Although an integral part of the pedagogical process is the evaluation of students, questions remain about the purpose and characteristics of effective assessments. Assessments should benefit both the instructor and the student, but this could be a challenge in large classes, such as the English service courses offered at the University of Guyana (UG), which are compulsory courses offered to over 2,000 first year students annually. However, the transition to online delivery of these courses because of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has offered new opportunities for innovation in relation to course assessments. Consequently, this Action Research study was undertaken with the intention of improving the methods of assessment in the course, Introduction to the Use of English (ENG 1105), one of the three English service courses currently offered at UG.Multiple methods of data collection, including surveys, and semi-structured interviews, observations and analyses were used to determine how the assessment strategies used in the course helped develop academic self-efficacy in students and prepare them for other courses in their programs of study. The findings from the first two cycles of this study suggest that while the current assessment methods used in the course are beneficial to both lecturers and students, there is a need to adjust aspects of the assessments so students benefit from assessments that better align with other courses in their programs, as well as sharpen their English language skills. The third cycle captures the impact that the use of an innovation-an ungraded portfolio-had on student learning and suggests it should become a regular feature in the English service courses.

Despite the technical competence of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) graduates of the Department of Computer Science (DCS) at the University of Guyana, stakeholders’ perception generally holds that they lack affective and behavioural (soft) skills. These soft skills are expected of them to lead and champion technological change in Guyana. This dissertation addresses the question of what is understood about, and how meaning and sense are made of, the concept of ‘ICT graduate employability’, in the context of the local public sector, by the key stakeholders: employers (government), and alumni (graduates) and lecturers (educators) of the DCS. On account of the cyclic, incremental, reflective nature of Action Research (AR) and its tenet of integrating theory with practice, an AR project was undertaken to develop a deep local understanding about ICT graduate employability. This understanding has implications for how ICT graduates are prepared as a function of their programme of study in the DCS and how their performance and careers are managed in the public sector. The research comprised one reconnaissance study (Cycle 0), an intervention-based study (Cycle 1), and a qualitative study (Cycle 2). The focus and direction of Cycle 2 were refined by insights garnered from Cycles 0 and 1. Cycle 2 employed surveys, interviews, and focus groups to elicit the perceptions, views, opinions, experiences, values, and framing ideas and beliefs of a sample of forty participants. Thematic analysis was used to identify patterns and develop themes in the process of analysing and interpreting the data. The findings unearthed a local definition of ICT graduate employability; revealed implications of environmental factors in the public sector for the psychological safety and resilience of ICT graduates; and informed recommendations for a locally relevant ICT graduate education ecosystem.

This dissertation details an action research study designed to teach engineering students enrolled in a First Year Composition course understand and learn to use effective conventions of written communication. Over the course of one semester, students participated in an intervention that included embodied and constructive pedagogical practices within a rhetorical framework. The theoretical perspectives include Martha Kolln’s rhetorical grammar framework, embodied cognition, and Chi’s ICAP hypothesis. The study was conducted using an explanatory multi-methodological approach. The majority of students demonstrated that in their post-intervention writing samples, their ability to use effective conventions had improved. Over the course of the study, students’ attitudes about writing improved as did their self-efficacy about their writing ability.

The purpose of the project was to explore the extent to which an asynchronous online professional development (PD) model focusing on instructor presence would improve feedback and interactions with students. The study is grounded in Community of Inquiry theory, which situates learning at the intersection of teaching presence, social presence and cognitive presence. The study aimed to improve student success by empowering instructors to integrate engaging strategies and technology tools into fully online courses. The participants were 4 higher education instructors teaching in fully online degree programs delivered to 160-200 undergraduate students. For eight weeks the 4 instructors participated in the PD. The goals of the PD were to learn strategies for improving instructor presence and integrating student engagement opportunities in a collaborative online format. Data was collected from pre- and post-intervention offerings of the instructors’ courses to determine the impact of participation in the PD. Results suggest that the PD model was an effective intervention to increase presence and engagement. Presence and engagement were found to have increased in participants’ courses. Interactive video was found to serve multiple purposes including increasing instructor presence and student engagement, facilitating feedback between instructors and students, and elevating the level of cognitive presence of students. As a result, instructors and students both indicated a perception of improved interactions and feedback.

The purpose of this study was to understand how community members within a segregated school district approached racial inequities. I conducted a ¬nineteen-month-long ethnography using a critical Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach to explore how members in a community activist group called Eliminate Racism interacted and worked with school district officials. My goal was to identify and examine how community members addressed racially inequitable policies and practices in the Midwestern city of Pinecreek (pseudonym) in the context of a school district that had undergone two school desegregation lawsuits. I conducted 32 interviews with 24 individuals, including teachers and school leaders, parents, and community members.

This study answers three research questions: (1) What strategies did the community activist group use to influence local education policy for addressing racism in the schools? (2) How did community participation influence local education policy? (3) What were the motivating factors for individuals’ involvement in issues of local school segregation? To answer these questions, I used concepts from Critical Race Theory and Social Capital Theory. I employ Putnam’s and Putnam and Campbell’s social capital, Warren’s civic participation, Bonilla-Silva’s color-blind racism, Yosso’s community cultural wealth and religio-civics. My analysis shows that the community group used the social capital and community cultural wealth of its members to create partnerships with district officials. Although Eliminate Racism did not meet its goals, it established itself as a legitimate organization within the community, successfully drawing together residents throughout the city to bring attention to racism in the schools.

The study’s results encourage school and district leaders to constantly bring race to the forefront of their decision-making processes and to question how policy implementation affects minoritized students. This research also suggests that strategies from this community group can be adopted or avoided by other antiracist groups undertaking similar work. Finally, it provides an example of how to employ critical PAR methods into ethnography, as it notes the ways that researcher positionality and status can be leveraged by community groups to support the legitimacy of their mission and work.

The lasting benefits of high-quality early childhood programs are widely understood. These benefits and the well-documented return on investments are among the factors that have shaped executives at philanthropic foundations’ grant making in support of early childhood programs, policies, and research in the United States. Yet little is known about the investments they are making in the field of early childhood. Drawing from a conceptual framework that combines types of philanthropic investment with the concepts of accountability and transparency, I conducted a comparative case study of the Buffett Early Childhood Fund, George Kaiser Family Foundation, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, all of which began financially supporting early childhood between 2000 and 2005. I attempted to understand how and why philanthropic foundations and pooled funding organizations have supported early childhood from the late 1990s through 2018.



Based on my analysis of 32 semi-structured interviews with current and former early childhood philanthropic foundation, pooled funding, and operating organization executives, I found that each foundation independently determines their investment decision processes and invests a disparate amount of money in early childhood. In addition, philanthropic foundations gain programmatic and legislative power by leveraging funds and partnering with additional foundations and businesses. With the inclusion of early childhood programs in K-12 education systems and the decrease in national and state education funding from those same budgets, it is critical to understand how philanthropic foundations have supported early childhood education and some of the implications of their support both locally and nationally.

In the years following Lance Freeman’s seminal study, There Goes the ‘Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up (2006), the literature about how Black residents experience gentrification and its impacts on education, agency, and life has grown only slightly, and tends to explore gentrification as a class-based phenomenon. Yet, in America, race is inextricably linked to economics and geographical space. Therefore any discussion of urban blight and economic redevelopment must necessarily locate race as its nucleus to connect the vestiges of systemic racism to contemporary issues of social transformation. Using Critical Race Theory as a construct, this dissertation attempts to demonstrate the interconnectedness of racism and capitalism to extend the academic and practical discussions of gentrification.

This ethnographically inspired study begins with a historical analysis of Olde Towne East (OTE), a gentrifying community in Columbus, Ohio and then moves to a contemporary analysis of relevant data to demonstrate the vast disparities across myriad measures between the neighborhood’s Black and White residents. The crux of the dissertation features interviews with Black residents (N=17) who shared their stories about life in OTE and reflected upon the dynamics they perceive and ascribe to be associated with the transformation of their community.

Using grounded theory to analyze the values, attitudes, and beliefs contained in participant reflections, findings indicate that Black folks in this study are keenly aware of the systemic forces, including institutionalized racism, that have resulted in the gentrifying of their community. In addition to the systemic factors these participants ascribe to be associated with the transformation of OTE, they also contend that a lack of Black critical consciousness exacerbated the racially inequitable outcomes associated with gentrification.

This research investigates the experiences of Chinese heritage language learners (CHLLs) in a federally funded program of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language in the United States. Most pertinent studies on Chinese heritage language education focus on stakeholders such as teachers and parents. Instead, this study explores the agency of heritage language learners in their efforts toward heritage language maintenance. Adopting a three-pronged conceptual framework of language planning and policy as a sociocultural process, language ideology, and language identity, this study applies an ethnographically-informed qualitative approach to understanding how CHLLs develop and exercise implicit language policies—taken-for-granted norms about language that guide their language choices and practices—their language ideologies that undergird these policies and the relationship of these informal policies to these learners’ language identities.

This study suggests CHLLs participate in Chinese learning activities to reconnect to their family and culture. Their language maintenance efforts, however, do not necessarily change their language use dramatically. In CHLLs’ everyday social interactions, their language choices depend on the interlocutors, locations and topics of the conversation and are impacted by the dominant language ideologies toward Chinese and English. CHLLs’ Chinese language maintenance practices strengthen learners’ relationship with both the language and culture. But Chinese language can be absent from learners’ pursuit of their cultural heritage. Furthermore, the multilayered identities of CHLLs are constructed and negotiated in the heteroglossic and multicultural environments.

This is an endeavor in connecting the initiatives of increasing foreign language capacity at the national level with the efforts of maintaining heritage language at the individual level. This study can contribute to a holistic picture for teachers and parents to understand CHLLs’ language learning experience. It also offers strategies that can benefit heritage language education.

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this descriptive study was to gain an understanding of the confidence level held by third, fourth, and fifth grade teachers as to their preparedness for teaching the cognitive demands of the Common Core State Standards (Arizona's College and Career Ready Standards) to all students, in particular Hispanic students living in poverty, who occupy close to a third of all classroom seats in Arizona. The achievement gap between Hispanic students living in poverty and non-Hispanic students of non-poverty status is one of the largest achievement gaps in Arizona, which has existed with minimal change for more than 12 years. By gaining an understanding of the teachers' confidence in teaching critical thinking skills, further support and professional development is suggested to link a teacher's knowledge to instructional practice that in turn increases the academic achievement of Arizona's poor Hispanic students.

The process of gaining this understanding was by using a multi-dimensional survey with 500 third through fifth grade teachers in two uniquely different, but representative, Arizona school districts. Approximately one-third of those teachers responded to the multi-dimensional survey about teaching the critical thinking (CT) skills of Arizona's College and Career Ready Standards for English Language Arts. The survey asked teachers to rate their levels of preparedness for teaching CT to several types of students, to choose a CT definition, describe the relationship of CT and reading, explain how they teach CT to students who are reading below grade level, express the support they need to teach CT to those students, and rate the effectiveness of several CT classroom vignettes for different types of students. Although the questions involved several types of students, the primary focus was on exploring the teachers' position with teaching CT to Low SES Hispanic students.

A disconnect was revealed between the teachers' perception that they had the ability and knowledge necessary to teach critical thinking skills and their ability to identify ineffective critical thinking instructional practices. This disconnect may be interfering with the link between the professional development teachers are currently receiving to implement Common Core State Standards and teachers actively engaging in learning what is needed to effectively teach critical thinking skills to their students.

Increasing public criticism of traditional teacher evaluation systems based largely on classroom observations has spurred an unprecedented shift in the debate surrounding educational accountability policies, specifically about the purposes for and measures used to evaluate teachers. In response to growing public demand and associated federal mandates, states have been prompted to design and implement teacher evaluation systems that use increasingly available, statistically complex models (i.e., value-added) intended to isolate and measure the effects of individual teachers on student academic growth over time. The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of school administrators and teachers within one of the largest school districts in the state of Arizona with regards to the design and implementation of a federally-supported, state policy-directed teacher evaluation system based on professional practice and value-added measures. While much research has been conducted on teacher evaluation, few studies have examined teacher evaluation systems in context to better understand the standards of effectiveness used by school administrators and teachers to measure system effectiveness. The perceptions of school administrators and teachers, considering their lived experiences as the subjects of the nation's new and improved teacher evaluation systems in context, must be better understood if state and federal policymakers are to also better recognize and understand the consequences (intended and unintended) associated with the design and implementation of these systems in practice.