Given the demands of the era of accountability and standardization, the purpose of this study was to explore how educational leaders construct their identity and agency. The study utilized overlapping post-structural and critical theoretical frameworks on identity and agency to analyze how high school principals interpret and enact comprehensive school reform rhetoric and their state’s educational leadership standards. In addition to several cycles of coding, a critical discourse analysis was performed with the input of the participants’ high schools in order to further analyze the form and function of discourses, socially situated meanings, and ideologies that constitute being an educational leader and doing the work of an educational leader. The findings from the study revealed that the high school principals discursively construct their professional identity and agency by engaging in discourses and social practices related to managing the personnel, numerical data, and external expectations of the organization. As a result, the participants use the comprehensive school reform rhetoric as a way to legitimize and rationalize their duty as educators. The socially situated meaning attributed to the state’s educational leadership standards is not as clear, with the participants dismissing their value for a lack of context. In interpreting and enacting the school reform policy mandates set forth by the district and the state, principals conserve a corporatized model of school leadership that borrows much of its neoliberal language from the business sphere. The principals are positioned as mid-level managers, confirming Foster’s (2004) description of the contemporary school leader who is preoccupied with controlling the numeracy, information systems, and language of the organization. Future research should focus on performing critical discourse analysis studies with the upper levels of management, including, but not limited to, the central office and the office of the superintendent, as a way of exploring a more transcendent meaning of schooling and school leadership that focuses on human development. This study has the potential to provide leadership preparation programs and policymakers significant insight into the problems, paradoxes, and possibilities of school reform rhetoric and its impact on local school leaders. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This quantitative, non-experimental study was conducted to determine whether there is a link between the principal’s behavioral agility, the organization’s culture, and school performance as defined by the state’s Value Added Measure (VAM). Additionally, this study examined if there was a moderator influence of contextual factors to behavioral agility and school culture and school culture and school performance. Data collection was obtained through the use of two validated scales, the Strategic Leadership Questionnaire (SLQ) and the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI). Multiple regression was conducted to determine the extent each independent variable predicts school performance. Hayes’s (2012) PROCESS macro for SPSS was completed to determine if school culture mediated the relationship between behavioral agility and school performance and school culture and school performance. Significant correlations were found between and within the two instruments measured unidimensionally and multidimensionally. The OCAI findings included significant, high effect correlations with the four culture types, although market was not correlated with clan or adhocracy. All subscales of the SLQ had positive significant correlations within the instrument. School size was significantly negatively correlated with clan and adhocracy culture types. School performance was found to be significantly correlated with hierarchy culture type and school level. The contribution this study makes is both theoretical and practical. Theoretically, this study offers insights into school level and its moderation of culture and school performances as well as the influence culture types have on school performance. Practically, the study could identify a new culture type valuable to principals for improving school performance. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Thesis. 1972. M.C.P.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. MOTION PICTURE AVAILABLE IN ROTCH VISUAL COLLECTIONS ONLY. / M.C.P.

Since its establishment the Institute of Education Sciences has been creating opportunities and driving standards to generate research in education that is high quality rigorous, and relevant. This dissertation is an analysis of current practices in Goal III and Goal IV studies, in order to (1) better understand of the types of schools that agree to take part in these studies, and (2) an assess how representative these schools are in comparison to important policy relevant populations. This dissertation focuses on a subset of studies that were funded from 2005-2014 by the Department of Education, IES, under the NCER grants-funding arm. Studies included were those whose interventions were aimed at elementary students across core curriculum and ELL program areas. Study schools were compared to two main populations, the U.S population of elementary schools and Title I elementary schools, as well as these populations on a state level. The B-index, proposed by Tipton (2014) was the main value of comparison used to assess the compositional similarity, or generalizability, of study schools to these identified inference populations. The findings show that across all studies included in this analysis, participating schools were representative of the U.S. population of schools, B-index = 0.9. Comparisons were also made between this collection of schools and the respective populations at the state level. Results showed that these schools were not representative of any individual states (no B-index values were greater than 0.90). Across all included studies, schools that agreed to participate were more often located in urban areas, had higher rates of FRL students, had more minority students enrolled, and had more total students, in both district and school, than those schools in the population of U.S. schools. It is clear that the movement of education research is to be relevant to a larger audience. Through this study it is clear that, across studies, we are achieving some representation in IES funded studies. However, the finer comparisons, study samples to individual state and individual studies to these populations, show limited similarity between study schools and populations of interest to policy makers using these study findings to make decisions about their schools.

This dissertation consists of essays studying the impacts of education policies on outcomes measured at three distinct points in the high school to labor force continuum: course taking and academic performance in high school, choice of college and major, and labor market returns to completing college. The chapters are linked by their focus on understanding how these policies affect disadvantaged and under-represented populations, and by their exploitation of exogenous variation in the timing and assignment of treatments to identify causal effects. The first chapter asks whether lack of information about ability helps explain why high-performing students from disadvantaged backgrounds tend to under-invest in their education. In the presence of uncertainty, an information shock may lead individuals to revise their beliefs and decision-making. To explore this question, I examine an individualized signal of academic aptitude known as "AP Potential'' that is provided in Preliminary SAT (PSAT) reports. The signal provides information about students' aptitude for Advanced Placement (AP), a national program that offers college-level courses and exams in high school. In the United States, participation in AP has become a key step on the path to admission into selective four-year colleges. I begin by collecting high-frequency panel data on subjective beliefs from students in Oakland, California. Students stated their expected performance on the PSAT, beliefs about their abilities, and expectations about future academic outcomes before and after receiving their PSAT results reports. This survey data allows me to identify the information shock students experienced from the PSAT. I establish that although the PSAT is, on average, a negative information shock, the AP Potential signal itself contains valuable information: students with the same PSAT score and prior beliefs about own ability who receive the AP Potential signal experience a more positive information shock. The information shock in turn leads students to revise their beliefs about their ability, the number of AP classes they plan to take, and the likelihood that they will attend a four-year college, consistent with a Bayesian updating framework. I focus next on estimating whether the AP Potential signal has a causal effect on the probability of participating in AP and the number of AP classes in which students actually enroll by exploiting the deterministic relationship between PSAT scores and the AP Potential signal in a Regression Discontinuity (RD) design. Both graphical and more formal non-parametric and parametric methods robustly demonstrate that surveyed students on the margin of receiving the signal enroll in approximately one more AP course their junior year, increasing the probability of participation in the AP program by at least 26 percentage points. Given the demographics and performance levels of students at the margin, this effect amounted to increasing the number of high-ability, under-represented high school students taking college-level courses in Oakland. In addition, mismatch between course enrollments and student ability decreased. When I extend this analysis to students in other schools who did not take the survey, I find that the AP Potential signal had no effect on their course enrollment decisions. This finding is equally important, as it indicates that only students who received an explanation of their PSAT results, the AP Potential signal, and ways to use the information exhibited a behavioral response to the signal. The AP Potential message is not especially conspicuous on PSAT reports, so students who were surveyed likely received an intensified treatment. The results suggest that providing a credible, individualized signal of ability is a cost-effective means of increasing human capital investments among disadvantaged students. The second chapter examines how men and women respond to changes in the competitiveness of university admissions. Experimental research has shown that women respond to competition differently than men, which could help explain gender gaps in math performance and selection into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs. A growing body of work has found suggestive evidence that these relationships also exist in practical educational settings. However, exogenous variation in competition has been restricted to the experimental literature, leaving the differential causal effects of competitive admissions an open question. An affirmative action policy enacted in Venezuela in 2002 provides a unique opportunity to explore how men and women's academic performance and college application decisions respond to changes in competition. The policy led to exogenous shocks in the competitiveness of the university admissions process, effectively increasing competition for socioeconomically advantaged students and decreasing competition for disadvantaged students. Students who neither belonged to the advantaged nor disadvantaged groups defined by the policy were unaffected and thus served as a control group. I use a triple-difference approach on the universe of college applicants between 1994 and 2007 to estimate the impact of changes in the level of competition on high school GPA, math and verbal test scores, and the selectivity of college applications by gender. My results suggest that men and women respond differently to changes in the competitiveness of university admissions, consistent with experimental evidence. The results indicate that males, in both the advantaged and disadvantaged groups, did not respond to the policy change. Women, on the other hand, responded strongly, improving their performance in GPA and in the verbal test in response to both the increase in competition and the increased incentive to exert effort provided by affirmative action. One of the main findings, however, is that increased competition led to lower math test scores for women, while reduced competition led women to increase their performance in math. A student's goal should be to maximize the academic index used for admissions, which places equal weight on verbal and math scores. Under time constraints, if women believe they are more effective at improving their verbal scores, they should allocate more time to studying for the verbal test, perhaps even allocating too much time away from studying math, which would result in lower math scores. However, only women who experienced higher levels of competition had lower math scores. Women from the disadvantaged group who experienced less competition improved their math scores, as well as their GPA and verbal scores. The second main finding is that women in the disadvantaged group who experienced less competition applied to more selective programs. In particular, the competitiveness of their top-ranked choice, which should reflect their true preference given the assignment mechanism in place, saw the biggest increase, even net of the effect due to their improved performance. Given the persistence of a wage gender gap despite women's higher educational attainment, how competitive admissions influence sorting into specific universities and majors emerges as a key question. The third chapter, which is a joint work with Ruth Uwaifo appearing in the Economics of Education Review, studies how expanding access to higher education affects college graduates once they reach the labor market. We focus on a major university education reform in Venezuela known as Mission Sucre, which provided free, open-access tertiary education targeted to the poor and marginalized, and its potential impact on returns to university education on non-participants. We begin by finding that returns to education decreased in Venezuela over the period Mission Sucre was introduced, despite a previous upward trend and an economic boom. Although returns to all levels of education declined during this period, the return to university education fell by over 10 percentage points more than other levels. Motivated by these preliminary findings, we evaluate the possible role of Mission Sucre on the significant decline in returns to university education. For our main analysis, we compare the returns to university education and technical education in a difference-in-difference strategy. We focus on these particular levels of education because both are tertiary levels and are more likely to have similar general trends in returns. More importantly, Mission Sucre originally focused on only expanding university education. This allows us to classify those with university education as a treatment group and those with technical education as a potential control group. We find that Mission Sucre led to a 2.7 percentage point decrease in returns to university education of non-participants in the 23-28 age cohort between 2007 and 2008, the year the first cohort of Mission Sucre graduates entered the labor force. Further, states with higher shares of Mission Sucre students had a larger decline in the returns to university education. Specifically, a 1 percent increase in the share of Mission Sucre students led to a 0.4 percentage point decline in the returns to university education. Although we provide ample evidence of the impact of Mission Sucre, we cannot state whether the noted effect of the program is driven solely by an excess supply of skilled labor, or a combination of the excess supply and other negative externalities of the program on nonparticipants, such as a change in the perceived overall quality of public higher education. Nevertheless, our results present a cautionary tale of the short-term effects of a rapid and large expansion in access to university education.

The objective of Experiment I was to determine whether establishing conditioned reinforcement for engaging in math for pre-kindergarten students was possible using the three conditioning procedures outlined in previous research for conditioning book stimuli. The purpose of Experiment II was to determine whether this change in preference for engaging in math had an effect on 6 pre-kindergarten participants’ rate of learning math. In Experiment I a counterbalanced pre- and post-intervention ABAB/BABA functional analysis and a delayed multiple probe across dyads design, was used to measure the indirect and direct reinforcement value of math for each participant. Indirect measures referred to a functional analysis where the participants’ rate of responding to a performance task during a 1-min session when Play-Doh® was delivered as a reinforcer was compared to their rate of responding when math was delivered as a reinforcement operation. Direct measures referred to the number of 5-s intervals (out of 60) each participant engaged in math when given math worksheets and Play-Doh®. The individualized reinforcement intervention consisted of a sequence of conditioning procedures until a defined successful outcome resulted. First learn units were delivered, then stimulus-stimulus pairing, and then observational conditioning-by-denial. Learn unit instruction resulted in the establishment of conditioned reinforcement for the first dyad, while the stimulus-stimulus pairing procedure was necessary for the remaining dyad. The purpose of Experiment II was to test if establishing conditioned reinforcement for math would change rate of learning. The dependent variable was each participant’s rate of learning as measured by the number of learn units required to meet mastery criterion for 4 units of the Multiple Exemplar Functional Math (MEF-Math) curriculum. The dependent variable, rate of learning, was tested using a multiple probe design. The independent variable was the establishment of conditioned reinforcement for math using individualized reinforcement procedures as detailed in Experiment I. The intervention also consisted of a multiple probe design on testing the effect of the individualized reinforcement procedures on establishing conditioned reinforcement. Three participants required learn units, 2 participants required the stimulus-stimulus pairing procedure, and 1 participant required observational conditioning-by-denial to establish conditioned reinforcement for math. Results showed an educationally significant acceleration of learning following the establishment of conditioned reinforcement for math across all 6 participants. Results are discussed in terms of the significance of early math instruction.

Mathematical reasoning can be considered to be the pursuit of a line of enquiry to produce assertions and develop an argument to reach and justify conclusions. This involves processes such as conjecturing, generalising and forming arguments. The pursuit of a line of mathematical reasoning is not a routine process and perseverance is required to overcome difficulties. There is a lack of research on pedagogy to foster children’s perseverance in mathematical reasoning, hence this study sought to answer the research question: how can primary teachers improve children’s perseverance in mathematical reasoning? The study took place in two year 6 classes in different English schools. The study group comprised eight children, purposively selected for their limited capacity to persevere in mathematical reasoning. An action research approach was used to develop and evaluate two interventions. Data relating to the children’s cognitive and affective responses and the focus of their attention, a conative component, were collected by observation and interview. Data analysis synthesised the children’s reasoning processes with their affective responses and their conative focus. The use of this tripartite psychological classification to analyse children’s mathematical reasoning offered a new approach to analysing the interplay between cognition and affect in mathematics learning and revealed the role that engagement and focus play in both restricting and enabling children’s perseverance in mathematical reasoning. The interventions comprised providing children with representations that could be used in a provisional way and embedding a focus on generalising and convincing in mathematics lessons. These enabled children to improve their perseverance in mathematical reasoning; they were able to strive to pursue a line of enquiry and progress from making trials and spotting patterns to generalising and forming convincing arguments. This study found that children were not necessarily aware of when they encountered a difficulty. This lack of cognisance impacted on their capacity to apply the self-regulatory actions needed to monitor and adapt their use of reasoning processes. One outcome of this was that they tended towards repetitious actions, in particular, creating multiple trials even when they had spotted and formed conjectures about patterns. Their perseverance in mathematical reasoning was further compromised by their enjoyment of repetitious actions. When the children engaged in activities involving reasoning, their common affective response was pleasure, even in instances when they demonstrated limited perseverance. However, when they were able to persevere in reasoning so that they generalised and formed convincing arguments, they expressed pride and satisfaction. They attributed these emotions to their improved mathematical understanding. The bi-directional interplay between children’s cognition and affect in mathematics is discussed in literature; however, the impact of children’s focus on their cognitive understanding and affective experience augments existing literature.

Thesis (M. Dev.) -- University of Limpopo, 2003 / Refer to document

There is an increased emphasis on inquiry in national and Oregon state high school science standards. As hypothesis testing is a key component of these new standards, instructors need effective strategies to improve students' hypothesis testing skills. Recent research suggests that classroom exercises may prove useful. A general purpose classroom activity called the thought experiment is proposed. The effectiveness of 7 hours of instruction using this exercise was measured in an introductory biology course, using a quasi-experimental contrast group design. An instrument for measuring hypothesis testing skill is also proposed. Treatment (n=18) and control (n=10) sections drawn from preexisting high school classes were pre- and post-assessed using the proposed Multiple Choice Assessment of Deductive Reasoning. Both groups were also post-assessed by individually completing a written, short-answer format hypothesis testing exercise. Treatment section mean posttest scores on contextualized, multiple choice problem sets were significantly higher than those of the control section. Mean posttest scores did not significantly differ between sections on abstract deductive logic problems or the short answer format hypothesis testing exercise.

Representations (such as pictures, diagrams, word descriptions, equations, etc.) are critical tools for learning, problem solving, and communicating in science, particularly in physics where multiple representations often serve as intermediate steps, a means to evaluate a solution, and highlight different aspects a physical phenomenon. This dissertation explores the representation choices made by students in the University Modeling Instruction (MI) courses on problems from across introductory physics content. Modeling Instruction is a two-semester introductory, calculus-based physics sequence that was designed to guide students through the process of building, testing, applying, and refining models. As a part of this modeling cycle, students have explicit instruction and practice in building, evaluating, and coordinating representations in introductory physics. Since I am particularly interested in representations across all of introductory physics, this work was situated in the second semester of MI. To address students' representation choices, the Problem Solving and Representation Use Survey (PSRUS) was developed as modified card sort survey, which asked students to simply list the representations that they would use on 25 physics questions from across introductory physics. Using non-parametric statistical tests (Mann-Whitney-Wilcox, Wilcoxon-Ranked Sign, and Cliff's Delta), I compare the number and variety of representations that students choose. Initially, students who took the first semester of MI use significantly more representations in their problem solving when compared to those who did not; however, there are significant gains in the number of representations that these students choose over the semester across the introductory physics content. After significant changes to the second semester MI curriculum, the difference between these two groups disappears, with both groups increasing their representation choices when compared to the previous semester. Using network analysis to compare students' concurrent representation choices, I also show that students use a consistent set of representations on mechanics problems; whereas, they choose a wider variety on electricity and magnetism (EM) problems. In both mechanics and EM, pictures serve as an important connecting representation between the others. I use these results to make suggestions for instructors, curriculum developers, and physics education researchers.