Although School based agricultural education (SBAE) teachers have a variety of responsibilities within a comprehensive program, supervised agricultural experience (SAE) programs are considered an intracurricular component. Unfortunately, the ability for teachers to plan for and facilitate SAEs has been reported as lacking. The purpose of this…

The purpose of the study was to examine the extent to which participants built meaningful culturally and linguistically responsive (CLR) relationships with students and to what extent those same participants engaged in cognitively demanding academic discourse with their students. The participatory action research (PAR) study took place in a rural…

This study investigated teachers' perception of their school administrators as consistent enforcers of school code-of-conduct rules, and if their rating of consistency was associated with an increase or decrease in risk ratio for African American students in middle schools in North Carolina. Findings suggest that teachers viewed their school…

The current exploratory study used data on students in grades six through 12 in North Carolina to examine the effectiveness of their mathematics teachers. Its purpose was fourfold: (1) to identify teacher qualification indicators that are most important for predicting students' math scores; (2) to empirically identify teacher qualification…

School systems across the nation have used some form of instructional feedback, such as traditional and standards-based grading systems, to document students' academic performance. The urgency of developing an alternative grading system emerged because grades determined by teachers using the traditional grading system were unreliable. This study…

The No Child Left Behind Act (2002) stipulates that states assess students during their K-12 educational experience at various points as a way of measuring student learning. In North Carolina (NC), the State has the NC Schools Report Card that documents to the public, parents and educators the state of education in the schools annually. A major…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the LearnEd Notebook curriculum when used with two groups of eighth-grade African American male students in teaching science. More specifically, the researcher sought to determine if there was a correlation between the utilization of the LearnEd Notebook Science curriculum…

This report focuses on a competency-based grading initiative at Carroll Middle School. The initiative was implemented from 2018-19 to 2020-21 to address the lack of alignment between report card grades and End-of-Grade (EOG) test results and was designed to ensure consistent delivery of standards-based instruction, formative assessment, and…

The overall aim of the Effective Implementation Cohort (EIC) investment is to increase district capacity to implement a high-quality middle years math curriculum as part of a Coherent Instructional System (CIS) to accelerate learning for students who are experiencing poverty, Black, Latino/a, and/or English Learner (EL)-Designated ("priority…

Over the past three decades, children from low-income families have increasingly been attending different public schools than those from more affluent families. Though recent work has helped us understand patterns of income segregation between districts and schools within districts, we know little about segregation of students as they experience…

Since the standards-based assessment practices required by the No Child Left Behind legislation, almost all students in the United States are "labeled" according to their performance on educational achievement tests. In spite of their widespread use in reporting test results, research on how achievement level labels are perceived by…

McMillan-Dorman, Stephanie Michelle. Examining the Relationship Between Middle School Students' Participation on i-Ready Computer Adaptive Tests and Math Achievement Scores (Under the direction of Theodore Kaniuka, Ed.D.) Despite over 50 years of effort, educators have witnessed a multiplicity of educational reforms make little to no effect on…

The "defund the police" movement has recently called for the removal of police--or school resource officers (SROs)--from schools. This call is driven by concerns that SROs may heighten student contact with criminal justice or lead to disproportionately harsh disciplinary consequences. This study uses linked disciplinary, academic,…

Purpose: We assess whether school start times predict the engagement and achievement outcomes of middle grades students. Our focus on middle grades is important because biological changes in sleep often begin when adolescents are in middle school and because middle school is a time when more students struggle academically. Research…

Although research suggests that family dynamics likely play a role in shaping children's behaviors, few studies focus on environmental behaviors, and none to our knowledge investigate how parents shape climate change mitigation behaviors among their children. We begin to fill this gap through a quantitative case study using matched household-level…