Learning by Evaluating (LbE) is an instructional approach that involves students making comparative judgements of pairs of artifacts, such as student work, portfolios, prototypes, or curated images related to a topic of instruction to enhance critical thinking and decision-making skills. Situated as a primer for learning, the efficacy of LbE stems…

Compared to all other options, homeschooling provides parents with the most control over their children's educational experiences. The COVID-19 pandemic led to a surge in the U.S. homeschool population. Black families had the largest increase in home educators from 3.3% to 16.1% between April 2020 and October 2020. The emerging literature on Black…

In the field of higher education, many institutions utilize traditional leadership frameworks to achieve organizational goals, but research suggests that shared leadership strategies may have positive influences on organizational and student outcomes. Shared leadership has become a topic of increasing interest among scholars in recent years, and…

The Standards Assessment Inventory (SAI) has provided relevant, educator-level data helping systems of all kinds -- states, districts, schools, provinces, and organizations -- gather and track data about the professional learning their educators experience. An online, confidential, valid, and reliable instrument administered to school-based…

This research study focused on understanding changes that were taking place in Promotion and Tenure (P and T) practices in eight selected institutions of higher education in the state of Georgia and examined factors, if any, that were acting as a catalyst for change. The research team used both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the P and T…

This elicitation study examined the beliefs and perceptions of site-based decisions-makers regarding recess policy implementation. This study was conducted at a public elementary school located in a district in Northeast Georgia. This site was chosen due to their policy defining recess as a daily unstructured break and mandating a minimum of 30…

Campus administrators and practitioners must make sense of state policy and system-level initiatives for successful implementation. This qualitative study examined campus administrators' and student health and well-being practitioners' sensemaking of the University System of Georgia's (USG) Mental Health Initiative (MHI) through interviews with…

The problem to be addressed is the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the graduating class of 2020 in a rural South Georgia community. This qualitative study explores the effect that the COVID-19 pandemic had on student mental wellbeing, relationships, education, and post-secondary decisions. The study is framed by the rural environment where the…

Retirement benefits for faculty are an important, but relatively understudied, topic in postsecondary education. To date, there have been very few studies that have used qualitative research methods to examine how workers make financial decisions about retirement, and no qualitative investigations of faculty choice between DB and DC plans. To help…

Although education abroad in the US offers participants demonstrable benefits, direct and opportunity costs are cited as primary barriers to broader participation. Yet the degree to which low-income status deters studying abroad and whether additional need-based aid beyond Pell Grants encourages participation remain uncertain. Moreover, not all…

School leaders must make decisions and implement strategies to improve a school climate and student achievement, and it benefits them to understand which areas of school climate have the greatest impact on student achievement. The State of Georgia measures school climate and student achievement with its school accountability measure, the College…

Studies of charter closure rates typically focus on year-to-year closures. While important for researchers, such studies provide little guidance to families seeking to understand the risk of enrolling their child in a charter school. That is because studies determining how many schools close each year provide no information on how long the school…

To characterize the professional interests, motivations, aspirations and demographics of chemical engineering (CHE) students, we surveyed almost 600 sophomores and seniors at Georgia Tech during the 1996-1997 and 2018-2019 academic years. Our objective was to study the evolution over two decades of: influences on student decision to study CHE,…

Through an exploratory comparative case study of two U.S. states (Georgia and Nevada), this study investigates how the selection mechanism to state higher education governing agency boards influences the responsiveness of board members to stakeholders and their role in the policy-making process. Framed around the recent national policy agenda to…

The National Association of Schools of Music (NASM) conducted a national report which indicated a disproportionate percentage of music education and performance graduates according to race, with black students graduating at 6.6% (McKoy, 2012). HBCUs are vital to improving the representation of Blacks, especially in high-need schools and…