The federal government has been making strides to make the term "appropriate" an inclusive term that recognizes and addresses the special learning needs of all students. In an effort to appropriately educate students who have been identified as "gifted," the New Jersey State Board of Education readopted Standards and Assessment…

The realm of Earth science (ES) is increasingly data-intensive. Geoinformatics research attempts to robustly smooth and accelerate the flow of data to information, information to knowledge, and knowledge to decisions and to supply necessary infrastructure and tools for advancing ES. Enabling easy access to and use of large volumes of ES data and…

State tests, which assess reading comprehension, ask students to make inferences and connections beyond the text. The problem of practice in which this study is situated is that students are having difficulty making meaningful connections and developing inferences in relation to the material that is read aloud together in class or assigned for…

This qualitative study researches a participatory action research project undertaken by 12 history teachers in two urban school districts. In this project middle and high school teachers were engaged in a yearlong action research project that involved them in implementing literacy strategies within their classrooms and reflecting on the use and…

Critical thinking is an important outcome of a college education. Assessment techniques that require students to demonstrate their understanding of course concepts are referred to as authentic assessment and promote the development of critical thinking. Little research exists on the types of assessment and grading practices utilized by community…

Organizational sensemaking is the attempt to understand complex events that occur in organizations (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005). This study focuses on the sensemaking leadership capabilities of a leadership team promoting comprehensive reform. The cross-school leadership team engaged in organizational sensemaking in order to…

Ample evidence suggests that attending college is positively associated with an increased level of civic engagement. However, few studies develop and test a conceptual model that investigates which elements of the collegiate experience affect the development of civic engagement. Therefore, this study focused on the development and testing of a…

Software quality is perhaps one of the most sought-after attributes in product development, however; this goal is unattained. Problem factors in software development and how these have affected the maintainability of the delivered software systems requires a thorough investigation. It was, therefore, very important to understand software…

Since 2000, The Wallace Foundation, nationally recognized for its involvement in educational programs, has supported efforts to improve the training and conditions of school leaders to better enable them to improve student achievement. One of these efforts in Delaware was the development of district level aspiring leadership development programs.…

We investigated barriers to and facilitators of effective teacher-child interactions in voluntary pre-kindergarten programs in child care settings. An effective teacher-child interaction enables both teachers and children to actively engage in solving the problems they confront in their daily lives. The effective teacher-child interaction relies…

Over the past three decades, researchers have studied doctoral research training programs using large scale surveys making visible trends in numbers of and kinds of research courses required, or using focused qualitative methods to gain rich, textured accounts of graduate school experiences. Both kinds of studies fail to capture the local,…

This study is an action research project that analyzed the ways in which ESL students improve their language learning processes by using as a teaching tool a media literacy video and Civics Education for social skills; it was presented to two groups of 12 students who were attending an ESL/Civics Education Intermediate-Advanced class in an ABE…

This research project served two main purposes. The first was to uncover the perceptions of district administrators from Quality award-winning school districts in regard to the use of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award program as a management framework. This was accomplished by using the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium's…

This study examines the information seeking and use behaviors of English language learners (ELLs) while performing a research task, using Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development and Kuhlthau's Information Search Process as theoretical frameworks. The research tasks implemented in this study were curriculum based units where students engaged a…

This study examines the development of nanoscience/nanotechnology over a 35 year period (1970-2004) by mapping its social and cognitive structures using social network analysis, bibliometrics and document analysis, and following their changes in time. Mapping is performed based on 580,000 journal articles, 240,000 patents and 53,000 research…