American social culture had a long-prevailing ideology that minorities were inferior to their Caucasian counterparts. Clearly, though, integration reflected an acknowledgement that racial equity and equality could and should be achieved in the composition of schools. In the last 40 years, as a profession and individually, educators have shifted…

The body of research work presented in this dissertation integrates critical ethnography with video and conversation analyses in order to provide ways to articulate and understand the complexities associated with social life enactment as it unfolds during cogenerative dialogues and in the science classroom as the teacher and her students engage in…

U.S. Latino parents are often characterized by educators as uninvolved in school and the formal education of their children because they do not value education. While research indicates otherwise, stereotypes still exist among many educators that one reason Latinos do poorly in school is because they do not care. Masked behind stereotypes is the…

Contractor performance evaluation enables agents to make informed purchasing decisions, provide feedback to contractors/vendors, and help improve service quality and customer satisfaction. However, both public and private organizations sometimes fail to do so, as is the case at a division of a government organization located in a northeastern U.S.…

This study examines the problem of inconsistent achievement in social studies on the Delaware State Testing Program (DSTP) at a high school in Delaware. Since 2002, the district began an initiative to create common assessments for all core content areas that were meant to align with the state standards. In social studies, that initiative was the…

Violence against women is a significant problem on America's college campuses. In response to this violence, many universities have developed direct service programs to assist the survivors of violence as well as educational programs to raise awareness about and/or reduce the likelihood of such violence. There has been no scholarly inquiry…

This study examined the effectiveness of a Verbal Query Intervention (VQI) procedure in decreasing motor and vocal stereotypy in four elementary students with autism. The VQI procedure involved the presentation of behavior-related questions that the students were required to respond to in an appropriate fashion. An ABC multiple-baseline across…

There is a need for more effective assessment and primary prevention programs aimed at accurately measuring and reducing alcohol consumption among women before conception in underserved, high-risk populations. Health Information Technology (HIT) may serve this purpose; however, the effectiveness of such tools is not known. We conducted a…

Although the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 requires schools to create initiatives to increase parental involvement, the development, implementation, and effectiveness of these initiatives are left to the individual schools and their leadership teams. This qualitative study focused on a program designed to increase parental involvement and…

Grounded within an understanding of literacy as social practice, this dissertation interrogates the disconnect between the ways youth are positioning themselves in online spaces as text designers and the way they are viewed as literacy learners in many urban public schools. Using a connective ethnographic approach that blends place-based and…

Students attending schools in the United States who have autism would benefit from increased parental involvement to enhance their learning. There is a lack of research regarding parental advocacy on behalf of students with autism. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to examine the lived experiences and perceptions of parents who have…

This research examines private liberal arts college professors' learning about teaching, in particular, how they come to pay attention to their students' experiences of learning. This study relies on interview, observation, and document analysis to consider the experiences of 16 professors whose teaching changed as they carried out their work. All…

This mixed methods study explores reflective analytical practices of novice teachers who taught in a University Reading Clinic just prior to student teaching. Novices' reflective practices are compared to reflective practices of experienced teachers in a pilot study in the same setting. A theoretical model of novices' reflective analytical…

Access to an adequate education has been widely considered an undeniable right since Chief Justice Warren stated in his landmark decision that "Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments...it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an…

This study explored the social inclusiveness of classrooms with culturally competent teachers who were identified both by their participation in in-service diversity training and by principal nomination. The design of this study was primarily quantitative using a one-way ANOVA to analyze whether fourth and fifth grade students ( N = 125) in…