This study investigates the attitudes, beliefs, experiences and involvement related to internationalization by faculty members at a group of universities in the United States. Internationalization of higher education is defined as the process of integrating an international or intercultural dimension into the teaching, research and service functions of an institution (Knight, 2004). The definition is placed within a conceptual framework of rationales, stakeholders, and approaches to internationalization (Knight, 1999). Data collected from faculty at nine public universities in Pennsylvania (n = 829) were used to provide a descriptive and correlational analysis that: explores faculty attitudes, beliefs and experiences; reviews the extent to which faculty incorporate an international perspective into their teaching, research, and scholarship; determines what relationships exist between faculty characteristics, campus climate, and attitudes, beliefs and behaviors; and examines patterns that are used to describe or predict faculty members orientation to internationalization (Morris 1996). Data were collected using a survey instrument accessed over the internet (Best & Krueger, 2004; Dillman, 2000). Data were analyzed by faculty characteristics and by research variables, including: international experiences at different educational stages, assessment of campus climate, faculty involvement in internationalization, and attitudes and beliefs about internationalization. The data show that important differences exist by gender, discipline, teaching responsibilities, tenure status, rank, and teaching/research preference. The research shows that faculty with higher levels of international experiences at different educational stages have higher levels of involvement in internationalization as faculty members, and that they also have more favorable attitudes and beliefs about internationalization. Furthermore, faculty with more favorable attitudes and beliefs about internationalization are likely to have higher levels of involvement in internationalization, although the strength of the relationship varies according to the three attitudes and beliefs factors identified in the factor analysis. A definition for the construct of an Orientation to Internationalization is provided. Several of the research findings replicate findings from the Carnegie Foundation for the Profession of Teachings Study of the International Academic Profession (Altbach, 1996). Policy implications are provided for different sectors interested in internationalizing higher education. Recommendations on internationalizing the faculty are provided, as are suggestions for future research.

THE PROMISE, THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE OF PRE-KINDERGARTEN: IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES, CAPACITY BUILDING AND SUSTAINABILITY Suellen Lawrence Gourley, Ed.D. University of Pittsburgh, 2006 Charles J. Gorman, Advisor School districts in Pennsylvania were able to receive grant money to implement pre-kindergarten through the Accountability Block grant program from the Pennsylvania Department of Education. This study focused on five schools that implemented pre-kindergarten during the 2004-2005 school year, studying the struggles during the first two years of the programs and how the schools used strategies to build capacity to sustain the pre-kindergartens. Grant money disappears eventually and with strong competition for educational dollars, ways to build capacity to sustain effective programs like pre-kindergarten are necessary. Site visits were used to gather the grant documents, observe the pre-kindergartens for a full session and conduct interviews with the principal, teacher and parent at each school. These three sources of data provided evidence of implementation issues, capacity building strategies, and how these strategies are connected to the sustainability of the pre-kindergarten. The findings indicate that the pre-kindergartens that are most likely to be sustained are those implemented by schools that use three capacity building strategies of knowledge and skills, collaborative culture and allocation of resources. The schools have and continue to seek knowledge and skills about early childhood education; consciously, purposefully and collectively create a collaborative climate; and allocate appropriate and adequate financial and human resources are promoting the sustainability of the pre-kindergarten. Transportation is a key resource for sustainability. Full-day vs. half-day programs, universal vs. targeted, quality of the program and the curriculum were not issues in the sustainability of the pre-kindergartens in this study. Pre-kindergarten in the public school needs financial commitment from school boards and the state. Adding this program to the basic education subsidy for each school would enable all Pennsylvania four-year-olds to have access to pre-kindergarten. The Accountability Block grant could also help promote sustainability by building a framework within the grant for school districts to absorb the costs of the program over time and not risk eliminating the program when the funding is gone.

In this qualitative study I investigated the ways in which young women create positive, safe spaces for their own sexual identity development during high school. Few topics are as emotionally charged as discussions about any aspect of sexuality, sexual identity, and sexual intercourse. Few adults even wish to acknowledge the desire much less the sexual practices of teens and young adults. My focus was on the strategies employed by self-identified straight, lesbian, bisexual and queer female students during their senior year of high school to create positive, safe spaces for sexual identities to emerge. This sample is a heterogeneous group of young women of similar ages and who were enrolled in a college or university at the time of their interview. Using a reflective interview method, I asked the young women of this study to do a retrospective recounting of their high school experiences. The resulting accounts provide an accurate, coherent view of the dilemmas faced by these young women. With the very public arena of high school as the backdrop, young women shared their stories of the ways in which they: made friends and negotiated status and peer cliques; managed reputations; made decisions about engaging in sexual activities; learned to acknowledge and to recognize their sexual desire; and came to know their sexual identity. This dissertation provides an analysis of dilemmas and strategies faced by these young women as they carefully waded through the institutional structures that may have been only minimally supportive in the process of their sexual identity development. I elaborate on key concepts of the creation of positive, safe spaces, girls sexual desire, silencing of girls talk of sexuality, and building communities of support. This dissertation informs a broader audience of parents, high school teachers, counselors and administrators, and college counselors and student life personnel, including residence hall directors and staff.

This study examines citizenship education policy and practice as they are perceived by teachers in three different societies the United States, England, and Hong Kong. Through a secondary analysis of the teacher data in Civics Education Study (CIVED), conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), it identifies similarities and differences in teachers beliefs and perceptions of citizenship, citizenship education, their professional preparation for their work as civic teachers, and their teaching practices. Six research questions have guided this investigation which was grounded on the literature of models of citizenship and of global vs. national cultural factors affecting education systems. The findings reveal strong consensus among teachers in the three countries suggesting that civics education matters a great deal for students political development and for their countries. Teachers, also, in the three countries, do not demonstrate a great deal of differentiation among the citizenship models and categories prescribed in the literature. For the teaching practices, the study presents that indirect teacher-centered methods dominate civics education classrooms, and that political socialization in the form of knowledge transmission is the most emphasized objective in these countries schools. The study concludes with recommendations to education policy-makers to consider teachers suggestion of the need to improve the quality of civics materials and sufficient training. The study, also, suggests diversifying the data of the future IEA studies in civics by incorporating qualitative and quantitative data that aim to explain the process of teaching and learning, and the educational outcomes as well. Finally, it recommends that cross-national studies need to consider and theorize as much about similarities and common features among various educational systems as they currently do for the differences among these systems. Also, it suggests a need to develop a more inclusive theoretical framework of citizenship.

Abstract: New and prospective faculty often enter the professoriate with less than adequate preparation for the many roles and expectations of the position, particularly in regard to teaching requirements. In spite of the fact that teaching responsibilities consume large amounts of new faculty time, they frequently are not emphasized in the doctoral preparation experience, nor in the new-faculty orientation process. Most prospective and new faculty do not understand the importance of the teaching culture of an institution, nor how to go about assessing that culture to determine the level and nature of support offered for teaching. New faculty need to evaluate the institutional fit between their own teaching and research priorities and those of the institution. In addition, those who enter graduate school with the ambition of one day entering the professoriate would be wise to understand the nature of their institutions teaching culture, as it directly affects the level and amount of training that graduate students receive as future instructors. This study reviewed the literature related to programs and practices that research universities have in place that help to form the culture of support for scholarly teaching on campus. The product of this review is a set of guidelines and related criteria intended to help new and prospective faculty assess the teaching culture of a research institution based on specific guidelines, as well as related criteria for each guideline. After compiling and defining the guidelines and related criteria for this study, feedback was gathered from individuals who are involved in related research and/or work in the field. The purpose of this effort was for these professionals to gauge whether the findings were relevant, viable, or lacking in any way. Based on the feedback and information that was received, changes were made to the proposed guidelines and related criteria. The resulting document should be helpful for new and prospective faculty to review prior to attending graduate school or accepting a professional position in academe.

This study analyzes the national characteristics that explain the prevalence of child labor and low school enrollments by using unbalanced panel regression analysis. This study contains 106 countries that have exhibited some degree of child labor between 1990 and 2003. The independent variables were divided into four categories; economic, political, educational, and socio-cultural. Although the issues of child labor and low school enrollment are almost always discussed relative to economics, this study shows that the rest of the factors are also related to the rate of child labor and school enrollment rates. Economic development seems necessary in order to reduce child labor, improving educational systems and establishing educational policies appear to effectively increase primary school enrollment. Additionally, it is very important to consider political factors, such as the quality of governance, as well as economic development in order to increase secondary school enrollment. In addition, the study shows that child labor is more strongly related to secondary school enrollment than primary school enrollment. According to the results obtained, the author proposes four policy recommendations. First, poverty reduction is very important and must be achieved by lowering fertility rates, improving income distribution, promoting female employment, and raising adult literacy rates. Secondly, because rural children are much more likely to be in the labor force and to drop out of school, especially at the secondary education level, it seems to be more effective to focus on rural areas by raising adult employment opportunities, increasing industrialization, reforming curriculum to improve educational quality/relevance and reducing socio-cultural effects by awareness-raising campaigns. Thirdly, it is important to focus on female education. Negative socio-cultural effects on female education have to be controlled through awareness-raising campaigns and the promotion of womens advancement in the economic and political spheres. Lastly, additional efforts are necessary in order to reduce child labor and promote secondary education in African countries, especially those with French-originated laws. The results show that children living in those countries seem to suffer most from economic, political and socio-cultural disadvantages.

The classroom is a dynamic social space. When faculty members and students enter that space for purposes of teaching and learning in a racially and ethnically diverse context, there are many actors that come into full participation: faculty members, students, the curriculum, cultural and ethnic diversity, challenges associated with racial and ethnic diversity such as culturally-based learning styles, prejudices and stereotypes, expectations between faculty and students, among other things. The extent to which faculty members are effective in conducting their instructional roles is impacted by their awareness of the classroom dynamic, the opportunities and challenges it provides for teaching and learning, and how adequately they are prepared to overcome the effects of the challenges and optimize the teaching and learning opportunities. This dissertation set out to explore, using faculty experience (in number of years), how culturally-based learning styles/preferences impacted faculty instructional roles: how faculty perceived their roles, their choice and use of course content, and their choice and use of teaching and evaluation methods. To gather such data, forty out of seventy faculty members teaching in one of the most racially and ethnically diverse higher education institutions in the continental United States responded to a survey, and fifteen were interviewed. The result shows that while teaching experience is important to understanding a classroom context, in the racially and ethnically diverse classroom, numbers are not an adequate measure of experience. Experience involves understanding and adequately responding to the racially and ethnically diverse classroom. It consists of intellectual, personal, and relational dimensions. To acquire these, faculty must be committed to acquiring self-knowledge first, and then understanding their need to develop sensibilities for understanding and interacting with race and ethnicity. This yields credibility with students and, eventually, instructional effectiveness. Except for a few instances, years of teaching experience in the racially and ethnically diverse classroom did not have direct affect on how faculty perceived and performed their instructional roles, and faculty preferred to view their commitment to racial and ethnic diversity as a better measure of experience rather than the number of years they have taught in such contexts.

This dissertation project is concerned with corruption in higher education as a newly emerging topic in the field of education research. In this study, I defined corruption in higher education and developed a conceptual ground for further methodological developments and empirical research focused on different aspects of corruption in higher education and the development of measurements and indicators of its prevalence in higher education. Based on the analysis of media reports, legal cases, and other records, I compared corruption in higher education sectors in the Russian Federation and the United States of America, identified differences, and predicted future possible partial convergence in forms of corruption. I disclosed positive role of the state in developing and sustaining corruption in higher education. I identified three major organizational structures with corruption, including the vertical structure, the horizontal structure, and the vertical hierarchy. Finally, I presented cellular automation as a new methodology to study misconduct in large educational organizations, and used simulation to model behavior of educators, including factors that influence their decision-making.

This project uses a large multi-state dataset to address three aspects of the relationship between tracking and student achievement that have been understudied. Chapter II establishes that rigorous instruction is substantially more common in high track classes. Rigorous instruction is defined as teaching that emphasizes justification and reasoning, and thus this gap between track levels represents a rationing of high status knowledge. However, this type of instruction only mediates a small proportion of the relationship between track level and achievement on state achievement tests. Chapter III finds that a developmental view of ability is significantly associated with student achievement. This conception of ability sees all students as capable of rigorous mathematics with the correct supports. Students in untracked settings whose teachers describe continuing to include low-achieving students in rigorous mathematics are predicted to out-score tracked students. Chapter IV shows that one support for low-achieving students outside the regular classroom, double dose instruction, can actually negatively impact their achievement, depending on the characteristics of the program. While some characteristics were associated with positive student achievement, only four schools employed these characteristics. In conclusion, I argue that each of these analyses provides a small window into policy and research direction for the future. If schools wish to support all students to succeed, they must emphasize rigorous mathematics not just among the highest-achieving, advocate for a developmental view of ability that sees all students as capable of success in this type of mathematics, and consider how the implementation of supports for students can be as important as the adoption of the supports as policy.

The gaps in achievement and attainment between races and classes have long vexed our educational system, with the former remaining stubbornly stable and the latter growing in recent decades. Researchers consistently conclude that these gaps mostly form before school and during the summer as the result of a vast array of out-of-school influences, but policy has primarily aimed to change what happens inside schools. I argue that aiming instead to mitigate the effects of factors/conditions experienced outside of school may offer a better solution. I review and evaluate the evidence linking 21 different factors/conditions disproportionately experienced by those living in urban poverty with academic performance. Overall, strong evidence supports the theory that policy could alter 12 of the factors/conditions in ways that would subsequently improve the academic performance of students living in urban poverty and narrow the achievement gap. In all, 19 are supported by at least moderately strong evidence. I select two of those --homeownership and stress - for comprehensive synthesis and in-depth review. The literature bases of both offer compelling cases that increasing homeownership and reducing stressors can narrow the achievement gap, but empirical evidence is mixed for the former and scattered for the latter. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.