In terms of Piaget's theory of cognitive development and the relationship he attributes between reasoning and the development of classification and seriation skills, the following questions arise: can early reasoning ability be enhanced through training? If IQ tests are accepted as measures of intellectual function, do they then contain a significant number of seriation type questions? If so, will the seriation test be an accepted measure of intellectual function?

Previous literature has indicated a relationship between poverty, participation in extracurricular activities, and developmental outcomes. The current study aimed to investigate and develop a deeper understanding of extracurricular activities (ECAs) and their impacts on adolescent development using two self-report tools, the YES 2.0 and the Delinquent Attitude Scale (DAS). The researcher surveyed 174 high school seniors from students attending schools in poverty areas and students attending schools not located in poverty areas in Mississippi, examining disparities in ECA opportunities, barriers to participation, and the positive and negative impacts of ECAs on development. Additional data were collected from school administrators, allowing the researcher to compare ECA participation among students attending schools in poverty areas and students attending schools not located in poverty areas and the barriers that impact this participation. Results showed that students attending schools in poverty areas were less likely to participate in ECAs than those students attending schools not located in poverty areas. Lack of awareness about programs was the most common barrier reported by students. To address this, it is recommended that schools emphasize recruiting for ECAs and involve students at younger ages. Regarding the impact of ECAs on development, participation in ECAs was found to have a positive impact on certain developmental areas, regardless of poverty area. Negative outcomes were minimal in all poverty areas. However, excessive participation in ECAs adversely affected grades among students attending schools in poverty areas. Overall, this study highlights the importance of addressing disparities in ECA opportunities and barriers to participation and the potential positive impact of ECAs on adolescent development.

The purpose of this study was to provide an examination of the relationships between general education teachers, special education teachers, and paraprofessionals and the influences of these relationships on students with disabilities. This study was conducted through the process of semi-structured interviews with general education teachers, special education teachers, and paraprofessionals working in two Tennessee school districts. The researcher found that communication practices, training, perspectives, time, role expectations, development of partnerships, and the creation of supportive environments affect the development of working relationships among special education teachers, paraprofessionals, and general education teachers. The researcher found that these relationships influence the experiences of students with disabilities in a significant and meaningful way. The researcher provides recommendations for current practices to promote the development of successful working relationships and provides suggestions for future research.

This thesis investigates best practices for teaching and supporting bilingual augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) users as they develop their communication skills. Although there are guidelines that inform best practices for teaching and supporting bilingual AAC users, there is very little information on what these practices look like. This thesis investigates the techniques and strategies that bilingual speech-language pathologists (SLPs) who practice in Catalunya, a bilingual community in northeastern Spain, use to evaluate, teach, and support people who use pictogram-based AAC modalities to communicate. To do this, six SLPs who practice in Catalunya participated in interviews regarding their practices when teaching bilingual AAC users. These interviews were analyzed thematically, based on an iterative, inductive coding process. Analysis revealed that most bilingual AAC users have access to an AAC system in only one language of the community. This may reflect a monolingual mindset (Tonsing & Soto, 2020), and limits the opportunities for engagement with both the larger community, and the individuals’ home communities. This is particularly true for those who speak a language other than those of the community with their families. Despite this, AAC users seem to understand both languages, develop bilingual identities, and “feel bilingual.” Additionally, despite the lack of access to multilingual AAC systems, professionals employ practices that show respect for the home language, whether it is Castilian Spanish, Catalan, or another language. The results suggest that the monolingual mindset is a deeply-ingrained part of educational and therapeutic systems in both monolingual and bilingual communities, even when individual practitioners respect and value their clients’ home language(s) and bilingual identities.

Adolescent literacy rates for students who struggle, particularly those with disabilities are alarming, especially in light of increased educational standards. As higher standards place a greater emphasis on reading and writing, addressing students’ literacy needs in the content areas has become a topic of interest in reading education. Although there is much debate about how to address this need, it is clear that content area teachers need support addressing literacy in their subject areas. An exploratory case study design was used to examine the responses of high school content area teachers to an EIE (exploratory, investigative, and experimental) professional development (PD) program. Specifically, the researcher sought to describe what the teachers considered to be valuable and useful aspects of the different components of the experience as it related to their practice, the outcomes they anticipated for struggling students, and their knowledge of literacy in the content areas. Ten content area teachers participated in 21.5 hours of professional development over a period of two months. Data about their PD experiences were collected during focus group discussions, individual interviews, observations, and completed questionnaires. When discussing the teachers’ descriptions and observations of their literacy practices, teachers reported an increased awareness of their practice as it pertained to literacy implementation. In the analysis of the outcomes teachers anticipated for struggling adolescents, including those with disabilities, teachers reported increased sense of control over the academic outcomes of struggling students. When addressing questions in reference to the effective components of the EIE PD experience, the teachers favored equally: (a) applicability of information, (b) exposure to literature, (c) autonomous systems, and (d) collaboration. Lastly, support emerged as an integral component of a constructivist EIE PD approach. All teachers in the study reported that support played a pivotal role in how they learned about and implemented literacy practices in their content area. Based on the findings, the researcher recommends that PD address and validate the current perceptions and concerns among content area teachers in relation to literacy implementation. PD should support teachers as they reflect upon their reported instructional limitations in relation to their needs and their students’ needs. Second, literacy PD for content area teachers must provide systematic support for teachers to explore, investigate and experiment with literacy in their content. Lastly, PD designed to support content area teacher’s use of literacy strategies in the content areas should provide teachers the opportunities to drive the literacy PD content in order to address needs specific to their classroom and school communities.

Gender discrimination is an ongoing topic, including discrimination that occurs in higher education. Previous studies have shown female faculty experience a variety of workplace discrimination including sexual harassment/bullying, salary disparities, and lack of worklife balance. This dissertation aimed to analyze equity issues for female faculty at a private university. The researcher utilized a narrative inquiry methodology, conducting interviews with five full-time female faculty. The purpose of this dissertation was to understand the participants’ everyday stories and lived experiences. The researcher utilized critical feminist theory and leadership theory to examine the notion of equity at this campus. The findings, shown through narrative profiles, demonstrate the five women have experienced equity issues at the institution including workplace bullying and lack of work-life balance. It also found the women utilize a self-silencing voice, struggling between challenging equity issues while maintaining their positions at the university. In addition, gender issues experienced prior to working at the university were discussed, demonstrating larger societal issues in relation to gender equity. This dissertation adds to the current studies on equity issues in higher education by focusing on the participants’ stories rather than quantitative or coded data. In addition, it bridged two seemingly disparate frameworks, critical feminist theory and leadership theory, to demonstrate how these concepts can work toward alleviating equity issues in organizations.

Sub-Saharan Africa continues to fall behind other developing regions regarding educational attainment, despite recent progress in enrollment. This thesis examines a variety of external conditional factors that could contribute to a country’s relative success, in terms of years spent in school using a prediction model that compares years enrolled in secondary education as a foundation to determine over- and under-performing countries in sub-Saharan Africa. By exploring various educational policies, historical patterns, and projects executed in Rwanda, South Africa, Ghana, and Botswana, this thesis sheds light on four main challenges that can impact educational attainment: ethnic and racial tensions, an acute shortage of learning materials and trained teachers, inappropriate curricula, and high costs of education. Some of these challenges have been met with an array of policies, with mixed results in terms of the soundness and fairness of policies as well as the effectiveness of implementation. This thesis argues that to facilitate the creation of an effective school system, education policies must focus on more appropriate reallocations of funding, improved teacher-training quality throughout rural regions, applicable and localized curricula, conditional cash transfer programs, and long-term improvements in the job market.

Blind and visually impaired students are under-represented in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines of higher education and the workforce. This is due primarily to the difficulties they encounter in trying to succeed in mathematics courses. While there are sufficient tools available to create Braille content, including the special Nemeth Braille used in the U.S. for mathematics constructs, there are very few tools to allow a blind or visually impaired student to create his/her own mathematical content in a manner that sighted individuals can use. The software tools that are available are isolated, do not interface well with other common software, and may be priced for institutional use instead of individual use. Instructors are unprepared or unable to interact with these students in a real-time manner. All of these factors combine to isolate the blind or visually impaired student in the study of mathematics. Nemeth Braille is a complete mathematical markup system in Braille, containing everything that is needed to produce quality math content at all levels of complexity. Blind and visually impaired students should not have to learn any additional markup languages in order to produce math content. This work addressed the needs of the individual blind or visually impaired student who must be able to produce mathematical content for course assignments, and who wishes to interact with peers and instructors on a real-time basis to share mathematical content. Two tools were created to facilitate mathematical interaction: a Nemeth Braille editor, and a real-time instant messenger chat capability that supports Nemeth Braille and MathML constructs. In the Visually Impaired view, the editor accepts Nemeth Braille input, displays the math expressions in a tree structure which will allow sub-expressions to be expanded or collapsed. The Braille constructs can be translated to MathML for display within MathType. Similarly, in the Sighted view, math constructs entered in MathType can be translated into Nemeth Braille. Mathematical content can then be shared between sighted and visually impaired users via the instant messenger chat capability. Using Math in the Dark software, blind and visually impaired students can work math problems fully in Nemeth Braille and can seamlessly convert their work into MathML for viewing by sighted instructors. The converted output has the quality of professionally produced math content. Blind and VI students can also communicate and share math constructs with a sighted partner via a real-time chat feature, with automatic translation in both directions, allowing VI students to obtain help in real-time from a sighted instructor or tutor. By eliminating the burden of translation, this software will help to remove the barriers faced by blind and VI students who wish to excel in the STEM fields of study.

Over the past decade, the number of individuals being diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder has risen substantially. One byproduct of increased diagnosis is that more and more students with Autism Spectrum Disorder are applying and being accepted to colleges and universities (Graetz & Spampinato, 2008; Jones, 2012; Smith, 2007; Taylor, 2005; Zager, Alpern, McKeon, Maxam, & Mulvey, 2013; Longtin, 2013; Adreon & Durocher, 2007; Zager & Alpern, 2010). Research in the field of Autism and Higher Education is in its infancy, with a dearth of the research focusing on the challenges and struggles that degree-seeking students with ASD face within higher education. In an attempt to combat these challenges, many colleges and universities across the nation have begun to create post-secondary transition programs, but little is known from the perspective of the students participating in these programs (Adreon & Durocher, 2012). In this following study, Q Methodology was used to obtain information from 30 degree-seeking college students with Autism Spectrum Disorder on their best experiences within a higher education transition program.

The literature presented in the following pages explores the shortcomings of the American public education system in the context of creating long-term, sustainable social change. Using financial illiteracy and its relationship to low quality of life as an entry point, the first section exposes public schools’ shortcomings as agents of social change by delving into the hardships endured by the original public school promoters of the 19th century, the pitfalls of President George W. Bush’s 2001 enactment of No Child Left Behind, and the shortcomings of the financial literacy programming that found traction in urban schools following the subprime lending crisis. These examples render the public education system unfit to address social change, at which point the paper segues into a discussion of social enterprise and the new field’s demonstrated potential to capture social value. After a brief historical exploration of social innovation which examines some values and principles of this “fourth sector,” successful ventures and failed social organizations are scrutinized in the penultimate chapter. The comparisons made ultimately argue in favor of social entrepreneurship’s fitness, on both a structural and ideological level, in addressing the complex social, environmental, and cultural issues of our time.