No matter how well an educator evaluation system is designed, it can only be as effective as those who are actually implementing it in the trenches (Stronge, 1993). Unfortunately, many educational reforms at the school level have entirely failed or have failed to be implemented as designed. While much of the current educator evaluation research is…

The current computing landscape owes its roots to the birth of hardware and software technologies from the 1940s and 1950s. Since then, the advent of mainframes, miniaturized computing, and internetworking has given rise to the now prevalent cloud computing era. In the past few months just after 2010, cloud computing adoption has picked up pace…

Research conducted at schools that have outperformed their counterparts points to specific characteristics that make them successful. These characteristics brought about the development of the effective schools correlates by Ronald Edmonds (1979). Various people from across the United States and in various occupations perceive these correlates…

The purpose of this explorative qualitative case study was to identify the characteristics online administrators reveal as existing in their most effective, and ineffective online teaching faculty (OTF). By identifying the characteristics of effective OTF, online administrators can develop practices to reduce and avoid the negative effects…

A single subject study with multiple baselines across participants was used to explore the effect of giving access to picture-to-text software for writing to young students, with moderate autism, and documented difficulties with written language. For this intervention study, three participants, who had strengths in visual processing and who were…

College students often come to the study of evolutionary biology with many misconceptions of how the processes of natural selection and speciation occur. How to relinquish these misconceptions with learners is a question that many educators face in introductory biology courses. Constructivism as a theoretical framework has become an accepted and…

The purpose of the quantitative survey design study was to examine key social ecological care variables that are related to the domains of neighborhood (neighbors who care), school (teachers who care, a fun place to learn, and a fun place to be with other children), friends (friends who care, accepted by other children, and friends have good…

Despite Minnesota's investment in professional development in content area literacy, secondary students are not showing expected literacy gains. A lack of literacy proficiency limits future options for students. The purpose of this study was to examine content-area literacy strategy inclusion and its relationship to professional development…

While access to images in general has improved in the last 20 years, due to both advances in electronic storage and dissemination and to improvements in the intellectual provisions of them, access to editorial cartoons lags behind access to other types of images. While there have been piecemeal or ad hoc efforts to organize large cartoon…

This study analyzes the academic performance of White students in urban settings, relative to Minority peers, and investigates structural variables that might exacerbate or attenuate differences. The investigation is motivated by and extends qualitative work investigating the experiences of middle school students in Texas (Morris, 2006). Research…

Prior research has considered the sequential order of function words, after the contextual words of the text have been removed, as a stylistic indicator of authorship. This research describes an effort to enhance authorship attribution accuracy based on this same information source with alternate classifiers, alternate n-gram construction methods,…

This dissertation examines the role of new media in individuals' organizational socialization process across cultures. First, this study has explored individuals' use of new media in their organizational socialization process in two countries, China and the United States, to gain a general understanding of the usage patterns. Second,…

High school graduates with specific learning disabilities (SLD) often lack sufficient skills to advocate for themselves in adult situations. This limited advocacy ability of young adults with SLD contributes to their higher postsecondary school drop-out rate, lower paying jobs, and a greater dependence on family and public assistance programs for…

The purpose of this dissertation was to better understand the experiences of "out" gay and lesbian higher education presidents. Of the more than 4,500 institutions of higher education in the United States, only 30 presidents have identified themselves as gay or lesbian. As institutions of higher education face large scale retirements at…

This interpretative phenomenological study used semi-structured interviews of 10 participants to gain a deeper understanding of the experience for virtual team members using collaborative technology. The participants were knowledge workers from global software companies working on cross-functional project teams at a distance. There were no…