Traditional grading practices have been in place for well over a hundred years and grades received served to identify in which subjects a student is "smart" or in which ones they are not (Dewitt, 2017). The problem with traditional grading is that it does not provide qualitative information on the difference between an A, B, C, D, or F…

Students entering the workforce or college after high school must demonstrate both technical skills and highly sought-after durable skills in order to be prepared for college and careers. This study used Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to study the lived experiences of 10 students who participated in a secondary Career and Technical…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the perceptions of selected CTE directors regarding policies, practices, and procedures in West Virginia. Specific CTE components investigated included philosophy and rationale, structure, curricula, partnerships, evaluation, challenges, and future goals. Purposeful and snowball sampling…

This paper presents the findings of a Consensual Qualitative Research partial program evaluation of the effectiveness of a secondary transition-to-work training program in a Southeastern public school system. Current literature regarding the history of students with intellectual and developmental disabilities, barriers they have faced to…

Project-based (PBL) learning has been found to improve student achievement, engagement, and interpersonal and intrapersonal skills; however, it is not widely implemented in K-12 schools in the United States. Prior research has established several barriers and challenges to implementing PBL in K-12 schools including challenges related to teacher…

Successful secondary career and technical education programs are highly dependent on the effectiveness of the instructors tasked with preparing high school students for post-secondary employment. Many of these instructors, especially those hired straight from industry, are experts in their field of study, but lack pedagogical training. Thus, the…

The increased demand for a skilled workforce has placed new challenges on rural school districts. Students are provided the opportunity to obtain the skills required to fill the workforce needs through exemplary career and technical education programs. The purpose of this study was to identify key characteristics of exemplary career and technical…

The focus of this dissertation was to explore the importance of high quality early education in later secondary education development, quantifying quality in early childhood education programs, and examining how teacher education contributes to quality of early childhood education programs. For phase I, early childhood education positively…

The Good Behavior Game is an interdependent group contingency that relies on the influence of other important group members to modify challenging behaviors of a student or a group of students within the classroom. Although the Good Behavior Game possesses a long history of effective use in the research literature, there is a significant void in…

This study involved administering two rating forms (student self-rating on commitment and student rating of teacher rapport) to approximately 1,400 secondary students taught by 12 different teachers at two different high school Latter-day Saint (LDS) released time seminaries along the Wasatch Front in Utah. Seminaries and Institutes of Religion…

This study assesses the environmental proficiency of Texas life science educators certified from 2003 to 2011 by analyzing their TExES 138 8-12 exam results in domains V and VI. The sample consisted of all the individuals that took and passed the TExES 138 life science 8-12 exam. During this period, approximately 41% of the individuals who took…

The problem is that some secondary schools use the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program to service gifted students even though it was not developed as a gifted model. The purpose of the study is to determine if gifted identified students benefit more or less academically than students not identified as gifted as a result of their…

As demonstrated by their emphasis in the new, national, science education standards, learning progressions (LPs) have become a valuable means of informing teaching and learning. LPs serve this role by isolating the key components of central skills and understandings, and by describing how those abilities and concepts tend to develop over time…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate if the use of a self-advocacy strategy, with high school students identified as having a mild cognitive disability, would increase student use of self-advocacy skills across multiple school settings. Participants in the study were also identified as participating in at least one general education class at…

This research project focuses on a freshman class in a suburban high school where incoming ninth graders were identified as being at-risk or not at-risk; students' scores on eighth grade standardized tests were critical in determining a student's placement in one of the two categories. The researcher established the predictive value of this…