Research on freshman transition programs suggests the need for a transition program that assists students as they enter high school. Many freshman transition programs consist of a visit from the high school counselors or a tour of the school. These programs do not help meet the needs of many students who will need constant support throughout the…

Urban districts suffer from a severe shortage of qualified science teachers. Therefore, many new science teachers will need to take positions in urban districts with little or no exposure to urban communities. As a result, prospective teachers find it difficult to learn how to negotiate the cultural contexts of urban teaching. Consequently, it is…

School administrators who recruit teachers domestically and abroad lack an internationally accepted checklist for effective teachers with which to evaluate teacher applicants. This study was conducted to use the elements of a U.S.-based effective teacher checklist survey with a sample of secondary teachers in Guatemala and Japan to describe the…

Research on learning to teach mathematics reveals that mathematics teaching is a complex process (Lerman, 2000) and classroom teaching and learning is a "multifaceted, extraordinarily complex phenomenon" (O'Connor, 1998, p. 43). Moreover, research reveals that the mathematics reform agenda has had an impact on what happens in the mathematics…

As high schools have struggled to increase the academic performance of their students to meet state and national guidelines, all aspects of the schools' operations have been reviewed. This includes the type of schedule, block or traditional, used by the school. This study was a comparison of teacher attitudes and teaching strategies between two…

This dissertation presents research that investigated how first grade students' ability to construct solutions and to plan through drawing for engineering design problems is related to their participation in a LEGO-based engineering curriculum with two variations on the instruction for planning. The quasi-experimental design engaged two first…

Against a backdrop of increasing diversity in the United States, the number of Black women undergraduates enrolled at predominantly white institutions across the country is growing. Yet while colleges and universities are eager to diversify their campuses, often the climate of these campuses has not changed in ways that support the success of…

This study is a mixed method examination of two elementary level Colorado Reading First Schools in Colorado Springs, Colorado. This study replicated a study conducted in two California Reading First elementary schools, in one Southern California School District. The purpose of the study was to examine whether there were differences in the…

Explored in the qualitative phenomenological study were the potential executive leadership capabilities and attributes for a new fourth generation of emergent female leaders in the 21st century and the organizational and cultural obstacles female executives faced in upward mobility. Sixteen female community college vice presidents in New York…

In the first part of this dissertation, we study the competition among network service providers in a parallel-link network with the presence of elastic user demand that diminishes both with higher prices and congestion. First we analyze a game where providers strategically price their service for single class of traffic. Later we analyze a game…

Educational, social, and learning development theories for inclusion, grounded in Bandura's social cognitive theory, do not explicitly take into account individuals with Down syndrome, one of the most common birth defects. The problem addressed in this study was the lack of data regarding teacher attitudes toward inclusion of students with Down…

In 1992 an APA inter-divisional task force identified three levels of competency for professional practice with older adults: Exposure, Experience, and Expertise. It was recommended that all generalist programs provide their students with at least the first level of competency. However, most enter the field with little-to-no academic or clinical…

This action research project was aimed to improve geometry students' achievement and the retention in a suburban public high school over a one-year implementation cycle. The curricular design was influenced by Dweck's (2006) theories of growth mindset, educational standards, and directives outlined by the National Council of Teachers of…

The federal government has been making strides to make the term "appropriate" an inclusive term that recognizes and addresses the special learning needs of all students. In an effort to appropriately educate students who have been identified as "gifted," the New Jersey State Board of Education readopted Standards and Assessment for Student…

Previous investigators have found significant relations between children's early spontaneous gesture and their subsequent vocabulary development: the more gesture children produce early, the larger their later vocabularies. The questions we address here are (1) whether we can increase children's gesturing through experimental manipulation and, if…