As school accountability intensifies, school districts strive not only to prepare their students to meet the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandates, but also to prepare students for college and careers after high school. Understanding the necessary reading rigor to ensure academic success is key for educators. Although Texas opted not to adopt the Common Core Curriculum Standards and the accompanying Stretch Lexile measures for reading that require higher reading levels at each grade, Texas educators must still prepare students for academic success. This study determined how the use of more rigorous Lexile standards found in other states and associated with the Common Core Curriculum Standards would affect passing scores on Texas reading assessments in grades 6-8. The population for this study included three middle schools during the 2010 school year within one large suburban school district. State reading assessment data collected from these three schools included students' scores from grades 6, 7, and 8. A Chi-square Test for Independence determined that there was statistical significance for some groups of students in the accountability system: all students, Hispanic students, and economically disadvantaged students. Each of these groups was found to pass at a significantly lower rate when using the Stretch Lexile standard. Results were also examined in terms of political, economical, educational, and social policy implications. The policy implications discussed in this study are far-reaching for Texas educators and students, especially economically disadvantaged and Hispanic students. The higher standards can potentially trigger the school improvement process for campuses and districts failing to make NCLB's required adequate yearly progress. Additional expenses related to supplemental educational services, school choice, and professional development drain district Title I budgets due to mandatory set-aside amounts, disallowing funds for other student-centered programs. Implications for practitioners include clearly establishing intervention systems, adhering to a multi-tiered intervention system, and providing a screening tool for teachers so that progress monitoring can be accomplished for students as they move toward more rigorous reading expectations that will result in college and career preparedness.

Despite 21st Century technology, our nation’s high schools deliver a print-centric curriculum driven by high-stakes tests. A majority of states have adopted Common Core State Standards that incorporate producing and consuming multiple media texts. Some teachers have begun to include multimodal activities but few are exploiting the affordances of multimodal composition specifically for the benefit of English learners. Public high school teachers hold deficit views of English learners and fail to offer them challenging, creative tasks. Framed by the complementary sociocultural theories of ecological linguistics (van Lier, 2004), multimodality (Kress, 2010), and identity (Gee, 2001; Norton, 2000), this qualitative case study examined the process and product of high school English learners composing multimodally with digital video. Four questions guided the study: 1) What can we learn from adolescent English learners engaged in composing with video? 2) What identities do adolescent ELs explore while engaging in multimodal communication? 3) What processes do ELs engage in as they compose multimodally? 4) How do their multimodal compositions contribute to our understanding of ELs? Participants were enrolled in an elective English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) class at a public high school during Spring semester of 2012. Data included student generated lesson artifacts, audio/video recordings, researcher journal, and participants' video compositions. Data were analyzed through an ongoing, recursive cycle to determine themes, categories, and trends. Visual and video data were examined through visual discourse analysis (Albers, 2007b; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006) and multimodal interaction analysis (Norris, 2004). Addressing the process and product of learning to read and compose visual and video texts, this dissertation examines 3 pairs of student participants and their video compositions. It reveals English learners working collaboratively and creatively, exploring imagined identities, showing investment in learning, engaging in critical analysis, and effectively communicating through multiple modes. Multimodal analysis of three student videos revealed four patterns of multimodal design; less is less, layered modes, less is more, and overlapping modes. The study redefines English learners as multilingual, multimodal communicators. It illustrates the complexity and reveals the benefit of incorporating multimodal activities and provides a model for fostering multilingual, multimodal communicators.

abstract: The State of Arizona mandates that students with superior intellect or abilities, or identified gifted students, receive appropriate gifted education and services in order to achieve at levels commensurate with their intellect and abilities. Additionally, the State of Arizona adopted the Arizona College and Career Ready Standards (AZCCRS) initiative. This investigation explores if, according to the perceptions of gifted educators, the AZCCRS support a gifted mathematic curriculum and pedagogy at the elementary level which is commensurate with academic abilities, potential, and intellect of these mathematically gifted students, what the relationships are between exemplary gifted curriculum and pedagogy and the AZCCRS, and exactly how the gifted education specialists charged with meeting the academic and intellectual needs and potential of their gifted students interpret, negotiate, and implement the AZCCRS. This study utilized a qualitative approach and a variety of instruments to gather data, including: profile questionnaires, semi-structured pre-interviews, reflective journals, three group discussion sessions, and semi-structured post interviews. The pre- and post interviews as well as the group discussion sessions were audiotape recorded and transcribed. A three stage coding process was utilized on the questionnaires, interviews, discussion sessions, and journal entries. The results and findings demonstrated that AZCCRS clearly support exemplary gifted mathematic curriculum and practices at the elementary level, that there are at least nine distinct relationships between the AZCCRS and gifted pedagogy, and that the gifted education specialists interpret, negotiate, and implement the AZCCRS uniquely in at least four distinct ways, in their mathematically gifted pullout classes. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Curriculum and Instruction 2014

abstract: This study is a narrative inquiry into teachers' and instructional coaches' experiences of new curriculum policy implementation at the classroom and district levels. This study took place during the initial year of implementation of the third grade Common Core State Standards in Mathematics (CCSSM). Interviews were conducted with individuals directly involved in policy implementation at the classroom level, including several teachers and the school's instructional coach. Observations of the teachers' instruction and professional practice were also conducted. As an embedded researcher, I used this data to create a series of fictionalized narratives of the initial policy implementation experience. My analysis of the narratives suggests that accountability structures shaped individual's sense-making of the original policy. This sense-making process consequently influenced individuals' actions during implementation by directing them towards certain policy actions and ultimately altered how the policy unfolded in this school and district. In particular, accountability structures directed participants' attention to the technical instructional `forms' of the reform, such as the presence of written responses on assessments and how standards were distributed between grade levels, rather than the overall principled shifts in practice intended by the policy's creators. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Educational Administration and Supervision 2015

abstract: In this mixed-methods study, I examined the relationship between professional development based on the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and teacher knowledge, classroom practice, and student learning. Participants were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. The 50-hour professional development treatment was administered to the treatment group during one semester, and then a follow-up replication treatment was administered to the control group during the subsequent semester. Results revealed significant differences in teacher knowledge as a result of the treatment using two instruments. The Learning Mathematics for Teaching scales were used to detect changes in mathematical knowledge for teaching, and an online sorting task was used to detect changes in teachers' knowledge of their standards. Results also indicated differences in classroom practice between pairs of matched teachers selected to participate in classroom observations and interviews. No statistical difference was detected between the groups' student assessment scores using the district's benchmark assessment system. This efficacy study contributes to the literature in two ways. First, it provides an evidence base for a professional development model designed to promote effective implementation of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics. Second, it addresses ways to impact and measure teachers' knowledge of curriculum in addition to their mathematical content knowledge. The treatment was designed to focus on knowledge of curriculum, but it also successfully impacted teachers' specialized content knowledge, knowledge of content and students, and knowledge of content and teaching. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Curriculum and Instruction 2013

The most recent phase of curriculum reform in the era of accountability is the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) which have essentially reshaped the landscape of public education. Its objective of preparing K-12 students for college and career upon high school graduation have prioritized English language arts, mathematics, and science over social studies, which is not part of widespread high-stakes testing for elementary students. This qualitative case study investigated eleven intermediate elementary teachers’ perceptions of alignment between CCSS and the elementary social studies curriculum. Data gathering analysis included two semi-structured interviews and an archival analysis of the mandated curriculum. The data revealed that perceptions of alignment vary among teachers and were influenced by the perceived effects of inadequate instructional time and resources, lack of content knowledge, and insufficient district levels of professional support. Teachers perceived some similarities between the methods of thinking skills, such as historical thinking and higher-order thinking, and the English/Language Arts standards of the Common Core and their district social studies curriculum. Despite perceived inadequate instructional time and resources, teachers believed that elementary social studies must be an instructional priority and found ways to include social studies through interdisciplinary approaches. Recommendations include district-level professional development focused on an integration between CCSS and social studies modeled in classroom practices. These approaches may improve use of instructional time and resources and reduce the marginalization of elementary social studies.

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