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…

Traditional school districts do not have a lot of experience with virtual schools and have lost students to state and charter virtual schools. To retain students and offer alternative learning opportunities, more public districts are starting their own virtual schools. This study was an examination of foundational processes at three California…

Purpose: The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore how using technology tools during mentoring impacts the desired outcomes, as defined by the mentor-mentee contract, of the mentoring relationships of technology workers at a private graduate university with the main campus in Southern California. Methodology: This was a single…

In contrast to studies focusing on digital games as learning tools, this study shows how young children use digital games as a means of facilitating spontaneous play in their everyday lives. This article highlights how 4 three-year-old children's play with digital games revealed their ability to create new forms of play by mixing their digital…

This paper presents a case study that investigated students' perceptions on the integration of a socio-scientific issue into a general chemistry course at a public university located in northwestern California. The teaching intervention is based on a digital learning environment structured by the software Prezi that students used to explore the…

This ethnographic case investigates the relationship between the daily organizing work of one education technology "intermediary organization" (IO) in Silicon Valley, California and federal education technology policies. I argue that the IO constructed policy knowledge that reified discourses of "digital meritocracy": a belief…

The accelerated growth of 1:1 educational computing initiatives has challenged digital equity with a three-tiered, socioeconomic digital divide: (a) access, (b) higher order uses, and (c) user empowerment and personalization. As the access gap has been closing, the exponential increase of 1:1 devices threatens to widen the second and third digital…

The purpose of this case study was to evaluate a multi-campus university program designed to support STEM faculty in redesigning bottleneck courses, with integration of technology as one strategy. Despite the positive student learning outcomes in course redesign programs with an aim to support faculty in technology integration, there remains a…

Enterprise software implementations are subject to high failure rates. Organizations of higher education can be particularly resistant to technology implementations as they can be perceived as eroding the traditions of the institution. The California State University (CSU) system is moving into a new phase of data-driven accountability for…

Throughout the history of California's Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment (BTSA) program, new teachers have reported experiencing substantial tension between the curricular and programmatic demands arising from their induction programs' formative assessment systems and the immediate coaching help they need to deal with day-to-day classroom…

This article shares case studies from in-depth research that investigates Latino immigrant families' use of technology, focusing on family technology practices that were interest-driven, cross-setting, and in some cases also collaborative among family members. Three cases illustrate ways that families--all of whom included elementary school-age…

This qualitative study seeks to understand and resolve the difficulties that teachers encounter when integrating mobile devices in classrooms. To address the issue of teacher receptiveness, three undergraduate researchers collaborated with an education professor in spring 2012 to complete a qualitative study with a two-fold purpose: 1) to…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to identify the impact of technology on teaching and learning practices in a high-technology use K-12 school. The school selected for this study is an all-male Catholic STEM high school located in Southern California. The school is building a reputation as one of the country's leading high schools for STEM…

Education in the United States is failing the students. American education is failing largely because education is often taught with ineffective teaching methods as well as many of today's teachers not finding technology important or necessary in the classroom curricula. The purpose of this qualitative, exploratory multiple case study is to…

Inadequate software development collaboration processes can allow technical debt to accumulate increasing future maintenance costs and the chance of system failures. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore collaboration strategies software development leaders use to reduce the amount of technical debt created by software…