Schools across Texas are tasked with detailing action plans in support of students identified as at-risk of dropping out (TEA, 2020b). The intent of this study was to learn the perspective of students, identified as at-risk of dropping out, in terms of whether there is a relationship between campus retention/recovery intervention efforts and their…

This action research case study explores the impact of a culturally and socially diverse Advanced Placement Chemistry curriculum on student and teacher experiences. This study emerged due to my lack of multicultural teaching practices, which limited meaningful connections for students of diverse backgrounds. Once aware of this deficiency, I…

Special education teachers are often encouraged to use praise in their instructional interactions with their students with significant support needs (SSN). It is assumed that reinforcing behavior facilitates learning and academic achievement for these students. Despite a myriad of interventions aimed at increasing special education teachers' use…

Purpose: There is a need for precollege learning designs that empower youth to be epistemic agents in contexts that intersect burgeoning areas of computing, big data and social media. The purpose of this study is to explore how "sandbox" or open-inquiry data science with social media supports learning. Design/methodology/approach: This…

Project-Based Learning (PjBL) curricula offer unique opportunities for student engagement, yet they do not guarantee an engaging classroom. Furthermore, there has been little scholarly work on PjBL pedagogy that supports student engagement. This qualitative research study explores enactment of a PjBL Advanced Placement Physics 1 curriculum and the…

This preliminary investigation explored associations between African American students' perceptions of racial fairness, dimensions of school engagement (behavioral, emotional, cognitive) and school discipline (office discipline referrals, out-of-school suspensions), and the role of gender as an important social context for these associations. In…

Book clubs provide an innovative structure to study course content. Teachers can supplement the use of traditional textbooks and primary sources by including narratives that provide personal perspective into world events. Although more typical of English language arts classrooms, incorporating the workshop model into content area instruction…

We explored the associations of collective self-esteem and parent educational practices with school engagement in a sample of 128 Samoan middle and high school students in an urban school district. Simultaneous regression analysis revealed that each of these independent variables contributed to significant variance in school engagement.…

Invasive species threaten worldwide biodiversity. Success in facing this problem may be possible through the engagement of younger audiences. Here, a game was designed to teach children how to recognize invasive seaweed and to encourage them to participate in marine citizen science. The game was first tested in a pilot study, and then carried out…

This essay relies on methods of narrative research to both present and consider an example of a second-wave of critical whiteness pedagogy in K-12 contexts. The author focuses on his interactions with one high school student -- Adam -- to theorize how "The Whiteness Project" allowed students to "play with whiteness" in…

Due to the competitive nature of Career Development Events (CDEs), teachers must utilize various instructional and motivational strategies to engage students and encourage student participation. This qualitative intrinsic case study analyzed the motivational practices of a previously successful agriculture education teacher to determine the…

To better understand how to support high school students' engagement, advancements in research methods that provide greater understandings of malleable factors of engagement and conditions that affect students' engagement are needed. In this conceptual paper, we introduce four dilemmas that researchers need to navigate to study secondary students'…

Previous studies have shown that situational interest, as a primary motivator for students, affects student cognitive engagement. Considering this, the purpose of this study was to examine, within a situated perspective, the effects of situational interest dimensions on students' learning strategies in physical education. A total of 148…

Particle physicists are literally rewriting what we know about the physical world; yet, the typical high school physics curriculum spends little to no time on particle physics. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the inclusion of the particle physics topic in the curriculum increased the engagement and knowledge of high school…

"Measuring Student Cognitive Engagement When Using Technology" was designed to determine if students were using the recently purchased Chromebooks as well as if they were cognitively engaged when using the technology. Data collected using the IPI-T process suggested teachers were typically the users of the technology, students were often…