<p> High school capstone projects are adopted so students can increase their learning capacity and be better prepared to think critically and problem solve in the 21^st Century. However, it was not known how educational stakeholders, including students, parents, and educators, perceived the relationship between a senior capstone project and student capacities in regards to critical thinking, inquiry, problem solving, and autonomy. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore how educational stakeholders at Walter High School, including students, parents, and educators, perceived the relationship between a senior capstone project and student capacities in regards to critical thinking, inquiry, problem solving, and autonomy. Five learning theories guided the study including: Bloom&rsquo;s taxonomy of learning theory, Bloom&rsquo;s mastery learning theory, cognitive and affective learning theory, 21^st century learning theory, and constructivist learning theory. The study&rsquo;s sample and methodology consisted of interviews with 12 parents, a focus group with 10 educators, and analysis of 12 student capstone projects. Stakeholders perceived that as students applied critical thinking, inquiry, and problem solving, they also became more engaged, organized, and empowered as a result of completing the senior capstone project. In terms of student autonomy, perceptions from stakeholders indicated the capstone project made students more independent and determined; parents thought their students were better leaders.</p>

<p> In this study, a high school teacher&rsquo;s applied various pedagogical, critical thinking, and reading strategies within a high school classroom. As students prepare to become productive members of a democratic society in the 21st century, some students need focused literacy instruction to meet the increasing literacy demands; students who lag behind in critical thinking have a disadvantage. This teacher&rsquo;s action research study with struggling high school readers investigated whether implementing the pedagogical Gradual Release of Responsibility model (GRR) while engaging students with intertextual texts (juxtaposing two or more texts) within a reading community increased their critical thinking skills.</p><p> The participants included 35 ninth and tenth grade struggling readers in reading classes. The researcher used Reading Plus (2014) online silent reading comprehension, fluency, and vocabulary assessment; Fountas and Pinnell (2014) oral reading and silent reading comprehension assessment; the Weltzer-Ward, Baltes and Lynn&rsquo;s (2008) Critical Thinking Assessment Framework (TAF); high school students&rsquo; self-reflections with teacher-made prompts; and the researcher&rsquo;s action research journal to determine and monitor high school students&rsquo; reading and critical thinking progress. Teacher-made rubric tools measured critical thinking with 10 high school student blogs in response to high school teacher-made prompts reflecting the state&rsquo;s spring standardized assessment. Within the reading class structure, the researcher created a university partnership that consisted of one education class containing students from various disciplines who communicated and offered insights and feedback throughout the high school students&rsquo; 10 blogs. The researcher offered strategies and designed the high school reading course to encourage student choice and autonomy and made teaching modifications based on students&rsquo; behavioral needs, academic progress, and struggles.</p><p> Data analysis revealed 35 ninth and tenth grade students increased their critical thinking skills over the 2014-2015 school year; however, time constraint challenges and multiple reading program components negated drawing a clear picture of which aspect held the highest value. The researcher&rsquo;s journal noted that parent communication, student conferences, flexible due dates, individualized instructional scaffolding, and the online reading program contributed to students&rsquo; critical thinking. The journal revealed a consistent teacher expectation for students to engage in the critical thinking progress.</p>

<p> Transition is a process that occurs throughout life. The focus of this basic qualitative study was on the services and programs provided to individuals with autism and intellectual disabilities. This study included the exploration of participants&rsquo; experiences in the classroom and community. There was limited research on current pioneers in the area of transition services for individuals with disabilities between the ages of 18 and 22 who returned to the public school system for a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE). The literature review in this study included extensive research regarding the value of and many practical suggestions for designing quality transition programming to prepare each student with skills and competencies necessary for successful post-school outcomes. This study included interviews with transition coordinators, special education directors, special education teachers, and paraprofessionals. The research findings include observations of transition programs within the classroom and community setting, a review of Transition Individualized Education plans. The results from this study identified the services and programs that have led to successful post-secondary options for students with disabilities and revealed the following findings, community independence, soft and hard skills, utilization of visuals to design the curriculum, real-world activities, and age-appropriate experiences. The findings of this qualitative study suggested several implications for transition services and programs for students between the ages of 18 and 22 with autism and intellectual disabilities. School districts should offer community-based programs for students with disabilities starting at the age of 14, which would be in middle school. Despite the data collected during this study, services and programs for students with intellectual disabilities and autism continue to need fine-tuning.</p>

<p> Schools are seeking to understand how to build positive school environments that help students learn and become good citizens in the school community. One practice used in charter schools is merit and demerit systems. The literature indicates that positive and negative reinforcements acts as punitive discipline that only works when adults are around students to enforce policies, rules, and expectations. One particular charter high school that used a merit and demerit system to discipline students was studied to understand the implications of such systems for students of color living in a low-income community. Using the principles of critical pedagogy, the study connected and drew inferences between teacher perceptions of discipline and how the merit and demerit system impacted student referral and punishment. A total of 12 teachers (ninth and 10th grade) participated in this qualitative study. Through classroom observations and focus groups, trends were triangulated and presented in this study. A major finding of this study involves the teacher understanding that the concept of a merit and demerit system is beneficial, but ultimately leads to a loss of student agency. The discussion focuses on explaining an authoritarianperspective and the perceptions and reality of the implementing a merit and demerit system at the high school level. Implications for educators to understand and improve school discipline policies that support students and rethink punitive and authoritarian practices are discussed. Recommendations for future research in the study are presented and summarized.</p>

<p> The purpose of this mixed-methods action research study was to examine to what extent entomological research can promote students&rsquo; hands-on learning in a high-poverty, urban, secondary setting.</p><p> In reviewing the literature, the researcher was not able to find a specific study that investigated how entomological research could promote the hands-on learning of students. The researcher did find evidence that research on learning in a secondary setting was important to student growth. It should also be noted that support was established for the implementation of hands-on science inquiry in the classroom setting.</p><p> The study&rsquo;s purpose was to aid educators in their instruction by combining research-based strategies and hands-on science inquiry. The surveys asked 30 students to rate their understanding of three basic ideas. These core ideas were entomological research, hands-on science inquiry, and urban studies. These core ideas provided the foundation for the study. The questionnaires were based on follow-up ideas from the surveys. Two interview sessions were used to facilitate this one-on-one focus.</p><p> Because the study included only 30 student participants, its findings may not be totally replicable. Further study investigating the links between entomological research and hands-on science learning in an urban environment is needed.</p>

<p> Many research studies exist regarding high school master schedules. However, not one study could identify which schedule was &ldquo;best&rdquo; for high schools to implement. The researcher reviewed a variety of schedule types&mdash;traditional, drop 1, trimester, 4x4 block, A/B block, and modified block. The researcher also investigated interventions at the high school level. She also researched change and innovation. Lastly, she researched teacher collaboration. This study investigated changes a high-achieving high school made. The focus was on a master schedule change, interventions scheduled during the school day, and teacher collaboration scheduled during the school day. The purpose of this study was to determine whether a schedule change, interventions, and imbedded teacher collaboration created a cultural shift in a high-achieving school, making it a school that successfully supported all learners. This mixed-methods action research study surveyed students and teachers twice throughout the school year. Also, the researcher analyzed secondary data&mdash;tardies, absences, grades, behavior, and Reading Plus data. In this school, approximately 10-15% of students were struggling in various areas but particularly with reading as demonstrated by grades and Scholastic Reading Inventory (SRI) scores. It was important to explore the cultural shift that occurred because of this change. While some students expressed dissatisfaction with the new schedule, data supported that the change resulted in improved grades and a decrease in behavioral referrals. Making a significant change to the master schedule created an opportunity for teachers to review and revise their lesson delivery. While this was ultimately a benefit, it created increased stress, especially for those who were veteran teachers and accustomed to the previous schedule; however, in reviewing and analyzing the data, it was evident that feedback was overall positive and that the school&rsquo;s culture started to shift to become even more positive.</p>

<p> The purpose of this study was to elicit the perceptions of high school principals regarding state education standards and whether or not increasing education standards has a positive impact on student achievement. Missouri adopted a new set of standards which placed academic focus on fewer topics per subject and required teachers to create lessons that increased critical thinking within the classroom (Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education [MODESE], 2013b). To identify how the new standards might affect student achievement, four research questions were asked as part of this study. As a result of these questions, findings showed perceptions of the Missouri Learning Standards were more favorable than those associated with Common Core. It was believed among participants of this study that school districts have to develop professional development programs which provide information relevant to instruction and are organized around district goals. Data collected exposed student achievement is more likely to increase if new standards cause school districts to focus on specific goals and if teachers fully understand how to teach the new standards. By failing to adequately prepare teachers, school districts will struggle to properly prepare students for life after high school. Through a renewed focus on teacher comprehension of education standards, school districts can increase student achievement deficiencies and increase the number of students who graduate college- and career-ready.</p>

<p> This dissertation reports design-based research that determined the characteristics of an effective intervention to improve adolescent historical argumentative writing. This study involved 89 diverse 11th grade students, including approximately 50% Hispanic students and 12% students with disabilities. It compared a treatment that taught students to write warrants using historical thinking to explain how evidence supports a claim, and a comparison treatment that taught students to find and evaluate evidence for particular claims and sides. Both groups read a text set about the controversy surrounding the explosion of the battleship U.S.S. Maine at the start of the Spanish-American War. The intervention was designed to improve student ability to 1) select effective warrants reflecting different types of historical thinking, 2) generate their own warrants when given a claim and evidence, and 3) write more effective warrants in their own argumentative essays. When the most reliable study measures were combined and analyzed using MANOVA, there was a significant overall treatment effect. Follow up ANOVAs indicated a statistically significant effect for selecting warrants, but not writing warrants. The mean difference was greatest in items reflecting corroboration, a heuristic that requires reading several documents and giving more weight to evidence found in common across accounts. Both conditions struggled to differentiate between more and less effective warrants. These findings matter because historical argumentative writing involves advanced literacy skills similar to those needed for online reading and engaged citizenship. Based on these findings, the intervention was refined to include additional scaffolding for collecting evidence across texts and explicit instruction in differentiating between more and less effective warrants. The findings were used to develop a theory of teaching argumentative writing to inform work in similar contexts. This theory emphasizes backwards planning of units centered around a historical controversy from the writing students will do at unit&rsquo;s end. It emphasizes the importance of teachers reading historical texts closely themselves and identifying where students can use historical thinking heuristics to warrant claims about the historical controversy. Through this approach, students build understanding of content and disciplinary literacy skills simultaneously through reading, reasoning, and writing across texts. </p>

<p> As the country looks to increase the STEM workforce it is important to examine the effect of the programs in place, specifically the effect on the students choices in education. The Mathematics &amp; Science Academy (MSA), is a STEM-themed, public magnet school in Southern California whose mission is to increase the nation&rsquo;s pool of graduates in mathematics and science. It is 1 of the many schools and programs in place to increase the United States (U.S.) Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) workforce. This study, designed as a qualitative case study investigated how MSA has influenced female, African American students who attended a STEM magnet school in their educational pathways. Data was collected from 9 former African American, female graduates from the MSA class of 1998 primarily through interviews. Additional data was received from a pre-interview questionnaire and artifacts from their high school experience.</p><p> This study yielded 4 conclusions. First, the push to study STEM must be intentional and should be influenced by more factors than the school environment alone. Without mentors and an explicit thrust towards STEM, other factors may lead students away from STEM majors. Second, family and society are especially influential in directing a student&rsquo;s pathway. They along with the navigational and resistant capital gained by a student can divert a student&rsquo;s chosen path. Third, students are influenced by multiple factors (e.g. community, school environment, peers, family) each of which can impel them in a certain direction. Lastly, post-secondary (college) educational experiences are highly influential on choice of major and career pathways. </p><p> Based on the findings of this study, recommendations were made for leaders and administrators of STEM-themed magnet schools to consider, when developing programs that will encourage students to pursue STEM careers.</p>

<p> The purpose of this mixed method case study, on the continued implementation of common assessments developed within Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), was to investigate possible relationships between teacher collaboration, common assessments and End of Course (EOC) assessments. The researcher investigated the perceptions of teachers and administrators in a Midwest secondary setting on common assessment development and utilization on the culture of teaching and data-driven decision making. </p><p> The information from this study will provide the researched school district as well as others with insights into their implementation of PLCs and specifically the development and utilization of common assessments. In order to evaluate student learning in a classroom setting, the state of Missouri piloted SLOs in public schools in the 2016-2017 school year. Common assessments are a staple of the SLO process to foster collaborative use of assessment results and data-informed instruction to address student learning outcomes. Data collection included each of the EOC assessed academic departments, the researcher surveyed teachers and interviewed supervising principals and participating teachers. In order to evaluate common assessments, the researcher collected student achievement data through SLO pre-assessments EOC scores during the 2015-2016 school year. The study utilized the Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient to conduct analysis of the two data points to determine the strength of the relationship. </p><p> Through evaluating common assessment utilization, this study intended to address potential modifications needed in common assessment and accompanying practices in the school&rsquo;s PLC setting. By completing quantitative analysis of common assessment scores and qualitative data from surveys and interviews the researcher ascertained: Government and English PLC revealed a relationship between their instruction and corresponding assessments; Algebra had a modest relationship while Biology failed to connect classroom to assessments. Through qualitative data analysis, the researcher determined a need for continual professional development around assessment and data literacy to better support teachers with increased accountability of SLO implementation in future school years. Further, implications of the study could serve to assist schools in the implementation of SLOs and ancillary areas of assessment, teacher collaboration, and data use for school advancement and impacting student outcomes.</p>