As the 21st century unfolds, the world has become increasingly fast-paced, interconnected and unpredictable compared to previous generations (McChrystal, et al., 2015). As a result, education researchers and practitioners must be prepared for the challenge of helping students better apply their knowledge to respond to the complex and novel…

Community College Written Communication 1 (ENC) instructors encounter complex challenges when attempting to teach writing skills to diverse student populations. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study is to explore the perceptions of full-time community college ENC faculty and determine the instructional strategies they use to…

The purpose of this dissertation was to experiment with qualitative research methodologies while exploring the complexities of doctoral education, research practices, philosophies of inquiry, and other topics intersecting with(in) educational scholarship. My vision for this work was fueled by postmodernist critiques of humanist education,…

The purpose of this research is to showcase the process of a local Research-Practice Partnership (RPP) with possible policy implications by analyzing teacher attrition patterns over many years. The RPP is a collaboration between a principal, the practitioner, and statistic students, the researchers. All groups were graduate-level students at the…

Elementary teachers are challenged to meet the needs of all types of learners within their classrooms; high ability, learning disabled, average ability, and students suffering from childhood trauma. Childhood trauma impacts the brain of a young person and may keep them in a state of fight, flight, or shutdown, making it difficult to learn. Many…

Educational research has been around for over one hundred years and has faced periods of optimism, pessimism, and skepticism. Currently, there is a plethora of educational research available for teachers and districts to use. However, there is a research-practice gap. This gap refers to the amount of research available and educators using the…

The research-to-practice gap in education has been well documented over the decades (e.g., Abbott et al., 1999; Burns & Ysseldyke, 2009; Cook & Odom, 2013; van Ingen & Ariew, 2015). To best benefit PreK-12 student outcomes, educators must understand and implement scientifically based practices in their teaching (Elementary and…

The disconnect between educational researchers and practitioners has been prevalent since the 1900s. Researchers often conduct inapplicable, inaccessible studies, teachers often inadvertently use teaching methods that are not empirically supported, and administrators can be highly disconnected from student needs (Broekkamp & van Hout-Wolters,…

Basic writing, which developed as a field within the larger discipline of rhetoric and composition, has a tumultuous past and an uncertain future. What began as an academic response to a perceived literacy crisis with the rise of open admissions in the late 1960s has continued to grow and reinvent its structures, theories, and practices as new…

This dissertation interrogates three educational structures in a set of three manuscripts: (a) Technologies of Behavioral Intervention: Systematizing Control and Constructing Identities for BIPOC Students, (b) Parent Advocacy: Black Family Cultural Wealth and Special Education Structures, and (c) Ethics Review for Critical Special Education…

Increasing pressure to transform teaching and learning of engineering is supported by mounting research evidence for the value of learner-centered pedagogies. Despite this evidence, engineering faculty are often unsuccessful in applying such teaching approaches often because they lack the necessary knowledge to customize these pedagogies for their…

The identification and implementation of evidence-based practices by special education and general education teachers continues to be an issue in the field of education (Cook & Cook, 2011; Cook, Tankersley, Cook, & Landrum, 2008). Since the mandates of providing students with disabilities access to the general education curricula (IDEA,…

The purpose of this collection of multiple case studies was to examine teachers' perspectives and practices to determine whether instructional strategies implemented in their classrooms to promote literacy skills for students with autism spectrum disorders were described as research-based practices. Although extensive research has been conducted…

Traditional notions around "research" and "teaching" tend to project the two as separate, often conflicting, activities. My dissertation challenges this perceived dichotomy and explores points of connections, or continuities, between teaching and research through my own practice as an adjunct community-college English as a…

The purpose of this study was to develop an instructional theory for using a class wiki to support collaborative learning in higher education. Although wikis have been identified in theory as one of the most powerful emerging technologies to support collaborative learning, challenges have been revealed in a number of studies regarding student…