This study was designed to analyze the perceptions of required college admissions testing by graduates in the state of Oklahoma. Students in the state of Oklahoma were required to take the ACT or SAT to comply with the Every Student Succeeds Act, following the adoption by the state in 2017. This study was conducted to determine: whether graduates…

This study explores how the construct of interest may influence first-year community college students' willingness to engage with academic text assignments. Research on interest theory as presented by Renninger (2009) suggests that students, even those with low self-efficacy or regulation, are more likely to make gains in engagement and/or…

This study examined the experiences of vertical transfer students currently enrolled at a technical university and the academic and social integration of these students into their new institution. The purposes of this study were two-fold. The first objective was to better understand how community colleges prepare students academically and socially…

Black male community college students have the lowest retention and completion rates among any racial group (National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, 2017). During this dissertation, I examined the root causes of Black male community college students' low graduation rates through a systematic literature review, and then identified mentoring…

The landscape of higher education has changed considerably over the past several decades as a more diverse population of students seeks higher education. Nontraditional students--those who are not entering college as first-time, full-time students immediately after college--are increasingly the norm on college campuses. Student-parents are a…

Research has found that the use of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) can improve academic outcomes for students in urban environments. As teacher educators, we are driven by such findings to understand how to best prepare teacher education students to enact CRP. The Elementary Education department in our university offers an urban immersive…

With just 43% of community college students graduating within six years (Causey et al., 2022b), low graduation rates have been the defining, animating issue for community colleges for over a decade (Cutler & White, 2022). Concurrently, high-impact practices (HIPs) have proven enormously successful in improving student outcomes at higher…

This article presents a multi-layered approach to mentoring within an urban secondary teacher education program in the mid-southern United States. The featured case focuses on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), although multi-layered mentoring could occur in other subject areas or in general preservice teacher education. The…

The significance of employability skills has emerged as a critical concern within the national, regional, and international labor market. Most studies show that participants gain some type of growth after their experiences. These growths are usually intangible and contribute to the person's future interactions with others. The Center for American…

The charter school movement encompasses many school models. In Massachusetts in the 2010's, the site of our study, urban charter schools primarily used "No Excuses" practices, whereas nonurban charters had greater model variety. Using randomized admissions lotteries, we estimate the impact of charter schools by locality on college…

This qualitative study explores the holistic approaches that seven mentors use to attend to the well-being of new professionals as they transition into the classroom. We define holistic mentoring as practices that intertwine the professional with the personal, and bring together the aesthetic, intellectual, and moral in supporting beginning…

Teachers' perceptions guide their instructional decisions and interactions with their students. Given the increasing number of Emergent Bilingual (EB) students and the more acceptance of multilingual language ideologies in the social and political contexts, there is an urgency to examine teachers' beliefs about EB students and to train teachers to…

This article reports on how the policy context shaped the development of two elementary preservice teachers' (PSTs) literacy instructional practice. While student teaching emergent bilingual students in urban, high-poverty classrooms that utilized mandated scripted literacy curriculum, PSTs completed edTPA, a Teacher Performance Assessment, for…

Gateway science courses are an ongoing obstacle to recruitment into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields, in part due to the large gains in vocabulary that are fundamental to scientific literacy. Students also struggle to achieve the technological literacy necessary for a STEM career. We implemented an ePortfolio-based…

This study focused on the development and validation of the Sense of Online Community Scale (SOCS), which includes 28 Likert-type scale items across six subscales: (1) program community; (2) program academic activities; (3) program social activities; (4) institutional academic activities; (5) institutional social activities; and (6) affiliation.…