Enrollment in K-12 online courses continues to rise substantially each year (Evergreen Education Group, 2015). As the number of students taking courses online increases, the number of parents parenting in online courses also increases. This qualitative exploratory case study, bounded by the online program that was studied, was performed to better understand parents’ perceptions of their roles in online high school mathematics courses. Eighty-seven parents participated in an online questionnaire which elicited both quantitative and qualitative responses. Guided by the major tenets of symbolic interactionism theoretical framework, these responses were combined with data from six interviews to investigate why parents chose to enroll their children in online mathematics courses, their expectations pertaining to the online mathematics course, and their perceived roles and responsibilities in the online mathematics course. Through a detailed process of analyzing the questionnaire and interview data, nine themes emerged: (a) participant parents enrolled their children in online mathematics courses to remove their child from a negative social environment and to avoid distractions in the traditional setting; (b) participant parents want their children to have the flexibility to work ahead of their peers; (c) the school should provide quality curriculum and resources for teachers, students, and parents; (d) teachers should identify and address when students need help; (e) teachers should be available and approachable; (f) students should put forth their best effort; (g) students should ask for help when they experience difficulty understanding a new concept; (h) participant parents monitor to make sure their children are completing assignments and asking for help; and (i) participant parents help their children by re-teaching mathematics concepts or encouraging the child to seek help from others. This study has theoretical and practical significance by adding to literature investigating parental roles in mathematics education and providing insight on the nature of parental involvement in an online high school mathematics program. Consistent with relevant literature (Currie-Rubin & Smith, 2014; Curtis, 2013; Thurber, 2013), results of this study call upon educators to invest in efforts that enhance understanding of parents’ perspectives in an effort to strengthen parental involvement in online mathematics courses. INDEX WORDS: Mathematics, Online learning, Online mathematics, K-12 online learning, Virtual learning, Parental involvement, Parental engagement, Parental roles, Interactions, Teacher responsibilities, Student responsibilities, Success, Perceptions of success, Flexibility

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Eugene Vasserman / Computer science departments face numerous challenges. Enrollment over the past 15 years reached an all-time high, endured a rapid decline and is now experiencing a just as rapid rebound. Meanwhile, demand for graduates continues to grow at an incredible rate. This is especially true in specialized sub-fields such as cybersecurity, where employers are constantly working to keep up with changing technology and new threats emerging on a daily basis. My research consists of two main objectives. The rst is gauging the ability of pre-service teachers from non-STEM areas of study to introduce and utilize computing concepts in a classroom setting. The second goal is to develop an assessment tool that enables improvements in quality of education for students within cybersecurity courses. Currently, few K-12 school districts in the United States o er stand-alone courses in computer science. My work shows that pre-service teachers in non-STEM areas are capable of effectively introducing basic concepts to students using modern software development tools while exploring content within their own areas of expertise. Survey results indicate that student interest and self-efficacy increased when they were taught by these pre-service teachers. I also found that with only 2 hours of experience, pre-service teachers enrolled in an education technology course showed dramatic increases in interest and confidence related to using this technology. These two findings demonstrate that there are potential ways to increase interest in computing among a broad student population at the K-12 level without changing core curriculum requirements. Even when students choose to enter computer science departments, a large number do not remain within the program. The second portion of my research focuses on developing an assessment tool for measuring student interest and self-efficacy in cybersecurity courses. Using information gleaned from a series of interviews with cybersecurity students, I developed, and performed the initial testing of, a survey instrument which measures these 2 values. Initial results show that the survey responses were very different between a group of introductory programming students and those enrolled in a cybersecurity course and that general trends in both self-efficacy and interest among theses differing student populations can be observed

<div> <p>In order to achieve broadening participation in computer science and other careers related to computing, middle school classrooms should provide students opportunities (tasks) to think like a computer scientist. Researchers in computing education promote the idea that programming skill should not be a pre-requisite for students to display computational thinking (CT). Thus, some tasks that aim to deliberately elicit students’ CT competency should be stand-alone tasks rather than coding fluency-oriented tasks. Guided by this approach, this assessment design process began by examining national standards in CT. A Q-matrix (i.e., item–attribute alignment table) was then developed and modified using (a) literature in CT, (b) input from subject-matter experts, and (c) cognitive interviews with a small sample of students. After multiple-choice item prototypes were written, pilot-tested, and revised, 15 of them were finally selected to be administered to 564 students in two middle schools in the Mid-western US. Through cognitive diagnostic modeling, the estimation results yielded mastery classifications or subscores that can be used diagnostically by teachers. The results help teachers facilitate students’ <i>mastery orientations</i>, that is, to address the gap between what students know and what students need to know in order to meet desired learning goals. By equipping teachers with a diagnostic classification based assessment, this research has the capacity to inform instruction which, in turn, will enrich students’ learning experience in CT. </p> </div> <br>

Poster presentation from the Living the Future 7 Conference, April 30-May 3, 2008, University of Arizona Libraries, Tucson, AZ. / The University of Arizona has many useful resources for K-12 instructors that have been developed by different programs and departments and, until now, have been difficult to locate. The UA Libraries has developed a new resource called LessonLink that pulls together over 100 online resources for K-12 instructors. With this rich database, teachers only need to go to one site to access this material selected by a UA librarian for relevancy and applicability. Instructors can locate lesson plans, content for classroom activities, information about UA onsite campus visits, classroom visits from UA faculty and grad students, and programs for professional development. Teachers can search this database by subject and grade level. This poster will describe why and how this resource was developed, how it works, and its potential for outreach.

Thesis advisor: Katherine L. McNeill / Recent K-12 science reforms necessitate a shift in curriculum and instruction to support coherence from the students’ perspective. This coherence emerges when students see their science work as addressing and making progress on their questions and problems. Storyline curricular units afford student coherence, but teachers need support to craft coherent instruction from storyline materials. This three-paper dissertation involved research into one teacher’s storyline design work. The first empirical paper explores how one expert teacher interpreted the storyline materials as he planned for enactment. I used interaction and thematic analysis to identify key sources of tension that the teacher engaged with as he made sense of the storyline materials for epistemic agency. Three key sources of tension were: curricular coherence and student coherence-seeking; equitable participation and incremental building of science ideas; and singular or different forms of epistemic agency in discussions. Over time, the teacher grappled more deeply with these tensions and learned to leverage them to share epistemic agency with students. The second empirical paper documents how the same expert teacher designed instruction during enactment as students’ sensemaking diverged from the storyline plans. I engaged in interaction analysis to identify and describe particular episodes of storyline activity where the teacher shared epistemic agency with students in these divergences. The teacher engaged in principled improvisation related to the students’ interactive role, the science ideas they raised, and the experimental errors they experienced. Each episode involved the teacher’s efforts to work with students' divergences with an eye toward leveraging the storyline designs to share epistemic agency. The third paper, which is conceptual, provides an initial image of the Teacher-Storyline relationship. This relationship involves the teacher’s use of storyline materials to design and enact instruction with the goal to be coherent for students. The relationship concerns the teacher, the storyline materials, the participatory interactions between the two, and the subsequent planned and enacted storyline that is an outgrowth of this relationship. It has implications for ‘opening up’ curricular materials and for designing curriculum-based professional learning. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

This dissertation uses a three-manuscript style, and the ultimate purpose was to support critical thinking teaching in K-12 education from a systematic view concerning the lack of critical thinking in the young generation. The three manuscripts included in this dissertation were entirely or partly adapted based on three published or submitted research papers. The first research paper is a literature review article with an introduction to a development framework of nine principles, which provided a new view to developing critical thinking in younger children based on conceptual understanding of critical thinking. The second research paper is a study I coauthored with J. Michael Spector, which calls for more attention to the development of human intelligence given the rapid development of artificial intelligence and proposed that developing inquiry and critical thinking is a key to develop human intelligence. The third research paper reports an investigation over middle school educators' conceptualization of critical thinking and its alignment with the established theory and research. The major purpose was to connect the established theory and research with educational practices regarding what critical thinking constitutes. The significance of this study is to reveal the issues behind the abstract understanding of critical thinking and address the insufficient critical thinking teaching phenomenon from the perspective of educational practices.

The purpose of this dissertation in practice is to address the problem of online credit recovery. Although online enrollments have skyrocketed in recent years and all preliminary research indicates a large percentage of those enrollments are from students seeking credit recovery, much of the curriculum currently being offered is not research-based. Following a literature review focused on the history of credit recovery as well as successful current methods, we designed CRIT (Credit Recovery Instructional Treatment), a research-based approach to curriculum design for credit recovery. CRIT is a standards based curriculum relying on criterion based assessments. This approach was then applied in the creation of specific curriculum for English 4 credit recovery and as a general approach for all subjects. A step by step evaluation plan for current and proposed approaches for credit recovery was then defined. Additionally, we provide a detailed implementation strategy specific to our organization but easily retrofitted for other organizations. We focus on the organization of Florida Virtual School (FLVS), a state run K-12 virtual school run as a special school district in Florida because it is a familiar organization; however, the model and results may be generalizable for online or traditional education.

The purpose of this dissertation in practice is to address the problem of online credit recovery. Although online enrollments have skyrocketed in recent years and all preliminary research indicates a large percentage of those enrollments are from students seeking credit recovery, much of the curriculum currently being offered is not research-based. Following a literature review focused on the history of credit recovery as well as successful current methods, we designed CRIT (Credit Recovery Instructional Treatment), a research-based approach to curriculum design for credit recovery. CRIT is a standards based curriculum relying on criterion based assessments. This approach was then applied in the creation of specific curriculum for English 4 credit recovery and as a general approach for all subjects. A step by step evaluation plan for current and proposed approaches for credit recovery was then defined. Additionally, we provide a detailed implementation strategy specific to our organization but easily retrofitted for other organizations. We focus on the organization of Florida Virtual School (FLVS), a state run K-12 virtual school run as a special school district in Florida because it is a familiar organization; however, the model and results may be generalizable for online or traditional education.

Thesis advisor: G. Michael Barnett / Many stakeholders emphasize the importance of diverse populations’ participation in the sciences, though the motivations for this vary. Some reference an economic standpoint by emphasizing the importance of either recruiting more science workers to compete in a global economy, or of individual financial success for people from historically marginalized groups. However, a growing body of researchers and educators has emphasized the importance of increasing representation from historically marginalized communities in science because their exclusion from discussions about science funding, research, and implications has resulted in widespread harm to communities. The goal of this research is to broaden science participation for the purposes of democracy and strong equity. This work expands on the Democratic Science Teaching (DST) framework, articulated by Basu & Calabrese Barton in 2010. While the original work articulated a theory by identifying goals and practices in existing science classrooms, this work explores the possibilities of using DST as a framework for teacher learning.This dissertation consists of three papers. Paper 1 details the development of an instrument to measure teaching practices aligned with democratic science teaching. The instrument could be used and built on by researchers, teacher educators, and school leaders who wish to use tools to develop democratic accountability in their systems. Paper 2 is a case study exploring how teacher beliefs and actions are activated through interaction with the DST framework. The study follows one novice physics teacher who participated in a DST-aligned professional learning fellowship for one academic year. Paper 3 is a practitioner-facing piece that functions as a starting point for teachers who are interested in developing democratic teaching practices in their own classrooms. The paper outlines the DST framework for teachers, explores how a photo-journal project supported students in making connections between their personal lives and science content, and presents other strategies used by teachers to bolster student voice, shared authority, and critical science literacy. Altogether, these papers offer understanding of teachers’ experiences as they work with the DST framework as learners, and provide tools for science teachers, teacher educators, and other education leaders to develop DST-aligned programming, and more broadly consider democratic and holistic systems of accountability for teachers. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

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