While program-level assessment has become common in higher education, questions remain about the impacts of assessment on teaching and learning in academic programs. Despite the considerable assessment activity happening in higher education, assessment scholars still have difficulty finding evidence of programs "closing the loop," that…

Over the past decade, the independent school landscape in the U.S. and Hawai'i has experienced a dramatic transformation resulting in school closures, consolidations, and attempts at expansions. Leadership of organizational change, particularly within complex contexts undergoing highly dynamic and disruptive forces, is long understood as…

This Educational Leadership Portfolio (ELP) documents my exploratory study of the feasibility of developing a new associate level (A.A.S) degree program. While this study and plan is designed to serve as a guide for any two-year or community college thinking of developing such a program, many of the artifacts in this study are written specifically…

This study investigated whether or not lab type, traditional lab or virtual lab, influenced students' engagement. To measure student engagement six students were videoed over the course of an 18-week semester while conducting 10 lab experiments. To analyze student engagement, a systematic visual comparison in the tradition of single case research…

At Base Elementary School (BES) in the Southwest United States school administrators were concerned that writing proficiency levels for 2014-2015 were below district and state standards and there was not a clear understanding of teachers' perceptions on writing proficiency of military-connected (MC) students at the target site. Therefore, the…

Ethiopia faces a tremendous challenge producing an adequate supply of teachers to meet demands while maintaining the quality of education. Today, 497,737 (0.55%) of the teaching population in Ethiopia support 44,555,953 (49%) of the student population under the age of 18. Out of which, 70% stated they would leave the teaching profession given the…

Taking a critical archival studies approach, this dissertation engages critical discourse analysis as a means of analyzing the analogous treatment and representation of political dissidents from the civil war and alleged gang members in post-conflict El Salvador through the medium of human rights documentation. By analyzing a cross section of…

African Americans are underrepresented in Gifted and Talented Education programs (Ford, 1995). Gifted and Talented Education was created to address the needs of exceptional children, but educators have disproportionately identified and enrolled African American students at a lower rate as compared to their counterparts (Ford, 1995). Teachers'…

As states continue to grapple with the most appropriate ways to hold schools accountable under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), there is a lack of consensus on how alternative settings should fit into accountability systems and whether those systems should be separate from or included in accountability systems for traditional schools. The…

Discussion of alternative education is growing across the country as states and districts look for ways to better serve students whose needs are not met in traditional high school settings. Alternative settings, however, vary greatly in how they operate, whom they aim to enroll, and the methods they use to educate students. The variation of…

The issue of guns and gun control is very complex especially since the passage of Campus Carry Law in the state of Texas. The purpose of this qualitative case study is to explore how decision-making administrators at four nonresidential community colleges in South Texas implemented Campus Carry Law. This study further seeks to examine how 10…

Many institutions across the United States are investing considerable financial resources and human resources in the implementation of personalized adaptive learning (PAL) solutions to improve institutional learning outcomes. Little is known about the shapes and forms of measuring PAL success and the tools that may be utilized to evaluate…

The focus of this case study was a study abroad program for student-athletes at a high academically achieving, small liberal arts college in the mid-west region of the United States. The program is designed to maintain a culture of internationalism and multiculturalism by exposing as many student-athletes as possible to study abroad. I reviewed…

I argue that instructional coaches face inherent systemic conflicts when supporting standards-based reform. I interpret the politics of coaching as the local intermediation of broader debates about teacher accountability and teacher professionalism. Drawing on qualitative case study analysis, I examine the effects of macro-level ideological shifts…

The voices of families with children identified as EBD needed to be heard. This dissertation study allowed those families to express their joys, needs and concerns. Included with the voices of families are the voices of educators that are teaching a struggling population of children and usually in an inclusive classroom. This dissertation study…