving society. As societal and technological…

This explanatory sequential mixed methods study, which consisted of QUAN [right arrow] to qual investigated the impact of mathematics word problems among African American students in the seventh grade. This study applied a culturally relevant education (CRE) lens to examine how students solve mathematics word problems. Ladson-Billings (1997) and…

In the first part, we investigate Birman, Ko, and Lee's left canonical form of a braid and give a new diagrammatic approach. We use the left canonical form to characterize almost strongly quasipositive braids. In the second part, we investigate students' confidence in mathematics and problem solving skills. Every math instructor has heard students…

This study engages in a rigorous process to develop an instrument, College Students' Financial Stress (CSFS). This instrument aims to assess college students' generalized financial stress, or financial unsafety, to provide administrators with a tool to gauge students' mental well-being and financial experiences in higher education. Accurately…

Colleges and universities play an important role in training a skilled workforce and generating knowledge for society, but we know little about exactly how universities choose the skills and knowledge they provide to students. In my dissertation, I introduce novel data that allow me to document new facts about the supply of courses at a large…

With tuition increasing at a faster rate than inflation, many college students depend on grants to access education. The largest of these, the federally funded Pell Grant, subsidizes over 30 billion a year worth of tuition for eligible students (Cardona, 2023) yet no longer meets its goal of covering 75% percent of tuition costs. While the…

Given the current political climate of division, the study of history is important now more than ever, but the value of the study of history has been marginalized. This study used student focus groups to understand ways in which history could be taught in such a way that its importance is emphasized through relevance and connection to current…

For this study, an alternating treatment single-case research design was used to evaluate and compare the impacts of student-led and teacher-led Tootling on individual student's disruptive behaviors and academic engagement. Student-led Tootling, teacher-led Tootling, and baseline conditions were alternated daily following a systematically blocked,…

The American School Counselor Association has placed an increased emphasis on school counselor leadership. School counselors play an essential role within the educational setting (ASCA, 2019). Leadership embodies the overarching role of a school counselor and is a key component of each school counselor's professional identity (McMahon et al.,…

In this dissertation, I explored students' expressed emotions as they worked on a problem-solving lab contextualizing the local lead poisoning issue in the city in which they attended college. I identified students' expressed emotions and their reasoning for expressing those emotions. I also looked at the change in students' emotions as they…

A large body of research has documented the ineffectiveness and detrimental effects of punitive discipline policies and practices in schools. Though the anti-punitive discipline reform movement has grown in the last two decades, punitive discipline practices persist as the most prevalent approach to addressing behavior-related issues in U.S.…

In response to decreasing motivation in high school math classrooms, teachers are transforming classrooms with various instructional techniques. Traditional math instruction relies on direct instruction and memorization of content, processes, and skills. Teachers are transitioning to more constructivist student-led approaches. Utilizing multiple…

The purpose of this case study was to determine if using reading comprehension strategies to solve math word problems would help decrease math anxiety in third grade students. The research questions that guided this study included (a) how do the different reading comprehension strategies affect student self-confidence on math word problems, (b)…