This qualitative inquiry uses the methodology of portraiture to investigate the relationship between founding holistic school leaders and the schools they lead. The guiding question of this investigation is, how do founding holistic school leaders embody their pedagogy through their approach to leadership within holistic schools? Through an…

This qualitative study investigates how these students navigate the challenges of academic Discourse communities. Eight first-year students and one composition professor participated in semi-structured interviews, which were thematically coded around two core themes: students' cocreation of identity through writing, family, and university…

This quantitative research study investigates the relationship between teachers' evaluation rating and their classroom-based assessment practices using a survey approach. Four middle schools consisting of 39 (grades six through eight) teachers in the Southwestern U.S. participated in the study. Research has shown that when teachers regularly use a…

The higher education learning environment has always been an ideological battleground. We must collectively interrogate how we holistically construct an educational learning environment that is reflective of our values.

Drawing on annual, nationally representative survey data from 2007-2022, I demonstrate that partisan gaps - the average differences in public opinion between Democrats and Republicans - have widened on many education issues. This pattern consistently exceeds what would be expected due to the changing demographic compositions of the parties alone.…

College and university classrooms, curricula, and credentials have always been an ideological battleground of clashing values and perspectives that shift the answers to the question of what the learning environment should be. A crucible moment of legislative attacks on diversity initiatives, congressional interventions into university leadership,…

While researchers and practitioners have long known that differentiating formative feedback (FF) is a requisite for creating more equitable learning opportunities for students, less is known about how teachers plan for, enact, and reflect on differentiated FF dialogues with students individually, in small groups, or as a whole class--a lens on…

The COVID-19 pandemic caused major disruption in higher education, requiring rapid adaptation from colleges and universities worldwide. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the United States faced unique challenges serving their disproportionately low-income, first-generation racial minority students. This qualitative…

Considering the significance of integrating students with disabilities into general education classes in Mississippi, it is critical to identify the methods by which co-teachers report working together, whether they have obtained the needed professional development, and which teaching model they employ in the inclusion classroom. This data can…

Course policies around attendance and submission deadlines have documented impacts on student outcomes within college courses, yet our understanding remains limited of instructors' own motivations behind the policies they adopt. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 43 college instructors, we find that faculty emphasize both student-centered and…

Belief in psychological misconceptions, especially those regarding brain function and learning (i.e., neuromyths), hinders students' decision-making and learning. This necessitates conceptual change. Using an experimental design, this dissertation examined whether a utility value instructional induction (UVII) facilitated conceptual change.…

This descriptive phenomenology study investigated middle school mathematics teachers' formative assessment practices in the Dominican Republic. The study explored three research questions about the types of formative assessment strategies teachers implemented, how they used formative assessment data to make instructional decisions, and the…

Latinx multilingual learners historically have struggled with meeting academic proficiencies within our educational system. Districts have implemented many strategies to support multilingual learners but have often fallen short of expectations, and therefore perpetuated academic struggles for Latinx multilingual learners. Considering that Latinx…

The proposed paper utilizes teacher and student data from the 2014 U.S. National Assessment for Education Progress 8th grade Civics test (NAEP-Civics8) to explore the relationship between teacher pedagogical practices and other factors (i.e., teacher credentials, teacher professional characteristics, individual traits, and teachers' education…

Open education is an education and instruction network that is widely used to overcome physical and temporal limitations. In the current study, an evaluation was made by taking the opinions of students on the application areas of the open education system in Turkey. In this context, the reasons for students attending open education high schools to…