The purpose of this study was to examine the history and analyze the influence of the women's track and field team at the historically black college, Tennessee State University located in Nashville, Tennessee. The study was divided into three major sections. The first part examined the founding, early development and growth of the TSU women's…

This dissertation focuses on the narratives of four rural art educators of the Foothills of Western North Carolina. These women are the first art educators in this area in public education. They are often viewed as the invisible women in art who support community arts, much like the "invisible women in art history." From the view of the dominant…

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the existing literature on the foreign language learning of students with LLDs by conducting a comprehensive investigation of the performance of three students in middle school foreign language classes in a suburban school district in southwestern Pennsylvania. More specifically, this study documents…

The enterprise software market is seeing the rise of a new business model--selling Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), in which a standard piece of software is owned and managed remotely by the vendor and delivered as a service over the Internet. Despite the hype, questions remain regarding the rise of this new service model and how it would impact the…

Scope and Method of Study. Qualitative Case Study Research. Findings and Conclusions. Since the establishment of the public higher education system in the state of Oklahoma in 1890, there have been five women appointed permanently as president of a public college or university. A case study approach was applied to obtain a better understanding…

Educational aspiration is one of the most important factors influencing an individual's educational attainment. Although students' aspirations are changeable and the stability of their aspirations is important for their goal reaching, previous studies are rather limited in their ability to capture aspiration changes due to their incomplete…

Vaill (1996) argued, The learning challenges of effective leadership have not been sufficiently studied. We have not incorporated ideas about learning as a way of being into our thinking about how leading is learning. Behind those notions is a more basic one...leadership itself is primarily learning. (p. 148) To better understand how learning…

This study describes and implements a necessary preliminary strategic planning procedure, the Internal Environmental Scanning (IES), and discusses its relevance to strategic planning and university-sponsored lifelong learning program model selection. Employing a qualitative research methodology, a proposed lifelong learning-centric IES process…

The scope, breadth, and volume of data characterizing our current understanding of how the brain functions is growing at an increasingly rapid pace. What is more, theories are becoming increasing complex and nuanced, integrating knowledge from multiple previously independent sources of scientific inquiry. The research described within this…

I investigate the nexus of gender, student ability, and post-baccalaureate (PB) program quality. This is the first general empirical study of graduate and professional educational investment to consider inter-field differences in quality and gender composition. A primary goal of this dissertation is to establish whether admissions policy can…

There has been much discussion in recent years concerning student consumerism and its potentially negative impact on higher education. Much of the literature has been anecdotal (Bellah 1999; Delucchi and Smith 1997; Edmundson 1997; Smith 2000), while some studies have been more empirical in nature (Levine and Cureton 1998; Delucchi and Korgen…

The purpose of this research study was to investigate the phenomenon of the conflicting roles, such as parent, spouse, employee, caregiver, and community member/volunteer, associated with the lives of nontraditional college students and to reveal how these conflicting role obligations influence these students' persistence toward the attainment of…

A renewed focus on foreign language (FL) learning and speech for communication has resulted in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) software developed with Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). ASR features for FL pronunciation (Lafford, 2004) are functional components of CALL designs used for FL teaching and learning. The ASR features…

As school districts integrate evidence-based prevention programs into their daily regime, they may struggle with implementing these programs with fidelity. This is a multi-method, multi-source, retrospective explanatory study of the implementation factors associated with program installation and partial implementation of an evidence-based violence…

In 1973, the state of Florida implemented the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP). The program was developed to distribute available funds to public school districts in a more equitable manner than the Minimum Foundation Plan it replaced. Almost immediately, the Florida Education Finance Program came under attack as less equitable and…