Students' learning experience mainly depends on the knowledge and skills they learned in class. The objective of an interior design program is to teach students innovative design thinking and how to express their creative ideas. Students do individual and team assignments to learn relevant design cases and methods. The main teaching focus of…

Preparing to become a music teacher educator is a complex process and one component of this process should be learning to model, demonstrate, and teach assessment practices to preservice music educators. The purpose of this exploratory qualitative study was to discover how, and to what extent, music teacher educators (MTEs) are educated about…

The dynamic and high-stakes nature of education and training requires reliance on evidence-based practices and policies to make decisions about technology adoption and implementation. In the report, "Science of Learning and Readiness (SoLaR) Recommendation Report: Science of Learning Practices for Distributed Online Environments"…

We are living in an era where reality, truth, and facts are being turned upside down and inside out. Fake news and falsehoods are being spewed out in increasing exponential rates. I was prompted to do something about the propensity of fake news through post-truth discourse and designed an undergraduate course that I titled: Bullshit, Fake News,…

The case study explores the adoption and implementation of personalized, competency-based learning at Yuma Union High School District (YUHSD) within the broader context of the Arizona Personalized Learning Network (AZPLN). The study reveals that YUHSD has made notable strides in aligning district-wide systems with personalized learning principles,…

Background: Given the body image and disordered eating struggles prevalent in young adults, weight-inclusive anti-diet programs are needed on college campuses. Such programs replace weight loss advice with changes that center physical and mental well-being. Methods/Program Design: University health and wellness programs such as University Coaching…

As scrutiny of teacher effectiveness increases, there is a greater call for multiple instruments to measure teacher effectiveness and provide robust feedback to support teacher growth and development. Student perception surveys, questionnaires completed by K-12 students about their teachers, have increasingly been used to evaluate teachers and…

New teacher evaluation systems have emerged as the cornerstone of the recent movement to improve public school teaching. Fueled by incentives from the federal government, state and local policymakers have sought to replace the often-cursory evaluation models of the past with more comprehensive ones. In contrast to past evaluations, which often…

This study describes how multiple-measure teacher evaluations were put into practice in a set of ten volunteering local education agencies (LEAs) in Arizona. After a key shift in state policy, five "pilot" LEAs implemented the new Arizona Department of Education teacher evaluation model in the 2012/13 school year, while five other…

This action research study involves two cycles of investigation of Research Day an event at the end of each semester where doctoral students share their latest cycle of action research focused on a problem of practice they are facing. The study sought to understand students' perspectives of Research Day in terms of its instructional intention, how…

This study investigates a novel approach to automatically assessing essay quality that combines natural language processing approaches that assess text features with approaches that assess individual differences in writers such as demographic information, standardized test scores, and survey results. The results demonstrate that combining text…

This study explored the relationships among the components of the Arizona Department of Education's new teacher evaluation model, with a particular focus on the extent to which ratings from the state model's teacher observation instrument differentiated higher and lower performance. The study used teacher-level evaluation data collected by the…

The high cost of textbooks is of concern not only to college students but also to society as a whole. Open textbooks promise the same educational benefits as traditional textbooks; however, their efficacy remains largely untested. We report on one community college's adoption of a collection of open resources across five different mathematics…

The Environmental (2-MEV) Scale questionnaire was developed in Europe to measure adolescents' attitudes and gauge the effectiveness of educational programs. It also formed the basis for the Theory of Ecological Attitudes. In the present four-year study, the 2-MEV Scale was modified for use with 9-12-year-old children in the United States. Initial…

Background/Context: Arizona's most recent English Language Learner (ELL) legislation, starting in the school year 2008-2009, requires all such students be educated through a specific Structured English Immersion (SEI) model: the 4-hour English Language Development (ELD) block. The basic premise behind this particular model is that ELL students…