<p> This multiple case study utilized a qualitative approach to research student engagement at the middle school level. Specifically, this project contributes to the understanding of how students at a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) magnet middle school and a traditional public middle school perceive student engagement in the classroom as classified into the categories of behavioral, emotional, cognitive, and agentic engagement (Lee &amp; Reeve, 2012; Reeve &amp; Tseng, 2011). Middle school students in this project participated in a classroom engagement unit of inquiry, produced photo-elicitation data depicting positive examples of classroom engagement, produced descriptions of those photos, and discussed engagement in photo-elicited focus group interviews that revealed their thoughts and beliefs about engagement in the classroom setting. Results revealed that middle school students at traditional and STEM sites have similar perceptions related to each of the categories of student engagement. However, two distinguishing characteristics were discovered from this research. First, students at the traditional middle school attributed student engagement as primarily an individual experience whereas students at the STEM middle school perceived student engagement as mainly collaborative for each category of engagement. Second, students at the traditional middle school identified a teacher-centered aspect to student engagement that was absent from the perceptions of students at the STEM school. Additional research on student engagement is warranted due to the changing landscape of middle school education.</p><p>

Experimenters evaluated the effects of a homework session on undergraduate students' homework performance through an adapted alternating treatments design in two introduction to behavior analysis courses. Several participants attended homework sessions; however, homework submission and homework mastery did not vary as a function of homework session attendance or availability. Homework submission remained high throughout the experiment regardless of attendance at or availability of a homework session. Many participants responded that they were not interested in or did not need homework sessions. Participants who attended homework sessions rated them as neutral or helpful overall, with longer time and different time as the most common suggestions for improvement.

Modern Physical Education (PE) administered systemic models of teaching crafts. It atrophied the play element in human nature, and shaped a single-lens attitude to the treatment of bodies. Framing minds, it veiled the conditions of learning processes and thus “instituted” the sovereignty of subjective concerns. It created many unexplained “gaps” between abstract concerns and pragmatic issues. Following language’s poststructural analysis, PE’s professional communication practices were exposed to alternative methodological refocusing from conforming to move to personalise the agent’s experience in moving to learn. In the wake of poststructuralism came Whitehead’s Physical Literacy (PL) which I adopt as “leitmotif” to reform PE’s teacher preparation and schooling practices. PL addresses children up to 14 years. For older pupils, PL’s language needs to constitute versions of human purposes voiced by the introduction of a new development called “Movement Literacy” (ML). ML acknowledges that language and movement are very different forms of “self-expression”. By itself however, self-expression is inadequate when it comes to learning how to learn. Critical dialogue needs to be brought in to facilitate meaningful innovation in the PE world. By employing the philosophies of phenomenology and hermeneutics I make a case that expression in languaging movement [subjecting the agent’s account to hermeneutic treatment] is expression for others, and in exchange with others the expression is redefined, and changes the way one sees and talks about movement and about oneself. In its reflective practice, reverentially, ML will also unpack pedagogy’s hidden protocol, hoping to reclaim PE’s authentic purpose. It connects secular matters with sacred implications by reconciling the polemic differences between “techne” [purpose] and “phronesis ” [prudence]. With limited reference to Eastern “selflessness” ML advances teaching, through pedagogy and andragogy as a life-time mission. Not providing answers, the thesis offers a manifesto attempting to facilitate new questions such as: how can language and movement communicate? and how can movement educators “minister” to their learner’s sense of well-being?

This thesis represents my reflective journey to explore the relationship between ethos, learning habits and educational outcomes of Church of England secondary schools and academies. Leaders of Church schools often suggest that their Christian ethoses contribute to their favourable outcomes although they offer limited evidence to support this. Using published inspection reports for Church schools I argue that it is possible to find a statistically significant relationship between an aggregated score for ethos and an aggregated score for educational outcomes. Focusing on one school with a particularly strong match as a case-study, and drawing on the work of Jeynes (2003) in the United States, I argue that there is a perception amongst the stakeholders of this school that its Christian ethos contributes to success through cultivating the learning habits of diligence, resilience and compliance. Further, I argue that the values, theology and actions of the headteacher have contributed significantly to this ethos and these related learning habits. In proposing these findings I argue that my role as a self-professing Christian and serving Church school headteacher provided me with a unique experience to obtain this data grounded in my own story. Through personal biographies and further enquiry, I suggest that these learning habits may be applicable not only to the case-study school but to all successful Church schools. Finally, in arriving at all these findings, I maintain that the employment of a range of methodologies throughout this thesis enabled me to illuminate the different dimensions of the relationship between ethos, learning habits and outcomes in Church schools. In an age when there is evidence of growing opposition to all ‘faith’ schools, I suggest that the findings from this study provide important insights into the relationship between ethos, learning habits and outcomes, not only of Church schools but other schools too.

After conducting a number of pilot studies pre- and post-tests were given to three experimental classes of 11 to 13 year old early adolescents, one taken by Collings, and the two others by an inexperienced teacher. With one class the latter used materials designed to develop Field-independence only, with the other the teacher followed a similar pattern to Collings who incorporated a meta-cognitive aspect by encouraging students to analyse their own thinking strategies and to 'bridge' between the Field-independence lessons and the contexts of science. There were two control classes, and the overall period of the intervention was one school year with about 20% of the science teaching time used for the intervention. The tests used were the Group embedded Figures Test (GHFT) for Field-independence, and Volume and Heaviness (SRTII), NFER (1979) for Piagetian operations. In the pre- post-test Comparisons between experimental and Control groups all the differences between the differences were statistically significant. Collings' own class showed an effect-size of 1.53 σ on GBFT over the controls, and 0.92 σ on SRTII. The inexperienced teacher's class with Field-independence training only, showed an effect-size of 1.09 σ on GHFT and 0.36 on SRTII whereas his class with meta cognition added showed an effect-size of 1.13 σ on GEFT, and 0.63 σ on SRTII. There was no statistical difference between the 1.09 and 1.13 σ on GEFT and this inferred that the Field-independence materials were fairly robust to teacher effects. The difference between 0.36 and 0.68 σ on SRTII was significantly different, and this was interpreted as showing that the meta-cognitive aspect assisted transfer of training to Formal Operations.

The study focuses on 9 teachers teaching pupils aged between 12 and 18 years of age at the turn of the twenty first century in three schools; a Technology College for boys, a Rudolf Steiner-Waldorf School, and an Islamic School for girls. Starting from the premise that teachers may express different views to what they do in practice, qualitative methods of close examination (through interviews and observations) were used to explore the influence of ethos of the different schools on the teachers' expressed knowledge and behaviour, and sought to identify relationships between the models of learning and the models of moral learning teachers expressed in interviews, and implied in their interactions with children. The methodology highlights the qualitative perspective of 'the researcher as an instrument of the research', and 'gaining closeness' to the subjects and the data; and demonstrates how closeness and triangulation ensures the trustworthiness of qualitative research of this nature. The analysis is grounded in the research through themes arising from the data; and three fields of knowledge (e.g. theory and research on learning processes, philosophical perspectives of morality, and theory and research of moral development) inform the models of teachers' understanding identified from the implicit values or philosophical perspectives that they expressed verbally or implied by their behaviour. In general teachers expressed more eclectic views of learning processes and moral learning than they appeared to use in practice. Furthermore, some teachers may have been influenced towards mainly behaviourist perspectives by the ethos of their schools, and their perceptions of respect for their roles. However, unique characteristics and personal tacit knowledge of how children learn and learn morally dominated teachers' actions in the way that they imparted knowledge and guided children morally. Finally, the thesis acknowledges the personal journey of the researcher moving from positivist values and analytical methods involving quantifying qualitative data, to postmodern, constructivist and feminist values that emphasise the relationship between knowledge and context; and the validity of subjectivity and 'lived experience' as exploratory tools in research.

The purpose of this study is to examine the aims of the education delivered in a small sample of schools in the boarding sector, using qualitative methods of data gathering - analysis of school documents, interviews with the key participants (pupils, heads, staff and parents) and a limited element of participation in the schools selected. Studies on school effectiveness have proliferated in recent decades, the majority focusing on day schools. In addition, the research has tended to focus on enhancement of achievement in the cognitive area, to the virtual exclusion of other aspects of pupils' development. The present study makes a contribution to the discussion of effective schooling in two ways: firstly, by looking at the practices of boarding rather than day schools, it extends the scope and applicability of effective school research; and secondly, it extends the focus on effectiveness to include the somewhat neglected psychomotor and affective domains, while also addressing academic achievement among the pupils in the sample schools. Case studies were made of three boarding schools: one state, two independent, drawing on analysis of the material gathered. The research questions were designed to throw light on the purposes, workings and effectiveness of the schools, as perceived by each interviewee. Analysis of collected data led to an exploration of three themes that emerged as crucial to the realization of each school's aims: curriculum, community and commitment. The study highlighted the responsibility felt in the boarding sector to enhance potential not only in the cognitive, but also in the affective and psychomotor areas of each individual pupil's development. Many researchers have voiced the need to exploit pupils' all-round skills and aptitudes and this study suggests that further research in boarding schools might well prove to be both fruitful and relevant to the day sector.

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<p> This project, Brothers for Life, is a curriculum of formation designed for seniors at an all-male Lasallian high school so they can join faculty in their efforts to facilitate retreats, prayer, and service activities for younger students. This project takes root in the writings of St. John Baptist de La Salle (the founder of Lasallian schools) which state that students in Christian schools should receive an education that moves the students toward full and abundant lives, not just an accumulation of numbers and facts. To give this project proper shape and direction, the unit design is organized through the Understanding by Design framework created by Wiggins and McTighe (2005, 2011). Through an organized structure that maintains authenticity to the Founder, this project opens the door to a fuller and more abundant life for the students enrolled in the course and by extension, the students and faculty to whom they minister.</p>

<p> Existing research on peer-to-peer mentoring has focused mainly on cross-age peer mentoring with several years&rsquo; difference between mentor and mentees (Karcher, 2005, 2007; Lawon, 2014; Willis, Bland, Manka, &amp; Craft, 2012) and the impact of peer mentoring on the mentee. I aimed to examine the relationship of participating in a high school based peer-to-peer mentoring program and the impact on the high school upperclassmen mentors in this study. School is a social organization where peers can develop school connectedness and expand their prosocial skills and through their social networks increase social capital. The impact of peer mentoring programs on high school peer mentors is an area that has not been sufficiently investigated. The current exploratory case study used data from surveys, interviews, and field notes to understand the experiences of mentors and the impact of peer mentoring in a high school mentoring program on these mentors in terms of their school connectedness, social capital, and prosocial skill development. Researchers have identified increases in mentees who are involved in peer mentoring programs (Karcher, 2005, 2007). Further research is needed to investigate the impact of these social connections on high school peer mentors. In this study, data was collected from the Hemingway Survey, mentor interviews, and field notes. Findings of this study support the conclusion that the peer mentors&rsquo; prosocial skills of school involvement, school connection, and social capital increased as a result of participating in a peer-to-peer mentoring program. Additionally, mentors did not report identifiable differences between matches that were same gender or different genders. Results from this study demonstrate the impact of increases in the development of prosocial skills and social capital in peer mentors.</p>