A history of trauma can have a significant negative impact on the functioning of a student in the school environment. Check & Connect, a school engagement and dropout intervention program, has been found to have positive effects on student school engagement and decrease the likelihood of dropping out of school. However, a review of the Check…

This dissertation shines a light on the indomitable spirit of African American male students, who exhibit remarkable resilience despite facing persistent challenges such as underrepresentation, academic underachievement, and racial and socioeconomic disparities. It delves into the critical role of programs and services in promoting academic…

Disparities in academic performance and degree attainment continue to affect systemically marginalized (SM) college students. Amidst these persistent inequities, this qualitative study aimed to better understand how SM students at a competitive university navigated their choice to engage with support and how they conceptualized success. The study…

The Preventing Relational Aggression in Schools Everyday (PRAISE) Program is a school-based program that has shown promise for reducing aggression. PRAISE, 20-session classroom-based universal prevention program, was designed to be appropriate and responsive to the needs of youth within the urban school context. A preliminary trial of PRAISE…

This article reports on a quasi-experimental pilot study of the impacts of a high school teacher professional development (PD) series. The 10-session series, "Engaging High School Students in Academic Work," was designed to equip teachers to deepen students' learning and engagement and thereby increase course-passing rates. The study…

The integration of Social Emotional Learning into the secondary curriculum is recognized globally as an important set of skills to have, especially since the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of combining these skills within a virtual reality program is to engage and enhance the experience the students have learning the new skills.…

The purpose of this paper was to examine whether there is an effect of common reading program participation on first-year students' academic engagement, faculty interactions, and sense of belonging. Using a multi-institutional sample, propensity score matching, and linear regression techniques, the results suggest that common reading programs have…

Background: Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may experience challenges with verbal communication (VC) and task engagement (TE) in daily and academic activities. Antecedent-based interventions (ABI) have been explored as evidence-based practices (EBP) to improve VC and TE for children with ASD. The purpose of this study was to examine…

This brief addresses two evaluation questions: (1) What are the effects of supporting educators to intentionally intensify their practice on their overall implementation of targeted classroom practices (i.e., prompting, engaging, and praising)? and (2) What are the effects of educators intentionally intensifying their classroom practices on the…

Achieving adequate physical activity is an important health goal that many elementary school students are not meeting during the school day. The physical activity leadership (PAL) Program was designed to provide individually tailored supports to improve the quantity and quality of physical activity in schools, as well as promote improvements in…

Although it is widely accepted that reading motivation erodes over the elementary years and school experiences shape motivation, few have examined young readers' motivation for their reading intervention programs. This two-year qualitative case study probed the motivation-related perceptions of four young children specific to their involvement in…

Learning Analytics Dashboards (LADs) are gaining popularity as a platform for providing students with insights into their learning behaviour patterns in online environments. Existing LAD studies are mainly centred on displaying students' online behaviours with simplistic descriptive insights. Only a few studies have integrated predictive…

The COVID-19 pandemic forced the rapid implementation of online learning in California's 9-12 public schools, necessitating an examination of administrators' perceptions of this new educational landscape and its impact on student engagement. This qualitative dissertation explored how administrators perceived the effectiveness of online learning in…

Various approaches have been introduced and tested to try to help struggling high school students catch up on their reading achievement. The current research study investigated how to support high school students with reading difficulties in increasing their reading abilities, engagement, and perception of their school as a supportive and…

In this study, 82 middle and high school teachers engaged with the InSTEP online professional learning platform to develop their expertise in teaching data science and statistics. We investigated teachers' engagement within the platform, aspects of the platform that were most and least effective in building teachers' expertise, and the extent to…