Afterschool programs can offer enriching opportunities, homework help and a safe environment. To ensure that these programs are cohesive, high-quality and widely available, many cities have designed community-wide systems to coordinate the various afterschool programs offered by different providers. Having a way to collect and share reliable data…

"Prentice Hall/Pearson Literature©" (2007-15) is an English language arts curriculum designed for students in grades 6-12 that focuses on building reading, vocabulary, literary analysis, and writing skills. It uses passages from fiction and nonfiction texts, poetry, and contemporary digital media. The curriculum is based on a textbook.…

Communication is an integral component for establishing a strong school community. Learning management systems (LMSs) present new opportunities for communication and collaboration among teachers, students, and parents. This study examined parents' and teachers' perceptions and use of a newly adopted LMS for school-home communication in a rural…

This Capstone project intended to create a greater awareness and develop an understanding of the impact of attendance on academic performance. Schools are faced with the tasks of ensuring students attend school and keeping them engaged while they are at school. This project encourages the reader to look past school attendance as a mere student…

This Capstone project intended to create a greater awareness and develop an understanding of the impact of attendance on academic performance. Schools are faced with the tasks of ensuring students attend school and keeping them engaged while they are at school. This project encourages the reader to look past school attendance as a mere student…

As a school-wide framework, Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) relies on the prevention and early identification of students at risk of academic failure. Approaches to early identification of students in need of support include the administration of universal screening assessments and the analysis of existing student data such as attendance,…

Charter schools represent an increasingly important form of school choice in the United States. Charter schools are public schools, with a difference. Compared to traditional public schools, they are exempted from some of the state laws and regulations that govern traditional public schools. In this way, parents come to have a greater number of…

Teaching science as inquiry has been at the forefront of many educational reforms related to teaching science in K-12 settings. However, educators' understandings of the term and practices related to science as inquiry vary. This study examined a group of middle school science teachers' perspectives and practices related to teaching science as…

Students with learning disabilities struggle with word problems in mathematics classes. Understanding the type of errors students make when working through such mathematical problems can further describe student performance and highlight student difficulties. Through the use of error codes, researchers analyzed the type of errors made by 14 sixth…

Despite the prevalence of polymers in modern everyday life, there is little introduction to the topic in science education throughout primary or secondary schooling in the United States. Of the few states that do include polymer education, this is only found at the high school level, primarily in biology or chemistry. Over the past year, we have…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the 7th grade reading performance among a random sample of urban public school academies (charter schools) in Wayne County, Michigan, compared with a random sample of traditional urban public schools within the same geographic area. This study was conducted using the fall 2012 Michigan…

Early awareness strategies, from outreach campaigns to cohort-based learning groups to scholarships, are a group of efforts that help middle school students stay on the path to college and understand how to fund their education. These strategies become part of early awareness programs, which seek to put students on a college-going path by…

The Middle-Grades Leadership Development (MLD) Project was designed to develop principal leaders and leadership teams who create high-performing middle-grades schools. Designed by the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, the four-year project was funded from 2013 to 2017 by a U.S. Department of Education Investing in Innovation (i3)…

Novice special educators (those in their first 3 years) consistently report their workloads are unmanageable. Yet, it is not clear whether their perceptions of workload manageability contribute to outcomes of concern such as emotional exhaustion (a component of burnout) or intentions to continue teaching in their schools and districts. This pilot…

This article reports on a 2-year qualitative research study of the processes by which middle school principals' policies and actions shaped the experiences of five novice teachers in two Michigan school districts. We examined beginning teachers' perceptions of principals' approaches to managing student behavior, instructional leadership, and…