Research on the use of culturally relevant texts has shown the great benefits on students who are exposed to these types of texts (Feger, 2006; Ebe, 2010; Ebe, 2012; Delgado, 2021). Focus needs to be placed on the cultural backgrounds and experiences of the students so that they can become successful, and develop cultural competence and student…

In a time of rapid change and uncertainty, the skills that students must acquire are becoming more focused on creativity. Correspondingly, the development of students' creative competency should be addressed and implemented in curriculum. The purpose of the study is to examine how the content of a curriculum material, specifically an elementary…

Critical information literacy (CIL) and critical information consumption (CIC) are essential skills and habits of minds for pre-service teachers to develop as they prepare to educate future generations. The purpose of this critical discourse analysis was to investigate ways in which introductory teaching or pedagogy textbooks used in public…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to analyze how textbooks inform and prepare teachers for handling behaviors and the management of the classroom. By reviewing 55 textbooks provided to the researcher by current midwestern K-12 classroom teachers and administrators, analysis was completed for pre-service and novice teacher stages. Textbooks…

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate linguistic variation within ESL/EFL reading textbooks and between EAP reading textbooks and lower-division university textbooks. Specifically, within ESL/EFL reading textbooks, lexical, lexico-grammatical, and formulaic variation was measured within series of textbooks, across textbooks at the…

Currently, the perceived use of critical theoretical frameworks to shape instruction in public K-12 education is undergoing intense scrutiny in popular and political debate. Chief among such frameworks has been Critical Race Theory (CRT), which, at the time of this writing, has been legally banned or restricted in eighteen states -- with similar…

End-Of-Chapter (EOC) problems have been part of many physics education studies. Typically, only problems "localized" as relevant to a single chapter were used. This work examines how well this type of problem represents all EOC problems and whether EOC problems found in leading textbooks have changed over the past several decades. To…

Tullahoma City Schools, a rural district in Middle Tennessee, recently switched from traditional static textbooks to an online, open educational resource platform. As a result of this change the role of curator, a teacher who creates the Flexbook by compiling and organizing content, was created. This research project sought to add to the limited…

Tullahoma City Schools, a rural district in Middle Tennessee, recently switched from traditional static textbooks to an online, open educational resource platform. As a result of this change the role of curator, a teacher who creates the Flexbook by compiling and organizing content, was created. This research project sought to add to the limited…

Tullahoma City Schools, a rural district in Middle Tennessee, recently switched from traditional static textbooks to an online, open educational resource platform. As a result of this change the role of curator, a teacher who creates the Flexbook by compiling and organizing content, was created. This research project sought to add to the limited…

In 1997, developmental biologist Michael Richardson compared his research team's embryo photographs to Ernst Haeckel's 1874 embryo drawings and called Haeckel's work "noncredible". "Science" soon published "Haeckel's Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered," and Richardson's comments further reinvigorated criticism of Haeckel by…

Both the purpose and overarching goal of this dissertation can be summarized with this quote by Buckminster Fuller: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." That is, to enable substantive positive change in mathematics education, this…

The cost of textbooks is a financial burden on many college students. Fortunately the advent of open educational resources (OER) has allowed for the development of textbooks and other materials at significantly reduced costs to students. Many faculty are using OER to develop customized textbooks for their students, usually published digitally…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how writing in mathematics is treated in one 4th grade National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded mathematics textbook titled "Everyday Mathematics" and one publisher-generated textbook titled "enVision MATH." The developed framework provided categories to support each of the research…

This dissertation critically investigates how Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. History textbooks portray key events in Latino/a history. The investigation is made in light of claims made by the College Board, the ACLU, scholars, and federal and state governments that the Advanced Placement program is the path to educational equity for Latino/a…