Test anxiety can act as a major inhibitor for students to perform to their ability. Students can find that what life decisions they are going to be afforded is going to be determined by a series of multiple choice mathematics questions. There must be a way to deal with their test anxiety so that the true nature of their knowledge is displayed, and…

An increasing number of higher education learners are using online learning. The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine non-traditional learners' perceptions and experiences of online learning at a public Historically Black College or University (HBCU). This study examined learners' interactivity with peers, teachers,…

In order to better understand how to use assessment productively in the basic writing classroom, I asked the question "How do basic writers perceive the assessment process?" The research reported on in this dissertation led to the conclusion that basic writers at Dona Ana Community College perceive and value each part of the assessment…

This qualitative critical multi-case study examines the nature of resistance as it emerges within the work of two urban secondary teachers acting as teacher educators, each teaching a secondary teacher preparation course within their own respective school context. Both research sites are discursively and functionally similar in terms of their…

Engineering graduates of the twenty-first century must be worldly and understand how to work with professionals from many cultures on projects that cross international boundaries. Increasingly, employers are finding that prospective employees who have studied abroad make better, more rounded candidates than those who have no life experience…

The purpose of this non-experimental, quantitative study was to determine how well selected institutional characteristics explain the variance in Hispanic community college students' transfer rates to 4-year institutions. Due to the rapidly growing Texas Hispanic population, understanding challenges to their educational attainment has become…

Native American Nations have perpetually had the highest rates of poverty and unemployment and the lowest per capita income of any ethnic population in the United States. Additionally, American Indian students have the highest high school dropout rates and lowest academic performance rates as well as the lowest college admission and retention…

The purpose of this study was to examine Latino/a student preferences for school counselor activities. The primary focus of research was to determine what school counseling activities Latino/a students perceived as important and which school counseling activities Latino/a high school students perceived as satisfying. The researcher pursued this…

Autism is primarily a social disorder and deficits in social-orienting may be responsible for the failure of children with autism to initiate critical social behaviors. The purpose of this research was to improve the quality of social interactions of children with autism by implementing naturalistic behavior strategies intervention utilizing a…

This research contributes to a body of literature that looks for effective responses to the gendered performance gap, the research into the effects of single-sex education, and the social construction of masculinities. This qualitative inquiry focuses on a bounded group of male students who graduated from New England single-sex high schools and…

This study investigated the impact of child teacher relationship training (CTRT) on teachers' ability to provide emotional support in the classroom, teachers' use of relationship-building skills, and teachers' level of stress related to the student-child relationship. Teachers and aides from one Head Start school were randomly…

This research targeted elementary education graduates of a large Southwestern university who were transfer students, and compared them to native students on selected variables. These variables included retention in teaching, and perception of supports and obstacles at the university. The sample consisted of 143 respondents: 73 native and 70…

In this dissertation, I explore unsupervised techniques for the task of automatic short answer grading. I compare a number of knowledge-based and corpus-based measures of text similarity, evaluate the effect of domain and size on the corpus-based measures, and also introduce a novel technique to improve the performance of the system by integrating…

Since their inception more than 150 years ago, Catholic schools in the Diocese of Scranton were autonomous, locally managed entities. This completely changed on July 1, 2007 when the schools were reorganized into geographically determined regions, each governed by Central Office. This change replaced local authority over, and responsibility for, a…

This qualitative, practitioner research study, conducted by a school leader-as-researcher, was designed to gain insight into instructional leadership and teacher learning through the perceptions of high school teachers participating in a voluntary, school-based, self-organized, self-directed, cross-curricular teacher learning group within a…