Strategic planning is a common tool utilized at colleges and universities to assist in achieving institutional goals. Leaders in higher education have taken best practices from corporate management and adapted them in an effort to develop comprehensive approaches to institutional planning, assessment and accountability. Various models for planning…

Technology in every form has become an important part of everyday life. In business, it is a necessity for success and survival. Many authors (Kotrlik & Redmann, 2009; Ma & Runyon (2004), among others) in the arena of higher education have pointed out the need for truly integrated business and technology programs at the graduate level, but…

Over the next five years, schools will be expected to replace more than 60% of key leadership in independent schools. This is just one example of the growing evidence of shortages of persons filling key leadership positions. Based on this increasing concern, there is a need to develop a strategy to ensure the efficacy of prospective heads and…

This dissertation chronicles my search to engage high school English students in inquiry as part of a formal research process. The perspective of critical literacy theory is used to describe the four phases of the problem posing process in shaping student research and action. Grounded in Freire's approach and consistent with Dewey and others who…

This research concerns the culture of design education in the context of great change in the social and professional conditions of practice. Findings illuminate interrelationships among pedagogy, professional identity and the design of the instructional setting in programs that teach visual communication and interaction design. Participants'…

Transition from high school to post-school activities is recognized as a serious challenge for students with disabilities (Shandra & Hogan, 2008; Wehman, 2006). The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) (2006) outlines the development of the IEP and transition plan as an essential task. However, the preponderance of secondary…

Recently the National Reading Panel concluded that systematic and direct instruction in phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension that is informed by ongoing assessments of student progress results in positive student achievement (NICHHD, 2002). For students with moderate to severe disabilities and students with…

An important goal of pre-service teacher education is to prepare future mathematics teachers to design and enact instruction to develop students' procedural fluency, conceptual understanding, and mathematical reasoning. However, future teachers lack deep and flexible knowledge, as well as beliefs, skills, and practices to teach in these ways (NRC,…

Online learning has become a major force in higher education, creating a need to understand the relationship between instructional support factors and learner satisfaction. This study focused on students who had enrolled in online courses. The setting for this study was a Midwestern community college that offered online courses for college…

Environmental sustainability is one of the most pressing concerns of the twenty-first century, and working toward sustainability will require broad lifestyle and cultural shifts, particularly in industrialized societies. Yet despite a growing recognition of the importance of issues such as climate change, food security, transportation, and…

Faculty, staff, and administrators at a small independent college determined that planning with a Concept Mapping process efficiently produced strategic thinking and action plans for the accomplishment of a strategic goal to expand experiential learning within the curriculum. One year into a new strategic plan, the college enjoyed enrollment…

Math skills are essential to daily life, impacting a person's ability to function at home, work, and in the community. Although reading has been the focus in recent years, many students struggle in math. The inability to master math calculation and problem solving has contributed to the rising incidence of student failure, referrals for special…

This study investigates the mechanism of beginning teachers' learning in the context of a university-based teacher preparation program. The purpose is to understand "how" and "why" secondary science teacher candidates from the same university-based teacher preparation program develop different kinds of practices of science teaching as their…

This study used a design based-research (DBR) methodology to examine how an Instructional Systematic Design (ISD) process such as ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation) can be employed to develop a web-based module to teach metacognitive learning strategies to students in higher education. The goal of the study was…

Scope and Method of Study: This study develops, implements, and evaluates a new economics teaching pedagogy based on the U.S. Army's systems approach to training model. Using the approach, tasks are identified that compose the task domain for the Principles of Microeconomics course. From the 130 identified tasks, 73 are used by Economics of…