Library: Education

The purpose of this quantitative study was to discover the perceptions of school culture and correlate those perceptions with standardized test scores in elementary and secondary schools in southwestern Arizona. The intention of this study was to contribute to the field of education leadership related to student achievement and factors contributing to student achievement including organizational culture. A survey of teachers and administrators in participating schools in southwestern Arizona was completed and correlated with existing student achievement data for those participating schoo...

This applied dissertation was designed to investigate the characteristics most represented in two school districts, an inner-city and a suburban district. These characteristics were related to the innovativeness of the school district and the perception of individual leadership in schools that have passed the performance criteria for state accreditation. Forty schools and 200 principals were randomly selected to participate in the study for a period of 3 to 4 months. The researcher used three instruments to determine whether differences existed between the two districts in rega...

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the way and extend to which the elementary school is meeting special needs of students of gay and lesbian parents, in regard to school environment that provides support, protection, inclusive curriculum, principal and assistant principal involvement, and involvement of parents of these children in the life of the school. Methodology: The student consists of two types of research: a descriptive study and a qualitative case study. Questionnaires and semi structured interviews were conducted with elementary principals enroll...

Private Higher Education and the Labor Market in China focuses on Chinese private higher education institutions and investigates their institutional management efforts in linking private higher education to the labor market. The dissertation firstly describes and analyzes how these mostly demand-absorbing institutions include elements aimed at meeting labor market demands in their mission statements, and how they improve student employability and bridge graduates and employers through job-oriented fields of study provision, educational delivery, career services, as well as networking and partn...

School psychologists have an ethical obligation to be advocates for students. However, the ethical principles of the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) do not define what it means for school psychologists to be advocates for students, except through the inferences that may be drawn from what school psychologists must be, and do, in order to comply with the NASP ethical principles. This dissertation proposed a definition of advocacy, which was then presented to a focus group of school psychology experts, to an expert panel, and then researched through a census survey of the Col...

The problem addressed in the current study was that disruptive student behavior is detrimental to learning because quality teacher-student interaction time is reduced. The purpose of this ethnographic research study was to explore relationship between disruptive behavior of students and leadership styles of teachers, parents and school leaders. Results indicated that in some cases, an individualized approach could help the K-6 elementary student by reducing their disruptive behavior. However, it was also confirmed that as part of this individualized approach, school-wide implementation might p...

The purpose of this study was to identify what were Taiwanese University English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ perceptions about learning communication strategies. This study collected qualitative data about students’ beliefs and attitudes as they learned communication strategies. The research question guiding the study was: What are Taiwanese University EFL learners’ perceptions about learning communication strategies? Twenty-four university students were trained for 10 weeks to use strategies in Faerch and Kasper’s (1983a) taxonomy, and seven volunteers were interviewed. None of the...

The Priority Method evolved from theories from first and second language acquisition and child language development. Along with error analysis theories, technical advances in equipment have allowed the Priority Method to offer a complete language diagnostic, analysis and training format. Its significant variation from all previous SLA pedagogy is that it concentrates on areas of weakness, prioritizing common areas of transitional errors from L1 to L2, that commonly occur in the phonetic production and delivery of the ESL student, and focuses on the key areas that have significant sociolinguist...

The purpose of the study was to examine, through narrative, contributing factors which lead to burnout in three Hispanic middle school teachers in a school in South Texas that is predominantly Hispanic. Burnout, in this work, was understood to be the experience of excessive stress and anxiety which accompanies teachers’ inabilities to cope with environmental stressors present in their workplaces. While this term served to introduce the study, the participants defined their experiences of burnout in their own words (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Merriam, 1998). While the exact impact of teacher b...

This study investigated the distribution of Reactive Tokens in natural conversation by male and female speakers of Japanese. According to Clancy et al. a reactive token (RT) is “a short utterance produced by an interlocutor who is playing a listener’s role during the other interlocutor’s speakership” (1996, p. 355). Clancy et al. classify RTs into five types: backchannels, reactive expressions, collaborative finishes, repetitions, and resumptive openers. This study investigated the distribution of these five types of RTs. In particular, it studied their use in turn management and their distrib...