Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 316-324). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (M.A.)--Eastern Illinois University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 109-123).

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Hamburg, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 276-311).

Thesis (doctoral)--Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg, 1982. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 330-341).

Thesis (M.S.)--Eastern Illinois University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 46-51).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Texas, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 61-63).

Not available / text

Many students in an allied health program at a Middle Eastern Arab university were experiencing difficulties with courses taught in English, resulting in poor academic achievement, low grade point averages, a high failure rate amongst its first year students, and an adverse impact upon a future skilled and educated work force for the region. Tinto's theory of institutional action for students' success served as the conceptual framework for the inquiry that used a qualitative explanatory case study method to examine the experiences of those students who were facing difficulties with their studies. To address questions about why students were failing and leaving the school and how the institution might remedy this educational problem, the study employed initial and follow-up interviews and reviews of academic records and portfolios of 6 currently enrolled or recently graduated students over age 21, who volunteered to participate. Content and thematic analysis of the collected qualitative data produced findings indicative of lack of college readiness among students and gaps in institutional practices such as remedial methods for the unprepared students. Based on the study findings, a policy recommendation for improving the educational practices was introduced to support building a better educational environment at the school. The positive social change implications of this study are not only limited to establishing programs to support the students' success and improve retention rates at the institution but also may include the establishment of more effective approaches to the reform measures of the educational system in the country.

published_or_final_version / Sociology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

In his 2011 article "Florida Reformers Got It Right," William Mattox uses his son Richard as an example of the benefits of hybrid education, or blended learning, which allows students to combine traditional classroom-based instruction with online schooling. Mattox only briefly praises the benefits of his son's opportunity for customized instruction, and he never tells his reader about the types of classes his son took, or how those classes helped his son reach greater achievements in co llege. Instead, he focuses his attention and (and about half his word count) on the network of acquaintances his son was able to develop by choosing a hybrid schooling option, in tum celebrating how those social relationships helped his son succeed in a voter-based talent contest, where the person with the most "likes" wins the award. Hybrid schooling might provide an excellent, customized education for its students, but its more significant feature, according to Mattox, seems to be the way it allows students to create a network where they can tap into a diverse group of markets to leverage the value of their personalities to become successful. While the hybrid schooling experience of Richard Maddox is not typical of most students, the importance of one's personal network and popularity as a form of social currency are typical of students in contemporary classrooms. Students in school today are learning much more than the standard reading, writing, and arithmetic, and they are learning it in different ways. Gone are the days of the distinct public and private spheres where school, work, and home were each given clearly defined spaces. Since the early 1990s, the home has been increasingly intruded upon as technological innovation and the continued growth of the internet have allowed employees and students to work from places other than the office or school (most notably, the home), redefining not only the location, but also the time of work. Work does not need to end at five o'clock, or school at 3:30, because employees and students can complete their work at whatever time is most appropriate to them. Now, more than twenty years after these mobile technologies began their assault on the home, the insulated and separate spheres of home, work, and school are almost completely obliterated. Gilles Deleuze predicted this breakdown in his 1995 "Postscript on Control Societies" in which he asserted that we would welcome the "ultrarapid forms of free-floating control" (178) that have developed to replace those clearly defined spaces. One-to-one programs and instructional models which put a computer or tablet in the hands of every child in a classroom are radically changing the fundamental structures of pedagogy and the roles of educators and students alike in twenty-first century classrooms. These classrooms not only reveal a shift in the way knowledge is transferred and acquired, they reveal a complete transformation in the society for which those pupils are being prepared. The specific closed spaces of Michel Foucault's disciplinary society, each with its individual rules and roles, have evolved into one of greater openness. The shift from the classroom as a closed space to an open, networked place replicates this shift in the larger society of global capitalism. These changes seem to indicate a freer environment that requires less work from the teacher and less concentration from the students, but it actually creates a more controlled environment where more is required of both teachers and students inside of the classroom and out. However, though these increased requirements are perhaps the most obvious outcome of this shift, they are not the only outcome. More significantly, this emerging system of education allows for the development of a new type of student--one who accepts that the creation of her subjectivity is not limited to the classroom, and who actually becomes involved in the formation of that subjectivity through her conflated roles as consumer and producer. Technology is not just opening the classroom. It is repurposing the classroom so that the students' personalities and subjectivities become subsumed in the process of education in preparation for their adult professional lives.