The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 has mandated that all public school students will be reading at grade level by the 2013-2014 school year. Florida has embarked on an agenda to ensure that the kindergarten through high school student population is reading at or above grade level by 2014. Many of Florida's low-performing student population, including middle school students with high incidence disabilities, are reading below grade level. Using a multiple baseline across subjects design, this study examined the impact of computer-assisted repeated readings on the reading performance of three middle school students with mild intellectual disabilities over the course of 67 days. Results showed an improvement in reading fluency rate using instructional level text. The study was evaluated using quality indicators of single-subject research in special education. Future research is advocated to replicate this study across different grades and exceptionalities.

Information fluency refers to the ability to recognize information needs and to gather, evaluate, and communicate information appropriately. In this study, I treat "information fluency" as both an overall competency and as a collection of knowledge and skills. The purpose of this study is to explore the specific workplace information fluency skills valued by employers of technical communicators, to find out how instructors perceive and teach these skills, and to suggest how these findings can inform our teaching practices. Within the framework of qualitative methodology, this study employs two data-collection instruments, including a content analysis of online job recruitment postings and a survey of technical communication instructors across the United States. The study discovers that when hiring technical communicators, employers require candidates to have skills in information processing, information technology, and critical thinking. Candidates must be able to identify their information needs, and must know how to use specified tools to gather, evaluate, and communicate information. It also reveals that although "information fluency" is a new terminology to a majority of instructors, the skill sets that constitute information fluency already existed in their knowledge. The study's last finding suggests that the opportunity for an internship is perceived as the most helpful in students' acquisition of information fluency skills. This dissertation concludes with a list of specific employer-valued information fluency skills, recommendations for program administrators and instructors for implementing information fluency, as well as recommendations for future researches on this subject.

During the last several decades, mathematics reform has emphasized the goal of ensuring that students develop both conceptual and procedural understanding in mathematics. The current mathematics reform, Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers [NGA Center & CCSSO], 2010), promotes this goal, with procedural knowledge building upon a strong conceptual base. This study uses content analysis to investigate the extent and ways in which Houghton Mifflin Harcourts Go Math! K-8 (HMH, 2016) supports teachers in building procedural fluency from conceptual understanding when teaching equivalence of fractions.Krippendorfs (1980) framework for content analysis guided this study. I identified a priori codes, and allowed for emergent codes, that characterize quality mathematical instruction. Careful analysis of the teacher editions of the textbook series revealed that, if the teacher instructions are to be followed with fidelity, students are not given opportunities to create and share their own strategies for solving tasks designed to help them learn equivalence of fractions. Neither are they given opportunities to make connections among strategies. All connections are introduced by the teacher. Although the teacher editions promote transitions from visual models to algorithms, they provide inconsistent use of problem-solving practice tasks and equal-sharing problems, two methods that are strongly supported by the research literature for developing procedural fluency from conceptual understanding in equivalence of fractions. Finally, the teacher materials include multiple instances in which the same or similar language and terms are used for mathematical and pedagogical practices found in mainstream research and professional literature, yet the practices were to be implemented in ways contrary to mainstream interpretations.Overall, Go Math! K-8 (HMH, 2016) provided little support to teachers in helping students build procedural fluency from conceptual understanding. A teacher-driven, rather than student-driven, approach to instruction was emphasized, thus minimizing opportunities for students to engage in the kinds of tasks and discourse recommended in the literature. The ways in which mathematical language and terms were implemented contrary to mainstream research interpretations can easily cause confusion among educators. The dearth of authentic problem-solving practice was inconsistent with quality mathematics instruction that supports students conceptual and procedural understanding.

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This study is a longitudinal study that investigated the development of English oral proficiency—complexity, accuracy, and fluency—under the pre-task and on-line planning conditions with task repetition among Japanese high school students. This study is unique because it is longitudinal and includes qualitative data. The participants were 15 Japanese high school students whose English proficiency level is categorized as low proficiency. Narrative tasks, post-task questionnaires, journals, and interviews were used in this study. In the narrative tasks, they were asked to describe a four-picture story three times with two minutes planning time, when they were allowed to listen to an ALT (assistant language teacher) tell the story and take notes. They completed a post-task questionnaire and a journal after completing the task. Interviews were conducted two times to further investigate their questionnaire responses and what they wrote in their journal entries. The results showed that low proficiency learners increased oral fluency, syntactic complexity, lexical complexity, and syntactic accuracy through repeating the same task within a single session, and syntactic complexity and lexical complexity through repeating the same type of task during the academic year. The aural input between the first, second, and third performance can lead them to draw their attention to form-meaning connections, resulting in increased oral performance. In addition, low and intermediate beginners benefited in increasing oral fluency, syntactic complexity, and syntactic accuracy, while high beginners benefited in improving oral fluency and lexical complexity under pre-task and on-line planning conditions with repetition during the academic year. The study suggests that the combined use of pre-task planning, on-line planning, and task repetition have a cumulative effect and can facilitate the development of oral fluency, syntactic complexity, lexical complexity, and syntactic accuracy for low proficiency high school learns of English. If learners are given the opportunity to plan before and during task performance with repetition, and to make the condition that draws their attention to both form and meaning, it is the most effective strategy to improve oral fluency, syntactic complexity, lexical complexity, and syntactic accuracy in task-based teaching in the classrooms. / Language Arts