Elementary music teachers are required to attend long-term, campus-wide professional development outside their content area. The purpose of this interpretive qualitative study was to better understand how elementary music teachers in a North Texas and a South-Central Colorado school district who have had five or more years of teaching experience…

8 minutes and 46 seconds. This was the amount of time it took me to watch George Floyd, an unarmed Black man be murdered at the hands of the police. While George Floyd's death was not the first Black murder to happen while in police custody or in 2020, his death served as a catalyst that reignited something in me, millions of around the globe, and…

At least 38 states have created service areas or "districts" for each of their community colleges. However, little is known about the geographic boundaries of community college districts, the political process that defines them, and how they relate to institutional racial segregation. Given this dearth of knowledge, we studied nearly 150…

The purpose of this study was to identify the strengths and challenges that emerged from the first 3 years of a high school student leadership development program located in an urban setting. This study was developed as an instrumental case study of one student leadership development program serving urban public high schools in South Central…

Focusing on community college transfer students who declared a STEM major at their initial transfer to a four-year research university, this study examined the extent to which students' sociodemographic characteristics and academic factors were related to STEM persistence and attrition. This study tracked multiple cohorts of transfer students…

Education librarians are receiving an increasing number of requests to help researchers with systematic reviews. Systematic reviews are evidence syntheses that require comprehensive, reproducible search strategies. Many of the available training programs and materials focus on systematic reviews in the health sciences, not education or the social…

This qualitative study explored the challenges that Hispanic and African American students experience during their education in STEM fields at community colleges. Students from four community colleges across Texas participated in this study. Drawing from focus group interviews, three themes were identified as self-perceived challenges to degree…

In spring 2022, the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology (OET) committed to advancing digital equity through the Digital Equity Education Roundtables (DEER) Initiative. Through DEER, OET hosted a series of national conversations with leaders from community-based organizations, as well as families and learners furthest…

The 2019-2020 school year ushered in the Texas Education Agency's second year under a new A - F rating system for the state's 1,200 districts and 8,759 public schools. As such, educational leaders across the state began to take an even closer look at what it takes to meet the needs of an ever growing and diverse population of students. However, in…

This study looks at a group of Hispanic English Learners from a region in deep South Texas that is situated along the U.S.-Mexico border, and how their sense of belonging, acculturation, and their perception of the teacher-student relationship impacts academic achievement on the STAAR End-of-Course state assessments for English I and English II.…

This qualitative case study examines how one bilingual teacher draws on their critical consciousness to support immigrant students and their families. Drawing on the construct of conscientization, I argue praxis is the embodiment of critical consciousness through acts of responsiveness and actions educators enact to rewrite unjust spaces and…

Dual enrollment (DE)--where students earn college credits during high school--is expanding rapidly. To facilitate DE, institutional actors across K-12 schools and colleges must build or repurpose structures across separate organizations to determine course offerings, assignments, modality, and composition. Yet the organization and implications of…

Although institutions of higher education have started engaging students and prospective students via text messages, no extant research has addressed student preferences for receiving text messages. Elaborating upon Castleman and Page's (2016) and Taylor and Serna's (2019) work, a large, metropolitan community college system surveyed 123 community…

National, state, and institutional data has indicated years of minimal increases in persistence; all while institutions continue to implement new strategies that they believe will increase persistence. What institutions often lack is understanding the lived experiences of first-time-in-college students who successfully persisted from their first…

Objective: Students' enrollment intensity during their first academic semester and year are highly influential in their success and decisions to persist in community college. Limited research, however, has focused on understanding how students navigate the decision-making process of determining their credit load or how institutional support…