The achievement gap, or opportunity gap, in education is when one group of students outperforms another group of students in statistical category. For decades, these gaps been analyzed in an attempt to support students and close these differences in categorical scores. The primary purpose of this dissertation was to focus on closing the…

Online Professional Learning (PL) has become a fundamental modality of providing PL support to teachers. The online learning design is one of the characteristics linked to the course's effectiveness. This Educational Leadership Portfolio (ELP) aims to improve the quality of online professional learning courses by identifying the features of online…

Background: Youth mental health needs have worsened following COVID-19. Rising demand for school mental health services is straining capacity. Several states have added policies requiring mental health education, yet these vary widely and barriers to operationalization exist. Purpose: This paper explores the onerous landscape of mental health…

Locally and nationally, English Learners (ELs) struggle to achieve parity with their monolingual peers in reading. In addition to second language-related considerations, ELs' efforts to succeed in reading may be thwarted by poverty, trauma, interrupted education, barriers to effective instruction and parental engagement, limited parental…

Promoting Adolescents' Comprehension of Text (PACT) is a text- and discourse-based set of instructional practices that engage students with disciplinary texts as a means of building content knowledge and improving reading comprehension. PACT)s "efficacy" has been the subject of extensive previous trials. The purpose of this study was to…

The purpose of this study was to examine how to restore a child's social-emotional well being. As an administrator in a middle school, I have the opportunity to see the natural state that our children are in on a daily basis. I have observed over time, more specifically since COVID-19, that children are struggling to balance their emotions, their…

Despite national attention for academic success, data shows that students with disabilities in the Appoquinimink School District do not share in this success. The district boasts a large enrollment in AP courses and high scores in both the state standardized tests and AP exams. However, students with disabilities consistently perform well below…

Sixth-grade science students at Gauger-Cobbs Middle School in Newark, DE, had misconceptions about how heat energy moves in the hydrosphere through conduction, convection, and radiation. As a result, students struggled to develop and connect ideas that correctly and completely explained heat transfer in the hydrosphere at the end of the lesson…

Across the country, career pathways programs are a popular bipartisan tool for addressing state workforce shortages and ensuring students graduate high school with workforce-ready skills. Delaware Pathways is one such example, formally established by executive order in 2016 by then-Delaware Gov. Jack Markell. The program consists of state-approved…

Although the importance of social and emotional learning (SEL) competencies in bullying prevention has received increased recognition, limited research has examined youth's cyberbullying victimization (CBV) experiences through a school-wide SEL perspective. Guided by the school-wide SEL framework and the social-ecological model, this study…

Although the psychological impacts of cyberbullying victimization (CBV) have been documented, research is inconclusive about the role of contextual factors in the association between CBV and student engagement. Sampling 16,237 adolescents from 43 schools in Delaware, we used multilevel modeling to test how CBV was associated with emotional and…

This study aims to understand from literature and from teacher perspectives the features of an effective professional development program for teacher learning and the essential instructional elements and activities for teaching with conceptual understanding. The goal was to produce a set of professional development modules on linear functions that…

The concurrent associations between students' perceptions of cognitive-behavioral and emotional engagement in schools and three factors aligning with the major aims of the school-wide social-emotional learning (SEL) approach (i.e., teacher-student relationships, student-student relationships, and teaching of social and emotional competencies) were…

This technical report provides information about the sample, survey instrument, and resultant data for the American Instructional Resources Surveys (AIRS) that were administered to principals and teachers in spring 2019 via RAND's American Educator Panels. The AIRS focused on instructional resources used and supported in English language arts,…

Guided by the social-ecological, social identity, and social misfit theories, the present study examined the gender, racial/ethnic, and grade-level differences of students' perceived school safety and their associations with bullying victimization and school-wide bullying using a sample of 25,896 students from 114 public schools. Results of…