Portfolios have been used in the field of education as a form of assessment since the 1980s. As time has progressed, portfolios have transitioned from paper to electronic form. Research on electronic portfolios has focused on implementation issues and their impact on student learning. There has been limited effort, however, on their long-term impact. The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine the perceived impact of electronic portfolios on the beginning careers of classroom teachers. More specifically, this study sought to determine if use of electronic portfolios during pre-service education impacted the attitudes and performance of new teachers. The study used a survey design. A sample of graduates of teacher education programs in Louisiana was selected and asked to complete a survey that measured perceived technology knowledge, content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge. Survey respondents (n=189) were sorted into groups based on whether or not they developed an electronic portfolio as part of their teacher preparation program. These groups were compared with respect of each of these three areas. The results indicated that those who had completed an electronic portfolio in their teacher education program had higher perceived levels of competence with regard to technology knowledge and content knowledge in mathematics. The following information can be used by universities to determine if electronic portfolios are a viable assessment tool for use by their teacher candidates.

The purpose of this qualitative study is to explore the attitudes of current female doctoral candidates who express an interest in pursuing a career in the professoriate, as well as express a desire to have children. The participants will explain how they conceptualize the intersection of academia and motherhood, by detailing how they negotiate and navigate their current status in as a graduate student and their future career and family goals. A limited amount of literature has been published that specifically explores the intersection of academia and motherhood as conceptualized specifically by female graduate students. Therefore, the intent of the literature review in this project was to explore the relevant topics that would best provide the background on the impetus of the study. The review of literature concludes by introducing Feminist Critical Policy Analysis (FCPA) as the theoretical framework for this study followed by an explanation of the tenets of FPCA and the impetus for employing it as an analysis tool in this study. The six participants in the project expressed interest in pursuing a career in the professoriate as well as a desire to start a family, among other specific criterion detailed in chapter three. The participants represented three academic clusters: (1) science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), (2) humanities and social sciences (H&SS), and (3) professional and applied sciences (Professions). Data was collected by means of one-on-one individual unstructured interviews. The participants provided rich detail about how they navigate the notion of starting a family while beginning a tenure-track position. They also detailed their feelings on the policies and structures of the academy as it relates to supporting dual-career faculty. This study has a three-stage data reduction plan described by Madison (2005) for analyzing the data: identifying codes using a coding strategy, reducing codes into themes, and creating a point of view by incorporating the theoretical perspective. Concluding the project are suggestions for applying this research to the greater higher education community.

Public universities who participate in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I Football Bowl Subdivision produce and air university TV spots during televised college football games. The purpose of this research was to analyze TV spots of public universities who participate in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I Football Bowl Subdivision and determine if university TV spots were successful based on the official theme from the university and how the viewing audience perceived the university TV spot. This research used a qualitative paradigm that involved two phases: Phase I was a content analysis followed by Phase II, which was one-on-one interviews. ESPNs College GameDay was used to collect a group of university TV spots. A purposeful sample was then used to select nine university TV spots that would be used in the research. The university TV spots were captured during the televised college football games. Nine participants were purposefully selected to participate in one-on-one interviews. Finally, each university represented in the sample was contacted to receive the official theme assigned by the university official. In this research, the researcher found that some university TV spots successfully communicated their official theme assigned by their university officials and some did not communicate their university TV spot successfully. This research has analyzed the success of university TV spots by determining the compatibility of the university official theme with the viewers perceived themes. With such a large viewing audience for approximately 30 seconds of airtime and university funding associated with producing or outsourcing university TV spots, the results of this research warrants the significance of understanding university TV spots as well as continued research on university TV spots.

Education reform policies have focused on high-stakes assessments primarily utilizing standardized tests for accountability purposes. As testing practices have evolved due to a variety of factors throughout the past century or so, they have become fully integrated into public schooling in the United States. These tests are having a marked impact on teachers and education, as teachers feel pressure to produce exceptional student results and modify their instructional practices, often teaching to the test and narrowing the curriculum in order to focus on the requirements of the mandates. This study examines a survey of public school teachers to ascertain their experiences and perspectives regarding the impact of these testing policies. The results show that teachers are feeling an immense amount of pressure, their instructional planning and classroom practices are impacted by the tests, and they do not find the tests particularly helpful. Differences between teachers gender, education, experience, subject focus, and work with gifted and talented students are also examined. As testing is likely to be a force in public education in America for the foreseeable future, the results of this study can be used to ascertain teacher concerns and develop supports for teachers to help address those concerns.

This retrospective study explores how each disaster site needs to be considered as its own individual portrait for analysis and how inclusion of cultural elements contributes to the recovery of those affected by the disaster and helps in reinstating their cultural identity. This study was conducted after hurricane Katrinas landfall, at the largest FEMA trailer park, Renaissance Village, from its inception in October 2005 until its closure June 2008. It portrays how programs may ensure their sustainability if cultural elements are included in the program design, development, and delivery of services. The nuanced notions of culture are predominantly recognized in many realms such as curriculum theory, educational leadership, and especially in the social justice literature. Current post-disaster educational responses portray a predominant lack of, and dismissal of cultural values in educational responses to disasters. This is mainly due to time and funding constraints. This study presents a blue print for future post-disaster education programming, which promotes using local culture as the main driving force. This study contributes to the Emergency education field as well as culturally relevant pedagogy literature.

This dissertation draws on narrative, post-colonial, and curriculum theories to describe two book clubs in which twelve pre-service English teachers examined post-colonial young adult literature and explored the possibilities and challenges of using these texts in English Language Arts classrooms. The texts selected for the study focus on young protagonists of color living outside the cultural context of the U.S. because these narratives tend to be underrepresented in the international young adult literature market (Cart, 2010; Koss & Teale, 2009). The purpose of this dissertation was to explore the possibilities and challenges of using post-colonial young adult literature in education settings through examining such texts with pre-service teachers so that they might grapple with these ideas before they begin teaching and be in a better position to teach or recommend post-colonial young adult literature to their own students. The data collected for this dissertation included pre- and post-study questionnaires, participants written responses to each novel, audio recordings and transcriptions of each book club discussion, and field notes of each book club meeting. Using narrative analysis methods, I first coded this data thematically to generate categories across all data sources. However, as group discussions involved multiple narratives and speakers, I also used a dialogic approach (Riessman, 2008) to examine conversations in which participants discussed a topic in depth in response to an event described in the novel. The findings revealed that participants used a variety of strategies to establish meaningful connections for themselves across cultures. Participants used the novels to articulate and sometimes revise their understandings of post-colonial concerns such as race, ethnicity, nationality, and prejudice. They used the space of the book clubs to pool together their knowledge to form a collective learning environment. As pre-service teachers who were less than a year away from starting their careers, participants were concerned with how they might make post-colonial young adult novels relevant to their students lives while also expanding students global awareness. Taken together, these findings support the idea that reading and discussing post-colonial young adult literature in a book club setting can offer some critical and potentially transformative insights for pre-service teachers and, perhaps by extension, for their future students.

In August 1767 King Louis XV of France appointed Madame du Coudray, a 52-year-old midwife, to teach midwifery throughout the whole extent of the Realm. In so doing he acknowledged the science and experience and high degree of perfection that she had obtained in midwifery. Over the next 20 years Madame du Coudray traveled throughout France teaching midwifery to illiterate peasant women. It is estimated that she taught over 4,000 students. How did she teach midwifery to these women who had no previous experience with science? Could modern biology educators learn from her methods? This case study addressed these questions by studying her tools: a set of 26 teaching illustrations, a mannequin which served as an obstetric simulator, and a manual which contained her lectures. The illustrations were analyzed using Tuftes theory of graphic design. This analysis revealed that they are excellent examples of Tufte-style graphic illustrations. They minimize chartjunk while maximizing data ink. They use color appropriately. They are surprisingly truthful according to modern medical standards, and they use the principle of small multiples to teach the process of childbirth. The features of the mannequin were studied for their potential use for active learning and brain-based learning. This study revealed that the mannequin has a good fidelity, particularly for the eighteenth-century, and could have easily been used for active learning and brain-based learning. The manual was content analyzed for teaching methods. This study revealed that Madame du Coudrays method of teaching relied heavily on applications to real-world situations. It also showed that she taught her students their social and cultural responsibilities. In "Vision and Change: A Call for Action", the AAAS recommends that biology students in the twenty-first century should have experience with simulation and understand the role of science in society. It appears that modern biology instructors could learn much from Madame du Coudray.

Large numbers of students attending community college lack essential college success skills (motivation and study strategies). Many of these students do not complete their degree programs. Identifying learning and teaching methods that promote the development of lifelong learning skills in addition to content acquisition is essential. This quasi-experimental research design study examined the effect of alternative multiple-choice question design on student motivational strategies for learning and retention. Participants were 59 students enrolled in a Microsoft® Office applications course at a public gulf coast community college. The discrete-option multiple-choice (DOMC) test was designed to limit cheating and guessing on tests. The designers of the test suggested that the test format might require students to change how they prepare for exams. Results showed that the test format can change both the motivational beliefs and learning strategies of students. The present study indicates that it is possible, to affect student retention at the course level by changing the test format. Students who have low levels of interest and lower levels of intrinsic goal orientation may be at risk for non-retention. Students taking the alternate form of multiple-choice test versus the traditional format held higher levels of intrinsic value overall. Results indicate that the discrete-option multiple-choice (DOMC) question format promoted student self-efficacy (SE) and intrinsic value (IV) in the treatment group. The significant change in the control group (traditional multiple-choice test format) was the decreased score of intrinsic value from semester start to end. Student grade point average continues to be an indicator of college completion. This research may be of interest to educators and instructional course designers.

This investigation is focused on three critical issues facing educators in the 21st century: how technology is reshaping what it means to be human, the shift from the human era to the posthuman era and the implications of that shift on subjectivity, and the purpose of undergraduate education in a posthuman era. The current shift towards a posthuman worldview is a radical break from the modern and postmodern 20th century, when identity was constructed in terms of possibilities and multiplicities. Instead, in the hyperreal 21st century, subjectivity is complicated by homogenization and the radical sameness of simulated technological experiences. Also, whereas the modern and postmodern eras were human-centered, the posthuman era brings with it a shift from a human-centered to a machine-centered worldview. To illustrate a comparable historical shift, the investigation revisits the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the transition from the medieval period to the Renaissance. In that shift, the focus turned from a theocentric (God-centered) worldview to a humanistic (human-centered) worldview. From a genealogical perspective, this historical glance can help demonstrate how notions of humanness were privileged in the face of radical social chaos. In the end, when theorizing about the purpose of undergraduate education in a posthuman era, a poststructural examination of modernity is undertaken that explores threads of the lives of young people and the implications of ubiquitous screen culture on their daily lived experiences. Finally, a posthuman curriculum is proposed, which seeks to reawaken attention of the human experience in a digital age.

Video has long been used to support learner reflection in professional education programs in law, health, and education. Emerging video analysis tools offer learners the ability to highlight segments of video and focus their attention to specific moments or aspects of performance. These emerging tools afford opportunities for more systematic observation, analysis, and deliberate reflection on learner performance than was available previously. Expertise research has found that representative, rigorous tasks followed by immediate feedback and error correction constitute deliberate practice. Training environments that incorporate deliberate practice and emerging video annotation and analysis tools provide opportunities for learners pinpoint strengths and weaknesses in a systematic way. The purpose of this descriptive case study was to utilize a mixed method approach that would allow the identification and reveal the development of learner knowledge in an ill- structured professional domain. Data consisting of categorical, evaluative, and descriptive video annotations were collected from a legal interviewing and counseling course. Data were analyzed using Chi's (1997) verbal analysis approach. Verbal analysis is a methodology for quantifying the qualitative coding of the content of verbal utterances. Results imply that verbal analysis may be a useful method for other ill-structured professional domains. While the concept of reflection remains ambiguous, the method demonstrated in this study also provides a means to analyze reflective artifacts to reveal the content or object of reflections. Finally, results suggest that it may be possible to evaluate the development of learner knowledge in ill-structured professional domains.