Response to the continuing call to integrate scientific inquiry activities into high school education has taken different forms varying in student ownership, physical setting, time span, and mentoring resources. Important issues are how students perceive central dimensions of their experience, and the extent to which the inquiry framework design…

This dissertation is a qualitative investigation of influences of school tracking on the Black identity development of high school students. This dissertation begins with a Critical Race Theory analysis of school tracking processes. After exploring how tracking was designed, and how it continues to obstruct the potential for optimal Black student…

This paper presents findings from a qualitative study among 50 secondary school students from 10 schools in the Netherlands, aiming to understand how they experience 'presence' -- being fully (with one's entire being) engaged in the here-and-now -- in class. Although presence was a non-regular experience, students experienced it as personally…

The purposes of this study were to (1) investigate 127 high school students' views about scientific inquiry at different grade levels, and (2) to describe factors such as the teacher's views about scientific inquiry, his teaching, and his curriculum that facilitated or constrained students' views about scientific inquiry. The majority of students…

Four topics were investigated in this longitudinal person-centered study: (a) profiles of subjective task values and ability self-concepts of adolescents in the domain of mathematics, (b) the stability of and changes to the profiles of motivational beliefs from Grade 7 to 12, (c) the relation of changes to student-perceived classroom…

This study examined the perceptions of adulthood among 31 high-school students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We had two research aims: (a) to report students' postsecondary expectations in terms of school, work, friendships, and living arrangement and (b) to describe how our sample defined adulthood. To better compare our sample's criteria…

Recent literature debates the effectiveness of the senior year, stating that it is an unproductive and unrealistic time for many students--either because they are, by that point in their school careers, disengaged and waiting to graduate, or because they are so stressed from taking Advanced Placement (AP) exams and writing college essays that they…