The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of social media language learning activities with traditional language learning activities on the development of L2 grammatical competence in two English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes at a Taiwanese university. The study was grounded in four bodies of knowledge: (a) the…

From President Kennedy's first announcement of a non-military US volunteer corps in 1961, the Peace Corps has been one of the preeminent government grassroots volunteer development agency. This study explores the history of the ambiguities inherent in this contention, pressure primarily stemming from the organization's role as both a…

For decades, measures of academic outcomes have demonstrated the underachievement of minority students. The purpose of this study was to include student voices in a discussion of achievement by exploring the experiences and beliefs of minority girls that related to academic achievement in one single-sex urban high school. Moreover, the research…

The purpose of this study was to generate a theory that explained the beliefs and behaviors of participants from business, not-for-profit business, education, and government sectors when resolving the employability skills gap. Classical grounded theory was the inductive methodology applied to this study. The New North, an 18 county region located…

Graduation from high school is now more important than ever because of fewer opportunities in the blue collar work sector or within family businesses. Students with behavioral or emotional disorders may not be able to perform in the traditional work setting as they do not meet an acceptable level of achievement in the regular classroom and…

Immigration has resulted in an increase in the number of English Language Learners present in schools across the United States. The language barrier and lack of teacher preparation for handling the learning differences of these students have resulted in low reading achievement levels in elementary schools, further promoting the chances that these…

The number of Hispanic children entering public schools continues to increase at a staggering pace. With such a change in diversity, educators are struggling with the absence of Hispanic parent involvement in schools. Many teachers consider this lack of parent involvement as uncaring about their children. The problem is much more complex in…

Multicultural class professors are faced with the often difficult task of helping prepare pre-service counselors to meet the mental healthcare needs of an increasingly diverse and pluralistic society. A major factor that has stood in the way of effective training has been students' resistance to challenging their entrenched patterns of bias…

This dissertation investigates second language (L2) development in the domains of morphosyntax and semantics. Specifically, it examines the acquisition of definiteness and specificity in Russian within the Feature Re-assembly framework (Lardiere, 2009), according to which the hardest L2 learning task is not to reset parameters but to reconfigure,…

Change is an organizational inevitability. There are few fields that undergo change more rapidly than information technology. Keeping up with the pace of change in a field so inclined toward change may take a unique toll on workers in information technology. Yet, little has been done to investigate workers' orientations towards change in this…

Finding the most interesting correlations among items is essential for problems in many commercial, medical, and scientific domains. For example, what kinds of items should be recommended with regard to what has been purchased by a customer? How to arrange the store shelf in order to increase sales? How to partition the whole social network into…

Increasing numbers of women have gained access to college and the college teaching profession worldwide. However, women continue to be underrepresented in academic, research, and leadership positions. Women who have aspirations for top leadership positions still encounter numerous internal and external challenges. Existent literature on women…

Educational intermediary organizations, as defined by Honig (2004a), are characterized by their internal placement within schools as they mediate change among groups during the policymaking process. As intermediary organizations work to bring about internal changes, however, they are still performing their core external functions by operating as…

Thousands of international ESL students come to the United States every year to learn English for the purpose of matriculating into an American university. Teaching these diverse students can be a challenge for educators and despite the students' significant investment of time and money, many of them are inadequately prepared for the demands…

Reading and math proficiency is important for all students because education is a leading indicator of personal health and success and national prosperity. Improved student performance has also been linked to teacher satisfaction. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of teacher perceptions of their working conditions on student…