Alternative high school students are a demographic often relegated to the margins throughout their educational journey, stripped of the agency necessary for them to authentically engage in their learning. This Action Research study aimed to investigate the relationship between attendance and student engagement, with a particular emphasis on how…

An opportunity gap exists in the United States school system where students of color score lower on standardized tests and have fewer opportunities than their white counterparts. Culturally Relevant Education (CRE) theory attempts to close this gap, and is defined by Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) as Pedagogy that rests on three criteria or…

Poverty shapes the experience of more than twelve million children in the United States. To further an understanding of the relationship between poverty and school performance in South Carolina public schools, we investigated the association of high and low poverty levels with a range of state report card variables for three school levels:…

The last five decades of educational research have shown the construct of teacher self-efficacy is related to student achievement: the higher the efficacy of the teacher, the greater the impact on the student. Additionally, teachers who demonstrate more of a growth mindset--a belief a person's intelligence can change--than a fixed mindset--a…

Bullying is the most common form of school violence and is associated with a range of negative outcomes, including traumatic responses. This study used hierarchical linear modeling to examine the multilevel moderating effects of school climate and school level (i.e., elementary, middle, and high schools) on the association between bullying…

At-risk youth come to school with a variety of challenges that sometimes lead to voluntary or involuntary disengagement from traditional high schools. Alternative education programs are an alternate placement for students who have disengaged from traditional high schools. Although researchers have shown that teacher and staff approaches to the…

This quantitative correlational study addressed the concept that teacher-perceived high school principal leadership style correlated with teacher self-efficacy. A relationship existed between teacher self-efficacy and student outcomes and research indicated a relationship between leadership style and teacher self-efficacy. Also, the effect of…

The concurrent associations between students' perceptions of cognitive-behavioral and emotional engagement in schools and three factors aligning with the major aims of the school-wide social-emotional learning (SEL) approach (i.e., teacher-student relationships, student-student relationships, and teaching of social and emotional competencies) were…

Impulsivity holds a central place in the explanations of adolescent delinquency. Recent research suggests that neighborhood characteristics, particularly SES (socioeconomic status), perceived supervision, and collective efficacy, moderate the association between impulsivity and delinquency. However, findings to date have been equivocal, and the…

This study sought to evaluate the effect of participation in the Student-Guided Supports (SGS) curriculum on student behavior. The SGS curriculum was designed to teach students a set of simple behaviors to prompt and reinforce supportive teacher behavior. Student use of the SGS behaviors was hypothesized to initiate a constructive cycle of…

A sense of relatedness is individuals' views about themselves as connected to others and worthy of love and respect from others. Using the Self-System Model of Motivational Development as the framework, this study was designed to examine associations of urban high-school girls' relatedness toward teachers and peers with their behavioral and…

Sixty percent of America's teachers choose traditional baccalaureate programs while the remaining choose one of several alternative pathways. While certification/training is certainly important to preparing effective teachers, other research indicates that teacher efficacy serves as the foundation of teacher behaviors and classroom practice. The…

Although K-12 online learning has experienced exceptional growth, research in the area has lagged behind. This dissertation addressed this gap in the literature using a multiple article dissertation format. The first article used survey data from two online English courses at the Open High School of Utah (OHSU) to examine students' reported…

Education agencies are driven by the need to remove disruptive and dangerous students from classrooms without suspending or expelling them to home or the streets (Bear, 1998). As stated in the National Association of State Boards of Education (1994), the term "alternative education" refers to nontraditional educational services ranging from…

This study examined the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act federal mandate of the Transformation Intervention Model (TIM) outlined by the School Improvement Grant, which was designed to turn around persistently lowest achieving schools. The study was conducted in four high schools in a large Southern California urban district that selected the…