Within secondary English language arts (ELA), concerns about the use of whitestream curricula have fueled numerous studies regarding the authorship of works included in anthologies (Applebee, 1991; Hansen, 2005; Mikkelson, 2009; Pace, 1992; Rojas, 2010) and on the lists of required full-length titles (e.g., Applebee, 1989; Hoffman, 2007;…

Students attain cultural knowledge to navigate college admissions, yet few studies investigate when and how students activate this knowledge in a relatively transparent system. Drawing upon 26 Taiwanese student interviews, this study unveils how students strategically use available information to illuminate each step of the admission process. I…

Building on youth literacies in formal learning spaces is a promising direction for asset-based literacy learning designs. However, in response to ways that academic spaces can deaden passionate literacy study, it is important to attend to the resulting affective flows of such practices. This study traces how affect was sustained and dampened in a…

Aggression toward peers is a pervasive problem among school-aged youth. Specifically, relational aggression refers to actions intended to harm another through manipulating social relationships. A diverse group of students (N = 14,083) were surveyed regarding their pro-bullying attitudes, perceived social status, and whether they had perpetrated…

Monitoring the Future (MTF) is a long term study of substance use and related factors among U.S. adolescents, college students, and adult high school graduates through age 60. It is conducted annually and supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. MTF findings identify emerging substance use problems, track substance use trends, are…

Social and emotional (SE) skills are related to many positive outcomes, including academic performance, degree attainment, and life satisfaction, and are often taught through social and emotional learning (SEL) programs. Furthermore, a positive school climate is important for students' social and emotional wellness and ability to learn. For…

This dissertation is focused on understanding the expectations, beliefs, and motivations of parental involvement during the college choice process. Many high school students are under a lot of stress and pressure influenced by a culture of achievement. This culture has created a competitive college choice process and has intensified the role of…

Many school systems ask teachers to assess and report upon aspects of student performance beyond academic achievement. In Ontario, K-12 teachers assess a common set of six Learning Skills and Work Habits. How well teachers are able to undertake these assessments is not well studied. This study examines Grade 9 and 12 report card data from two…

This paper explores how PurpleState, a political simulation designed to foster skills and knowledge for informed civic participation, develops students' abilities to counter or resist the effects of political polarization and partisanship. Throughout the simulation, which has been implemented in Virginia and Wisconsin, students are asked to…

Background: There is a need to arm students with noncognitive, or 21st Century, skills to prepare them for a more STEM-based job market. As STEM schools are created in a response to this call to action, research is needed to better understand how exemplary STEM schools successfully accomplish this goal. This conversion mixed method study analyzed…

This research aimed to examine the difficulties and failures of eleventh-grade students regarding probability concepts. With this aim, ten different open-ended probability problems were asked to the 142 eleventh-grade students. Each of these problems requires using different basic probability concepts. It is qualitative research, and the data…

Health education offers a natural curricular home for important life skills and ways students can optimize physical, social, and emotional health. Although many schools have implemented social and emotional learning (SEL), health education provides a broader framework by encompassing the connections between physical and emotional health and the…

The purpose of this quantitative study with a correlational design was to examine if and to what extent a relationship exists between self- and teacher-ratings of student engagement and standardized test performance in a school in southern Los Angeles County. The overall research question was, is there a relationship between self- and…

This study addressed the issue of Grade 12 students reading below proficiency and their lived experiences within a personalized learning instructional approach. To address this problem, the purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore Grade 12 students who read at basic or below basic levels on the Scholastic Reading Inventory (2013)…

Moral development in gifted education is an issue of imperative importance due to the potential of gifted students to change the world. In consideration of this issue and the lack of research on the topic, this study examined the extent to which moral development was present within the senior secondary English curricula at an academically…