As campus leaders called students, faculty, and staff back to in-person courses and student activities after the COVID-19 global pandemic, they were faced with employee retention challenges, burnout, recruitment limitations, and the changing nature of on-campus learning; there is ongoing discourse around these challenges and the extent to which…

The problem addressed is that elementary school teachers lack an effective and feasible intervention system to reduce chronic absenteeism, which can lead to low academic performance and other issues. The purpose of this qualitative single case study was to explore elementary teachers' perceptions of how a multi-tiered system of support attendance…

The literature on mentorship centralizes formal mentoring programs with hired and trained staff and volunteers to work with at-promise youth of color at school- or community-based sites such as Big Brothers Big Sisters or smaller localized programs; however, these programs are not always available in rural areas. This multiple case study explores…

This dissertation presents the results and outcomes of an effort to design educational tools and curriculum to improve student learning in introductory programming courses. The work was conducted at the University of California, Merced (UC Merced), situated in the Central Valley of California, and home to a diverse student population. The findings…

Since the 1990s, despite numerous educational initiatives designed to support student reading success, a large percentage of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students have performed below standard in statewide standardized reading tests. This fact points to a need in further examining how teachers provide CLD students with early…

Engaging second language (L2) students in multimodal academic writing that leverages multiple semiotic resources has the potential to foster their awareness of audience, purpose, and other rhetorical features. This case study explores L2 students' engagement in a multimodal digital storytelling (DST) project. The study reports on how DST was…

Purpose: This qualitative case study sought to understand and examine school social workers' perspectives on their role within California's TK-12 public school system. Theoretical Framework: Bronfenbrenner and Morris's (2007) bioecological systems theory and Frey et al.'s (2013) national school social work practice model were employed as the…

Dyslexia impacts an estimated 5%-17% of children in the United States is the most prevalent disability in schools in the USA (D'Mello & Gabrieli, 2018; Johnston, 2019; Peltier et al., 2020). The problem addressed in this study was that general education teachers often feel unprepared to effectively support dyslexic learners in their classrooms…

The "Forum Guide to Data Literacy" is designed to help education agencies understand and build data literacy skills among various stakeholder groups such as administrators, teachers, students, parents and other caregivers, school board members, legislators, and community groups. This resource defines and discusses the importance of data…