The purpose of this study was to determine what effects synchronous instruction has on students in an asynchronous online art course. Action research was selected as the research method as it allows the researcher to study his or her own classroom in order to improve their own instruction. Data was collected for a period of one month from five…

Living inside built environments--infrastructure--it is easy to take for granted the things that we do not need to engage, but are at work behind the scenes nonetheless. Well-designed systems become invisible, but to engage them, how do we know which perspectives, objects, and relationships are useful? I examine the University of Michigan Digital…

During my experiences as a student, teacher, and math/science professional staff developer, I noticed that there was a lot of sadness, sorrow, frustration, and anger in the institutions where I worked. I wanted to understand what makes people happy in education. This qualitative research study utilized narrative inquiry and narrative analysis to…

The purpose of the this study was to explore how peer coaches support the development of collaborative communication skills in an online format for consultants in training (CITs). The program examined was Instructional Consultation which pairs a consultant with a teacher to work collaboratively to resolve the teacher's concern regarding a student.…

This study focuses on an analysis of a professional development program known as lesson study via data obtained during an in-service professional development program for secondary school science teachers. The purpose of this study was to examine the self-efficacy beliefs of one group of science teachers related to their experiences in a lesson…

Culture, defined as the visible organizational behaviors and practices; the espoused values that represent organizational philosophies and understandings; and the values and core beliefs that construct the philosophies represented by organizational action, is formed over decades as institutions learn to respond to challenges associated with their…

This study examined an elementary school, located in an urban school district, which was labeled as a Persistently Low-Achieving School (PLAS) by the federal government in 2009 in order to determine how the school planned to change leadership and staff; increase student achievement; and implement new approaches for changes in school climate. The…

The current study evaluated whether a manualized training in functional behavioral assessment (FBA) would result in typical school professionals being able to conduct a procedurally adequate FBA with a technically accurate summary statement for student behavior. Additionally, the study examined whether summary statements obtained by trained school…

The American School Counseling Association's (ASCA) National Model has been recognized in the field of professional school counseling as an effective framework for the training and supervision of school counselor interns. Despite this recommendation, school counselor supervision models which incorporate the ASCA model have until recently been rare…

This case study focused on a school action plan, using a planning and implementation process that focused on improving stakeholder involvement and responsibility for student reading achievement at Eisenberg Elementary School. This study examined the impact of the school action process on the development of a new plan compared to other traditional…

This study provides an historical analysis of the Chicago Public School Desegregation Consent Decree, while illustrating its relationship with the "Brown v. Board" of 1954. It provides an analysis of the mission and objectives of all three versions of the Consent Decree which include: The Original Consent Decree 1980, The Modified…

Nursing education programs are faced with the challenge of providing students with the necessary skills to function in a fast paced, high technological environment. To address this challenge, the current trend in nursing education is to integrate the use of high-fidelity simulation technology into the curricula although there has been limited…

Health science students like students in many disciplines exhibit difficulty with transferring content from one course to another. For example, the problem explored in this study occurred when overlapping concepts were presented in introductory biology and chemistry courses, but students could not transfer the concepts to the other disciplinary…

During the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) movement's formative years, programs were launched at hundreds of higher education institutions across North America. WAC programs incorporated workshops as the primary delivery mechanism to introduce participants to WAC pedagogy. To explore how workshops changed teaching practices, this study…

This study examined the participation styles of nine parents while attending Individual Educational Program (IEP) meetings for their children. The nine parents consisted of three parents from a suburban school district, three parents from a rural school district, and three parents from an urban school district. Data collection through videotaping…