Literacy practices play a catalytic role in equipping girls with the necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes to make qualitative improvements on their lives. This paper reports on a qualitative study that identified existing literacy practices and the support available to enable the development of literacies among girls. Interviews and…

Prior research has found that public investments in North Carolina's pre-kindergarten program--NC Pre-K--generated positive effects on student reading and math achievement through eighth grade (Bai et al., 2020). This study examined whether the effect of NC Pre-K funding exposure is moderated by the educational environments children subsequently…

This mixed methods case study dissertation research aimed to examine specific characteristics of general education teachers (non-arts-based, non-gifted-education-based) related to how teachers foster creative classroom ecologies in their traditional classroom environments. The targeted characteristics involve two dimensions potentially related to…

The research described in this study sought to understand how teacher agency was influenced by engaging teachers in action research-based professional development. Teacher agency is a critical component of teacher professionalism and nurturing teachers to recognize and enact greater agency has the potential to elevate the profession of teaching. A…

This qualitative case study aimed to investigate and gain a greater insight into understanding distributed leadership and the experiences of individuals at an elementary school who participated in the process of obtaining Indiana STEM-school certification. The ultimate objective was to explore the leadership interactions of multiple participants…

This research explored the lived experiences of Black girls in schools with a focus on racial discrimination and the impact it has on their mental health. Grounded in Black feminist thought and phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory (PVEST), this study used qualitative research to understand the lived experiences of Black girls.…

Traumatic events can alter the brain structure, affecting cognitive capacities and academic performance. Educators at all grade levels are responsible for supporting students through trauma-informed approaches. Previous trauma-informed research focused on K-12 education levels. Graduate-level occupational therapy educators' experiences and…

Using data from a longitudinal German large-scale study and structural equation modeling, this study investigated the effects of different dimensions of the early home learning environment (HLE) as well as the effect of language-related preschool quality at the age of 3 to 5 years on students' later school-relevant language proficiency (as…

According to the Civil Rights Data Collection, during the most recent data collection for 2020-2021, Black girls were nationally represented in gifted education at 9%. While White girls were defined at 55%, Hispanic/Latina girls at 19%, and Asian girls at 10%, Black girls appear in gifted education as the most underrepresented major subgroup in…

The general problem to be addressed by the current study is the increasing percentage/count of dropouts of non-traditional students from online college degree programs. Guided by the theory of Perceived Organizational Support (POS), the purpose of this quantitative study was to investigate how POS is related to perceptions of faculty support,…

Multiple national calls centered on critical thinking and social justice have been made to improve and reform higher education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses to increase the representation of students from marginalized groups in the STEM workforce and equip all students for success. To help answer this call,…

The rapid growth of edge computing, 5G, and IoT technologies has led to a significant increase in distributed data, creating both opportunities and challenges for machine learning. Federated learning has emerged as a promising approach to enable collaborative model training across decentralized devices while not sharing user data. However,…

In education, there is a risk that joy in learning is counteracted by allowing a performance culture to dominate. Research shows that emotions are of great importance for results, motivation and well-being. This study aims to add knowledge about the essential meanings of joy in learning based on students' lived experiences and thereby implications…

This critical self-reflection is not a success story; rather, it is an effort of decolonial thinking that reckons with the idea, experience, and practice of centerlessness during pandemic-induced online transitions and operations in a graduate writing center (GWC). By tracing the contours of a series of interlocking disruptions the author and her…

Recent reform efforts to center issues of equity and social justice in mathematics classrooms have been under fire from the loudest sectors of right-wing media. The hysteria around incorporating social justice issues in mathematics classrooms is captured in the artificial binary: STEM or CRT. In our paper, we examine resistance to reform efforts…