The completion of a formal proposal for a dissertation research project is a standard requirement as a prelude to the process of conducting research and writing a doctoral dissertation for students who complete a doctoral degree in most academic fields including all the branches of the field of education. Many students satisfactorily complete…

This study was designed to investigate the factors that affect master's student persistence in the United States. More specifically, this study explored whether the following factors: students' background, institution's, academic, environmental and psychological influences, had a significant effect on whether a master's student persisted and/or…

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…

Understanding the ways in which scientific knowledge develops, or the epistemology of science, is believed to be a crucial component of scientific literacy. This construct is more formally known as Nature of Science (NOS) within the science education community. The merits of three different approaches to NOS teaching and learning in the context of…

Colleges and universities in the U.S. face increasing pressure from policymakers and corporate leaders to increase their production of undergraduate degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). These pressures stem from a need to maintain the country's global economic competitiveness in science and engineering innovation.…

This study explores undergraduate students' experiences of learning disciplinary research in a summer undergraduate research program (S-UR). The study used a qualitative research design incorporating semi-structured interview, observation, and document analysis methods to analyze the learning experiences of nine study participants from different…

In this study, I examine what happens when institutional partnerships between schools and universities and classroom partnerships between adults and students are viewed as being situated within multiple, interconnected, shifting systems of networks. Using a feminist framework, I raise questions about what "partnering" means as I specifically…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships among transformational leadership, emotional complexity, and positive/negative emotions of leaders and followers. How leader openness, emotional complexity, gender, and trait affect may influence the extent to which leaders use various types of leadership and mentoring, and how all of…

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…

Podcasts covering essential first-semester general chemistry laboratory techniques and central concepts that aid in experimental design or data processing were prepared and made available for students to access on an as-needed basis on iPhones [arrow right] or iPod touches [arrow right]. Research focused in three areas: the extent of podcast…

In this study, I investigated the effectiveness of the knowledge map (k-map) instructional strategy compared to a text-based presentation in an online environment. K-maps consist of node-link representations of concepts that together form the content of a topic or domain. The benefits of using k-maps are that concepts and ideas are represented as…

Librarians have historically been responsible for the organization and management of the stores of human knowledge, and for ensuring information literacy among researchers. In recent years, however, librarians have become disintermediated (Boyd-Byrnes & Rosenthal,2005) or, removed from, researchers and the research process for a variety of…

The recent growth in the racial and cultural heterogeneity of college students in the United States has increased the demand for higher educational policies that will accommodate the needs of an increasingly diverse collective student body (Kao & Thompson, 2003). Traditionally, underrepresented minority students (i.e., African American,…

Teacher quality is a central concern of the profession. College-based teacher education, the core of teacher preparation in the United States, has increasingly included some form of practitioner inquiry in the pre-service program to encourage teacher candidates to be reflective, adaptive teachers who systematically and intentionally examine…

This study adapted the current model of science undergraduate research experiences (URE's) and applied this novel modification to include community college students. Numerous researchers have examined the efficacy of URE's in improving undergraduate retention and graduation rates, as well as matriculation rates for graduate programs. However, none…