It has been documented that American Indians and girls consistently underperform in STEM achievement compared to their European American and male counterparts, starting as early as adolescence. The goal of the current study was to develop a brief intervention aimed at mitigating the STEM achievement gap by shaping ethnic and gender identities to…

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Mary Sheldon Barnes emerged as a leading historical methods professor and history textbook author. Although men dominated the field, she wrote several articles and books alone or with her husband Earl Barnes about primary source materials and teaching. She lived during an era in United States history…

Leadership for American higher education is increasingly receiving more attention due to the rapidly changing academic world of the twenty-first century. Academic leadership development, thus, warrants serious study and lively discourse. The emergence of music as a fully organized discipline in the twentieth century, and the development of a…

More than five million children in the United States have a parent suffering from a severe mental illness and these children have specific experiences and needs, particularly in school. Children of mentally ill parents are at greater risk of being neglected and of developing psychological, social, emotional, and behavioral problems. They often…

This dissertation addresses a significant gap in the historiography of science: the nature of the language sciences as "science." Focusing on disciplinary and intellectual developments in the context of Imperial Germany (1871-1918), the project anticipates, complicates, and helps to explain a widely recognized theoretical shift, namely,…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to analyze Miguel A. Nevárez's educational leadership style by focusing on his notable contributions to The University of Texas Pan American. The researcher defined leadership style as actions by the leader. After examining Nevárez's background to place his motivations and actions in proper context, this…

Anna Eliot Ticknor (1823-1896) founded the first correspondence school in the United States, the Society to Encourage Studies at Home. In the fall of 1873 an educational movement was quietly initiated from her home in Boston, Massachusetts. A politically and socially sophisticated leader, she recognized the need that women felt for continuing…

Reminiscing--"the act or process of recalling the past (Butler, 1963, p. 66)"--is a core activity for any society. Research shows that the desire and tradition for reminiscing can be traced back to early civilizations where the elders of the community were responsible to know and share the history of their community (Butler, 1995;…

This archival study used constructivist grounded theory to document the educational and professional lives of seventeen women who founded the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA) in 1881, which later became known as the American Association of University Women (AAUW). This study resulted in a collective biography of the seventeen women which…

The single-site exemplar study presents an in-depth account of the presidential leadership of Charles M. Vest of MIT--the second longest presidency in the Institute's history--and his leadership team's journey between 1990 and 2004 into campus architectural changes that involved over a billion dollars, added a quarter of floor space to MIT's…

Using archival materials from the early years of Temple University's history at the Special Collections Research Center, Templana Collection, at Samuel Paley Library of Temple University as well as historical periodicals, this project established a biographical sketch of Associate President Laura Carnell and examined her influence on the…

Although in recent decades many of the outer Appalachian counties have stabilized economically, the central region of Appalachia continues to have the highest concentration of distressed and at-risk counties in the country. The geographic isolation and cultural characteristics of Appalachian communities have limited their ability to achieve…

The lexical dialect usage of Oklahoma has been well-studied in the past by the Survey of Oklahoma Dialects, but the acoustic speech production of the state has received little attention. Apart from two people from Tulsa and two people from Oklahoma City that were interviewed for the Atlas of North American English, no other acoustic work has been…

This research investigates the professional life histories of upper elementary science teachers who were identified as effective both within the classroom and in the outdoor learning environment (OLE). The narratives of five teachers collected through semi-structured and open-ended interviews provided the data for the study. Professional life…

The author explores Gordon Gee's career as a university president. There is a special focus on the journey Gee made between 1990, when he first became president of The Ohio State University, to 2007, when he returned to Ohio State for another term as university president ten years later. During this time away from Ohio State, he served as the…