This dissertation was a basic, exploratory qualitative study which examined professional identity development of community-engaged practitioner-scholars through participation in a community engagement professional associations' graduate student fellowship--the Imagining America (IA) Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) Fellows program. Data…

While the societal impact of continued homogeneity in clinical research is well-documented and deemed a national priority, manifesting meaningful change in this domain remains sluggish. Noonan et al. (2013) describe the problem at hand. They state, "HBCUs have traditionally played a key role in the education of African Americans and are…

This qualitative study examines the perceptions of education doctoral students and graduates in two upper Midwest research universities in the United States concerning their experiences of thriving during the transition to independent researchers. Thriving is a multi-faceted construct that describes positive human functioning and development.…

This dissertation, using a heuristic self-search inquiry (HSSI), provides a research vehicle for creative personal exploration seeking insight into the process of self-transformation with the intention of ultimately targeting the catalyst for life transformation. The study seeks to answer the research question: How does the use of drawings in an…

This study is focused on the concept and formalism of work done and potential energy on the very fundamental level. A detailed analysis of the incomplete presentations of the topics found a major misconception that precluded acknowledgement of existence of certain nonradial effects caused by classical radial/center-bound gravitational force fields…

This study investigates the tensions a teacher educator faces in facilitating a media literacy teacher education course at the university level. Teaching tensions are conceptualized as a three-tier framework. At the first level, tensions may arise in the selection and application of pedagogies associated with critical and new/21st century…

Modern science education reform recommends that teachers provide K-12 science students a more complete picture of the scientific enterprise, one that lies beyond content knowledge and centers more on the processes and culture of scientists. In the case of Research Experience for Teachers (RET) programs, the "teacher" becomes "researcher" and it is…

Our nation's public schools have been given the task of preparing our students for success in college as well as future careers. Determining how to best prepare future teachers is not an easy task, and the current state of public education has had an impact on what it takes to be a successful teacher. Involving pre-service career and…

This case study was conducted at a large four year institution of higher education located in southern California. The purpose was to answer the question, "What are international graduate students' perceptions of the connection between English language proficiency and academic success?" The participants were six international graduate…

The concept of liminality describes the experiences of individuals who live "between and betwixt" as a result of their indeterminate status in society. This concept seems appropriate to describe the experiences of people who live with vision loss, because we simultaneously belong to two social or cultural groups. On the one hand we must…

Despite the growing body of research on doctoral education, little is known about how doctoral students learn to do research across the disciplines. Even though there is a lack of empirical research on the pedagogy of research in doctoral education, much of the literature anecdotally and metaphorically attributes students' learning to traditional…

What does it mean to be a graduate student and to "do" graduate school? What happens when we shift our focus away from learning as a process of gaining expertise in a field or being socialized into the literacy conventions of a discipline and instead consider the ontological component of learning--the idea that learning entails becoming a certain…