There is a pattern of students' mathematics achievement scores dropping in the first year of middle school, typically sixth grade in Florida (fldoe.org, 2014). Sixth grade is of particular interest as this is typically a transition year from elementary to middle school. This quantitative study seeks to examine the mathematical teacher characteristics that are present and significant for Teacher Value-Added measures, as a proxy for sixth grade mathematical learning gains. The teacher characteristics that will be evaluated include certification area, degree held, and years of experience. Additionally, the effects of school demographics, specifically socioeconomic status (SES), as measured by the percentage of Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which determines a districts eligibility for the national free lunch program, on sixth grade student achievement in mathematics will be examined and accounted for when evaluating teacher characteristics. Teachers' Value-Added scores were collected from the Florida Department of Education. The teachers included were those that taught mathematics in a sixth-grade classroom that was NOT in a K-6 or K-8 setting, but a 6-8 or 6-12 setting. Each participating teachers' school CEP status was also gathered from the Florida Department of Education. These results will be compared for all teachers and the following results are anticipated: (1) Schools with lower socioeconomic status (as measured by CEP), higher percentage of CEP (over 40%), will have overall lower teacher Value-Added Scores (VAM) on the Math FSA (Florida Standards Assessment) for the end of sixth grade administration, regardless of teacher characteristics. (2) After accounting for CEP, teachers with higher levels of degrees held (BS vs MS, EdS, or PhD), will have higher teacher VAM scores on the Math FSA for the end of sixth grade administration. (3) After accounting for CEP, teachers with more years of experience will have higher VAM scores on the Math FSA for the end of sixth grade administration. (4) After accounting for CEP, teachers with certification in mathematics will have higher VAM scores on the Math FSA for the end of sixth grade administration. With these results, policy makers, education preparation programs, and school districts can make more informed decisions about the educational preparation that mathematics teachers need to possess in order to teach students during their first year of middle school. / A Dissertation submitted to the School of Teacher Education in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester 2018. / October 29, 2018. / Florida, sixth-grade mathematics, student achievement, teacher certification, teacher degrees, teacher experience / Includes bibliographical references. / Elizabeth Jakubowski, Professor Directing Dissertation; Eric Chicken, University Representative; Diana Rice, Committee Member; Angela Davis, Committee Member.

<p> The researcher completed a quantitative comparative content analysis of early childhood developmental programs in high-poverty and low-poverty counties across the state of Missouri. The researcher discussed the importance of early childhood programs in the longevity of academic, professional success and long-term health benefits. Although lawmakers, educators, parents and policy makers emphasized the immense importance of early childhood education, the state of Missouri had not completed an evaluation of early childhood developmental programs for over 15 years. The last study (Fuger et al., 2003), completed in 2003, only evaluated early childhood programs described as part of the state&rsquo;s Missouri Preschool Project (MPP). The research results stated the state of Missouri had not completed a study evaluating all early childhood programs in the state. </p><p> The researcher examined secondary data, specifically licensing reports from online, public records through the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS) website, as well as programing costs, curriculum, and accreditation through brief interviews of administrators employed by various child care centers and public school early childhood preschool programs. The purpose of the study was to discover if inequity occurred in facilities located in high-poverty and low-poverty counties. The researcher explored whether high-poverty facilities had more licensing violations than those facilities in low-poverty areas and examined the type of violations and assessed differences in the number of violation types. After researching early childhood curriculum endorsed by the state of Missouri, the researcher examined the type of curriculums used by each facility to determine the quality of the curriculum. The researcher surveyed the cost differences of facilities and the affordability of programs, based on average income. The researcher also evaluated the overall quality of programs, based on the secondary data. </p><p> In summary, the researcher conducted the study to examine differences between the quality of early learning and developmental programs in high and low poverty counties around the state of Missouri. The researcher determined the quality of a program based on the percentage of licensing violations, type of violations, curricula used, if a center held extra accreditation, and the cost per week. The results of the study were mixed.</p><p>

This thesis explores the political and ethical entanglements of Early Years Teachers with human and non-human worlds. Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) policy, research and professional practice frame expected ways of working with children. This highly-feminised workforce has historically been presented as deficient. I argue this notion sees them as dehumanised subjects (Snaza, 2015), in need of constant upskilling. Posthumanist theorising was employed to reveal Early Years Teachers in relations with other humans (children, teachers) and non-humans (classroom, outdoor environments, objects, policy) forming more-than-human subjectivities. A post-qualitative methodology was developed to attend to more-than-human entanglements, with material-ethno-carto-graphy proposed as a methodological undertaking pertinent to this inquiry. The reconfigured methods-as-affinity-groups built on ethnography to explore connections within/between four Early Years Teacher case studies. The resultant data generated was mapped and read both literally and diffractively where glow data (MacLure, 2010, 2013) was selected for diffractive analysis. I theorised the positions of becoming-professional and being-teacher to reveal how subjectivities take either a more material connected or a more normative subject position and employ the metaphor of the earthworm to debate these shifting forms. Data revealed becoming-professional and being-teacher saw wider relational entanglements within indoor and outdoor spaces drove new modes of professionalism. Furthermore, the influence of an online tool, Tapestry, on subjectivities was explored. Additionally, vital agentic materiality (Bennett, 2010) and cyborg figurations (Haraway, 1991) were encountered in ECEC classrooms. Finally, the influence of nature has been explored where Indigenous ontologies trouble traditional vistas. Generative ways to view the production of Early Years Teacher subjectivities show that human and non-human worlds are always in flux. The more-than-human moments reveal the interplay between becoming-professional and being-teacher as a re-humanising enactment with subjectivities distributed across human and material bodies. These relations are a counter movement to the reified professional in policy, research and professional practice.

<p> The purpose of this case study was to explore the successes and challenges faced by a private, faith-based preschool in Los Angeles County in providing quality care and education to homeless children and their families. The study included interviews with parents, teachers, and administrator/staff to gather their perspectives as well as examined program structure through field observations and analysis of relevant documents. The National Association for the Education of Young Children&rsquo;s quality standards were used to examine the quality of the program. Findings showed that the relationships among all stakeholders involved in the preschool program were crucial to the success of this preschool. The study&rsquo;s findings highlighted some challenges in the following areas: support for teachers, sustained teacher training and development, strong administrative program structure, and funding. The findings bear important implications, both at the program and policy-level, for early childhood education programs serving children in exceptional circumstances, and specifically homeless children and their families.</p><p>

In a within-subjects alternating treatments design, I tested for the presence of audience control in four participants' frequency of stereotypy in a self-contained special education setting versus a general education setting. Three students with autism, and one student diagnosed with an emotional disability were participants in the study. All students had the capability of observational learning and the cusp social listener reinforcement in their repertoires of verbal behavior. Probes were conducted at random across participants and settings, and showed high frequencies of stereotypy in the self-contained setting and low to no instances of stereotypy in the general education setting. As an extended test of audience control, Experiment 2 identified developmentally delayed nursery school students in an integrated setting and tested the effects of the social listener reinforcement protocol (Reilly-Lawson & Walsh, 2007) on the audience control of social vocal operants. All participants had speaker behavior in repertoire but few conversational units, sequelics, and mands were emitted with typically developing peers in the classroom. Participants also emitted low levels of correct choral responding during group instruction. Following the social listener reinforcement protocol all participants increased social vocal operants with classroom peers and became more integrated in the classroom environment. Correct choral responses increased, as well as sharing and mands, with each other and with typically developing classroom peers.

The number of Latino children in the United States is steadily increasing. Many of these children are underperforming academically, with noticeable gaps in math and literacy between Latino and White children apparent by kindergarten. In coming years, researchers and policymakers will be confronted with the challenge of developing interventions, such as high quality child care, to better prepare Latino children for their entry into kindergarten. Findings from several studies already suggest that high quality center-based child care arrangements may have positive impacts on Latino children's academic outcomes. Such research is informative and has important policy implications; however, several gaps still remain in the literature. First, while center-based care appears to have larger effects on school readiness than parental care for Latino children, we know less about how different center-based arrangements compare to each other (e.g. Head Start vs. pre-kindergarten) or how different home-based arrangements compare to each other (e.g. parental vs. other home-based care). Second, most studies have estimated the effects of care arrangements for 3- and 4-year old children. We know relatively little about the effects of care arrangements for Latino children younger than that. Finally, many studies come from a single site or city, limiting the variability of data and generalizability of findings. This dissertation aims to address these gaps in the literature by drawing on a nationally representative sample of Latino American children from the birth cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-B). With these data, this dissertation first examines the association between care arrangements the year before kindergarten (YBK; Head Start, pre-kindergarten, other center, parental, home) and outcomes at kindergarten entry (math, literacy, and approaches to learning) for Latino American children. I then extended this inquiry to estimate impacts of care arrangements at 2 years (center, parental, home) and outcomes at kindergarten entry for Latino children. Finally, for Latino children from Spanish speaking homes, I examine whether the primary language of instruction (Spanish or English) is associated with outcomes at kindergarten entry. Results from Propensity Score Models (PSM) reveal few significant differences between care arrangements for Latino children. Among those significant differences that did emerge when care arrangement was measured the YBK, most were for English literacy outcomes. Latino children in center-based care arrangements (Head Start, pre-kindergarten, and other-center) scored significantly higher than those in home based care. Latino children in Head Start also scored higher than those in parental care. No significant differences emerged between the three center arrangements. Even fewer contrasts were significant when math was the outcome (center > home; Head Start > center), and no contrasts were significant when approaches to learning was the outcome. Follow-up analyses indicated that the findings were not very robust. Moreover, those significant differences that did emerge could be explained by differences in care arrangement quality. Second, results from PSM models at the 2-year wave did not reveal any significant contrasts for Latino children. Children scored similarly on math, literacy, and approaches to learning in kindergarten regardless of the care arrangement they attended at 2-years. Finally, results from PSM models showed that the language of instruction plays an important role in predicting kindergarten readiness outcomes. Latino children whose teachers spoke primarily Spanish scored significantly lower on math and literacy compared to those whose teachers spoke primarily English. These results were not explained by several characteristics of classroom quality (e.g. teacher qualifications, classroom size, time spent on reading and math activities).

This dissertation addresses the knowledge gap about the dosage feature of preschool programs and its relationship to kindergarten readiness by asking: Does the degree of center-based preschool attendance—more than 20 hours/week (full-day), more than zero and less than 20 hours/week (part-day), or zero hours/week (no attendance)—of 4-year old children in the United States have a discernible effect in mathematics, reading, and socio-emotional tests administered at the beginning of kindergarten? I used the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Birth Cohort (ECLS-B) to answer my research question. This high quality probability sample collected a wide range of data on young children and their families rather than assigning them to conditions. In the absence of experimental data, the quasi-experimental design that best fits the research question is a non-equivalent control group. In this design, two treated and an untreated group are compared on pre and posttest data on the same units. To minimize selection bias I first identified critical covariates that matter for selection into treatment and can be reliably measured. Then, I used propensity score analysis to match the treatment and control groups’ pretest scores and observable characteristics before directly comparing their outcomes. Results from this dissertation make evident that preschool level of attendance matters for kindergarten readiness compared no preschool. First, children who attended full-day preschool outperform their peers who did not attend in reading and math test scores at the beginning of kindergarten. Second, children who attended part-day preschool outperform their peers who did not attend in reading, math, and eagerness to learn tests scores at the beginning of kindergarten. However, results show that full-day preschool compared to part-day preschool had no statistically significant effect on cognitive skills, and had negative socio-emotional effects at the start of kindergarten. Children who attended full-day preschool performed the same in reading and math test scores- yet showed less eagerness to learn- compared to their peers who attended part-day preschool. These findings are aligned with existing literature stating that preschool has a positive effect on cognitive outcomes, particularly for low-income groups, and a negative or non-significant effect on socio-motional skills. They build upon and advance this knowledge base by empirically demonstrating the strong academic foundation that all young children develop when exposed to even a small number of hours of preschool per week. These results support the case for investments in our education system’s response that transcend the K-12 oriented approach. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2019. / April 3, 2019. / early childhood, ECLS-B, full-day, part-day, preschool, propensity score matching / Includes bibliographical references. / Stephanie S. Zuilkowski, Professor Co-Directing Dissertation; Toby Park, Professor Co-Directing Dissertation; Beth M. Phillips, University Representative; Carolyn Herrington, Committee Member.

The eight published articles in this portfolio collectively constitute a reconceptualising of literacy curriculum and pedagogy in early childhood education, with an emphasis on the use of drama pedagogy. The portfolio includes a synthesis of the themes that unify the articles and a review of the qualitative research methods that inform the articles, namely theoretical/conceptual and case study research. In relation to literacy curriculum, the portfolio explicates an inclusive and extended definition of literacy which reflects the wide range of social and cultural practices that engage young students in their everyday lives. From a sociocultural perspective, the articles investigate current literacy practices involving spoken, written and visual modes of representation and highlight the prevalence of multimodal texts within the concept of multiliteracies. Reconceptualising literacy pedagogy is another major theme of the articles in the portfolio. The majority of articles explore the use of drama pedagogy for the teaching and learning of literacies in early childhood education. A second pedagogical strategy researched in the articles is the explicit teaching of knowledge about language to young school students. The portfolio is underpinned by the premise that the proposed reforms of literacy curriculum and pedagogy contribute to social justice in education by facilitating success in literacy for more young students / Doctor of Education

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 178-185).

Thesis (Ed.D.)--University of Delaware, 2006. / Principal faculty advisor: Sharon Walpole, School of Education. Includes bibliographical references.