This dissertation captures the 10-year contemporary history of implementing the facilities element of New Jersey's historic Abbott v. Burke decision. New Jersey's Legislature and Governor took this Supreme Court decision and created legislation responding to multiple constituencies and lobbyists while shaping a school construction program to be…

This dissertation investigates how relational trust manifests within schools that have recently enacted the distributed leadership framework, a program implementation by the Penn Center for Educational Leadership. First, the dissertation highlights research that connects the distributed leadership and relational trust frameworks in the task of…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English and math were finalized in 2010 and, as of July 2012, have been adopted in full by 45 states. These standards provide a framework that is intended to ensure that all students who graduate from high school in the United States have attained the knowledge and competencies that prepare them well for…

The study aimed to determine the opinions of teacher candidates in the fourth year of Computer Education & Instructional Technologies department (CEIT) on the Problems Experienced by Information Technology (IT) Teachers and Suggested Solutions and it has been designed in case study routine taking place within qualitative research tradition and…

A variety of research has pointed to the interdependent linkage among vocabulary knowledge, reading comprehension, and level of literacy. With this point in mind, the present study addressed the question of whether student vocabulary acquisition could be accelerated by using a multi-part, semantic word-family-oriented learning strategy to…

Educators often use reading programs to address younger students' reading abilities and teachers' perceptions of those reading abilities; however, few researchers have examined teachers' perceptions of the effects of sustained silent reading on middle and high school students. The conceptual framework for this study was based on social learning…

This Report to Congress is required by Section 658L of the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) Act as amended. The report provides information about the role of the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), which is authorized under the CCDBG Act, in improving access to high-quality child care in states, territories, and tribes. The data…

As global demands for workers in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields persist, there are increased opportunities for historically underrepresented African-American and Latino youth to fill STEM career pipelines. African-American and Latino youth have long faced disproportionately high unemployment rates. Joblessness has been…

In 2010-11, Wake County Public School System (WCPSS), North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI), and SMART Technologies began a two-year collaboration to promote the use of formative assessment in mathematics classrooms at three Wake County public schools: Millbrook Elementary, East Millbrook Middle, and Millbrook High school. The…

First grade teachers play a critical role in shaping the foundation for early literacy skills acquisition of primary students. Past research studies have indicated that primary students whose teachers followed the"Big 5 Ideas" to teach reading had higher reading abilities when compared to other students. The purpose of this current…

There is no fixed rule about how financial resources must be directed to the education sector. It is quite clear that the size of investment in the sector well defines the quality of education students are offered. It is highly important to define the amount of money, which is needed for effective functioning of schools and it is also important to…

The study reviewed in this paper examined the impact of "Collaborative Strategic Reading" ("CSR"), a set of instructional strategies used to build reading proficiency, on the reading comprehension of fifth-grade students. The analysis included 1,355 students from 74 social studies classrooms within 26 linguistically diverse…

This study assessed implementation of food defense practices in public schools in Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. The first phase involved a qualitative multi-site case study: one-day visits were made to five school districts in the states of Iowa, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. A principal,…

For a school improvement initiative to succeed, education leaders must do more than adopt a new program and train staff. This issue of "SEDL Insights" explores steps that leaders can take to ensure the successful implementation of a new program or practice.

States are in various stages of reforming how they evaluate their educators, all striving for a new system that can assess a range of abilities and practices over long periods of time and capture the full nature of an educator's performance. The strongest systems look at teaching in a more comprehensive way than evaluations have done in the past,…