Secondary course assignment substantially determines a teacher's day-to-day work life, incentivizing them to realize their personal desires, which prior work shows tend to be working with more advanced students. Teachers have varying abilities to enact these desires, potentially due to their political capital, which is largely influenced by…

Despite recent calls to more fully incorporate multimodal perspectives into literacies research, there is still limited scholarship examining how students critically engage in reading activities by drawing on embodied practices. Racially and linguistically minoritized students are particularly disadvantaged by dominant logocentric and…

In October 2023, the California Department of Education released test scores for all students in Grades 3-8 and 11 for the 2022-23 school year. These results represent an opportunity to analyze whether and to what extent student learning has rebounded after the dramatic declines in scores resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and related school…

As institutions strive to improve teaching and learning for all, educators must consider equitable instruction. This includes equitable distributions of authority and agency among students. The authors define distribution of authority as shared opportunities for decision-making in enacting mathematical tasks and agency as the power to carry out…

Across countries, the age and timing of when children navigate school transition varies, as does provision of support during this challenging time. These two factors can heavily shape young people's adjustment, yet to date there is minimal research which has investigated how this period is navigated in different cultures. The aim of the present…

Using a national sample of students' writing from the National Study of Writing Instruction, this study examines the current state of writing in the mathematics classroom and the extent to which enactments align with the intentions established in the research base and curricula articulated by NCTM and the CCSS-M. Over 3,000 writing assignments…

This dissertation explored the roles schools can play in the successful outcomes of large carnivore or keystone reintroduction projects. Schools are more than centers for knowledge acquisition--they connect their community and disseminate information quickly to a wide audience. This study took place in California's Eastern Sierra Nevada, a…

To learn mathematical practices, students need opportunities to engage in them. But simply providing such opportunities may not be sufficient to support all students. Simultaneously, explicitly teaching mathematical practices could be problematic if instruction becomes prescriptive. This study investigated how teachers might make mathematical…

The "Pathway to Academic Success Project" trains teachers to improve the reading and writing abilities of English learners (ELs) who have an intermediate level of English proficiency by incorporating cognitive strategies into reading and writing instruction. This What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) intervention report, part of the WWC's…

The "Pathway to Academic Success Project" trains teachers to improve the reading and writing abilities of English learners (ELs) who have an intermediate level of English proficiency by incorporating cognitive strategies into reading and writing instruction. This What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) intervention report, part of the WWC's…

The "Pathway to Academic Success Project" trains teachers to improve the reading and writing abilities of English learners (ELs) who have an intermediate level of English proficiency by incorporating cognitive strategies into reading and writing instruction. The cognitive strategies include goal setting, tapping prior knowledge, asking…

The study reported here investigated the impacts of participation in 4-H on young people's interest and participation in science. Survey data were collected from relatively large and ethnically diverse samples of elementary and high school-aged students in California. Results indicated that although elementary-grade 4-H members are not more…

This mixed design study investigated the predictive and instructional uses of two different types of interim mathematics assessments given in two different districts. One district administered the same summative type of assessment three times a year, while the other district administered a different interim assessment after six-week intervals of…

The aim of this thesis is to investigate and present the status of student synthesis with color coded formula writing for grade level six through twelve, and to make recommendations for educators to teach writing structure through a color coded formula system in order to increase classroom engagement and lower students' affect. The thesis first…

This study was presented at the American Educational Research Association 2012 conference in Vancouver, Canada. The study explored how action research of arts-based teaching (ABT) impacted at-risk students in three urban public schools in southern California, USA. ABT was defined as using arts, music, drama, and dance in teaching other subjects. A…