Southern California is facing a demographic transformation that will become characteristic of the nation as a whole in coming decades. In this research, we present a historical review of the region's attempt to address school inequity, recent enrollment and segregation trends, and an investigation of whether segregation still matters. Our results…

This dissertation contains three independently conducted studies on factors that affect the math achievement scores of preschool-aged children. The first study examined the associations between children's executive-functioning (EF) and math achievement scores at 54 months of age. Results suggest that EF is strongly associated with children's…

The purpose of the qualitative study was to explore the strategies teachers from the third, fourth, and fifth grades are employing to engage students and provide an in-service training where identified needs are not being met in a school district in Connecticut. No empirical studies have been conducted to explore what strategies teachers in the…

The purpose of this study was to examine the college-choice process of high achieving students. Employing current literature and previous research, it combined current models of college choice and the influential factors identified throughout the literature while utilizing the concept of bounded rationality to create a conceptual framework to…

The understanding and use of systems has been studied in numerous environments, particularly among leadership and management. However, as yet it is unclear what people at large know about systems thinking, where they gained their knowledge, or how important the role they perceive it to have in their decision making processes. Through a mixed model…

The author explores the experiences and beliefs of emerging adult students, concerning their sense of voice and use of imaginary audience. Quantitative analyses revealed differences in voice and academic standing, and women reported higher feminine gender orientation than did men. Through qualitative analyses, participants stressed a need for…

In 2002 the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) issued a groundbreaking report, "A Call to Action: Changing the Culture of Drinking at U.S. Colleges." This report was developed by the NIAAA-supported Task Force on College Drinking after three years of intensive discussions. It described new understanding of dangerous…

The purpose of this research is to reveal how the concepts of living and non-living things are in the world of the primary school (4th and 5th classes) students, what they remember when they are told about living and non-living things and what the characteristics of living and non-living things are according to them. The research is a descriptive…

Participants with Down syndrome (DS) were required to participate in a face recognition experiment to recognize familiar (DS faces) and unfamiliar emotional faces (non DS faces), by using an affective priming paradigm. Pairs of emotional facial stimuli were presented (one face after another) with a short Stimulus Onset Asynchrony of 300…

This article examines the language and literacy practices of middle-school children as they worked toward constructing their own computer games using "Gamestar Mechanic," a game intended to teach them key ways of thinking and communicating germane to the discourse of game designers. It examines the changes that took place in what previous work…

Comparability studies on computer- and paper-based reading tests have focused on short texts and selected-response items via almost exclusively statistical modeling of test performance. The psychological effects of presentation mode and computer familiarity on individual students are under-researched. In this study, 157 students read extended…

Six adults diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) were treated with either acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), cognitive therapy (CT), or exposure with ritual prevention (ERP) in a preliminary attempt to clarify the similarities or differences between the purported mechanisms of change that underlie these treatments. A new process…

A mail survey of university graduates from a predominantly White university suggests how limited undergraduate demographic diversity could be leveraged to increase its impact. University graduates who recalled more undergraduate courses in which faculty discussed ethnic and cultural diversity reported more multicultural competence and volunteer…

This study examines the effect of familiarity, context, and linguistic convention on idiom comprehension in Mandarin speaking children. Two experiments (a comprehension task followed by a comprehension task coupled with a metapragmatic task) were administered to test participants in three age groups (6 and 9-year-olds, and an adult control group).…

Electrophysiological work in nonhuman primates has established the existence of multiple types of signals in the temporal lobe that contribute to recognition memory, including information regarding a stimulus's relative novelty, familiarity, and recency of occurrence. We used high-density event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine whether young…