Adult education literature generally acknowledges the appropriateness of the incorporation of instructional strategies that stress students' prior experience. Whether this appropriateness applies to students from diverse cultural backgrounds, such as adult students in ESL programs, is not clear. Based on the assumption that students from different…

Human Performance Technology (HPT) is a field of practice that has evolved from advancements in organizational development, instructional design, strategic human resource management and cognitive psychology. As globalization and trends like outsourcing and off-shoring start to dominate the way organizations grow, HPT practitioners are managing the…

The purpose of this study was to investigate, analyze, and document the differences in school, teacher, and student-level factors as perceived by administrators and teachers in high and low-performing, high-needs secondary schools in the Delta region of Mississippi. A modified version of Marzano's (2003) "What Works in Schools" survey was sent to…

Generalized fiducial inference is a powerful tool for many difficult problems. Based on an extension of R. A. Fisher's work, we used generalized fiducial inference for two extreme value problems and a multiple comparison procedure. The first extreme value problem is dealing with the generalized Pareto distribution. The generalized Pareto…

Teacher retention is a problem in today's schools. The question addressed in this blended quantitative and qualitative study conducted in evangelical Christian schools was, what factors most significantly predict the retention of Christian school teachers on linear combinations of 40 predictor retention factor variables? A questionnaire…

This research focused on the challenges experienced when executing risk management activities for information technology projects. The lack of adequate knowledge management support of risk management activities has caused many project failures in the past. The research objective was to propose a conceptual framework of the Knowledge-Based Risk…

How best to provide special education services to middle school students with learning disabilities (LD) has long been a contentious topic of debate among educators, researchers, politicians, and parents. With the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA, 2001) and the reauthorization of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA,…

The increase in the rate of autism diagnoses has created a growing demand for teachers who are trained to use effective interventions. Research supports behavioral interventions as effective methods for teaching children with autism, however dissemination of these methods has been problematic. Ineffective training and lack of ongoing support after…

For the past two decades, diverse stakeholders have been trying to reform public schools. Among these reforms are charter schools which embody: choice, innovation, regulatory flexibility, and accountability. The purpose of this study was to examine the educational programs of three charter schools and to describe their distinguishing…

Despite high-stakes applications of assessment findings, assessment data are frequently collected in situations that are of low-stakes to examinees. Because low-stakes tests are of little consequence to the examinees, test-taking motivation and thus the validity of inferences drawn from unmotivated examinees' scores are of concern. The current…

Accountability in education with regard to student achievement, especially within core subject areas such as mathematics, has emerged over the past ten years that support the need for impactful educational reform. Educators have been asked to evaluate the distinctiveness of the students that they serve to determine if there are better ways to…

The purpose of the study was to quantify the legal knowledge of Arkansas public school principals in seven areas: Arkansas law, constitutional issues, discipline, employee relations, federal law, special education/504, and tort liability and determine if significant relationships existed between legal knowledge recency of school law training,…

The purpose of the present researcher was to construct an understanding of experienced teachers' beliefs, instructional practices, and expectations after working in an urban elementary school for five or more years. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were used to gain knowledge about teachers' personal or cultural knowledge of themselves, gauge…

The study explores two teachers' beliefs and literacy instruction in self-contained classrooms with adolescents identified with emotional and behavioral disorders. Data are presented from participant observations and interviews collected over a three-month period in two middle school classrooms. Qualitative analysis investigates the literacy…

Can Critical Thinking be taught and learned? The author used a pre-experimental research method to answer this question. The foundation of this research study was Halpern's Teaching for Critical Thinking model. The instructional design paradigm was the 2003 Cognitive Training Model of Foshay, Silber, and Stelnicki. The author developed a course…