Pupils' classrooms are highly variable and teachers have a difficult time addressing the broad range of students' needs in diverse contexts. Additionally, teachers are often not taught how to learn from their own teaching and develop adaptive teaching expertise, a necessary ability for educators in a constantly changing social world. The…

In this mixed methods study the potential for developmental readers to experience optimal experience (flow) within the multi-user virtual environment, "Second Life," was examined. In an educational context, "Second Life" provided a space for constructivist learning, socialization, exploration, discovery and creativity. The communicative, social…

Practice and inquiry into school-community connections have been guided by problematic assumptions about the role of neighborhood schools, community based institutions, and local economic development policies in the evolution of urban communities. Formal relationships between schools and urban neighborhoods grounded in these assumptions have been…

The purpose of my study was to explore how, and to what extent, the UCSB faculty-in-residence program provided multicultural awareness education opportunities to student residents outside of the classroom. This research explored Housing and Residential Services, which housed the faculty-in-residence program whose mission is, in part, to provide…

Background: Community colleges represent an important access point for many individuals seeking to enter into the system of higher education. This is especially the case in California, where the state has indicated that these open-access institutions are supposed to provide education to the communities they serve and to reach those that are…

The purpose of this study was to determine the use and perceived usefulness of outcomes assessment methods in health information management programs. Additional characteristics of the outcomes assessment practices were recognized. The findings were evaluated for significant differences in results based on age of the program, type of institution,…

This study describes how two 10th grade teachers designed a cross-disciplinary unit, using PBL instruction as a tool for helping students create a valid and convincing argument in their math class. The five week PBL unit focused around American Studies/English and geometry content. In order to measure the rigor and relevance of the unit, multiple…

The Summer Achievement Center is a collaborative partnership between a large urban school district in Fresno County and California State University, Fresno designed to prepare teachers to teach students with autism and emotional disturbance. The purpose of this study was to examine characteristics of individuals teaching students with autism or…

This exploratory study was an attempt to understand the types of affective learning. The study focused on beginning students who were enrolled in apparel construction/sewing laboratory in community colleges within Los Angeles and Ventura counties during the spring of 2009 (n = 155). The primary purpose of the study was to develop scales that would…

Pressure exists to attract and retain students in higher education. Online programs educational programs have the potential to increase the number of students who can enroll in degree-bearing institutions. Explored in the qualitative study using a modified three-round Delphi technique was the phenomenon of consistently lower student retention…

Within the larger context of the Romance languages, Romanian stands alone in exhibiting a surface contrast between plain and palatalized consonants (that is, consonants with a secondary palatal articulation). While the properties of secondary palatalization are well known for language families in which the set of palatalized consonants is…

This dissertation examines the palatalization of consonants in historic and living dialects of three West-Germanic languages: Dutch, German, and Frisian. Palatalization was a common feature of the West-Germanic phonological system and can be found in some form in all West-Germanic languages of the present. It is argued that the extent of its…

A mixed methods study examined how a newly developed campus-wide framework for learning and teaching, called the Learning Model, was accepted and embraced by faculty members at Brigham Young University-Idaho from September 2007 to January 2009. Data from two administrations of the Approaches to Teaching Inventory showed that (a) faculty members…

Paraprofessionals in special education have a high level of responsibility but a low level of training and support to help them do their jobs effectively (Downing, Ryndak, & Clark, 2000; Goessling, 1998). The following qualitative study examined and analyzed the role of paraprofessional supervisors and the meaning of supervision. Participants…

In the 1970s, the Education for the Handicapped Act (EAHCA) gave rights to parents to receive training and mandated that schools provide it. The 1997, Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA 1997) mandated the use of PBS for children with problem behaviors. IDEA 1997 required that schools create behavior plans with positive behavioral strategies…