International mathematics assessments have established students in East Asia as among the best in the world and their U.S. counterparts as mediocre. What is not clear is why this “achievement gap” exists. The last major study to address this question, Stevenson and Stigler’s (1992) The Learning Gap, was published prior to empirical and methodological advances in international comparative research on education. Prevailing wisdom points to unverified differences in cultural beliefs, which often leads to defeatist conclusions. This dissertation offers a fresh perspective by applying sociological theory and methods to the issue. Specifically, I rely on underutilized data from the 2003 and 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) of fourth graders to compare educational systems across three major factors that influence math achievement: curriculum, teachers and parents. My main empirical findings are that there is greater uniformity of math instruction across classrooms in the participating East Asian nations of Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan than in the U.S. and that, among all participating educational systems, average achievement tends to be higher in those with greater uniformity of instruction. The implication is that the institutional arrangements that allow for less uniformity of instruction across classrooms in the U.S. might be partially responsible for the gap. Cross-regional differences in teacher effectiveness might also account for part of the gap, as three-level, hierarchical linear models of achievement in each nation indicate that U.S. math teachers are less effective than their East Asian counterparts—even after the quantity of instruction provided is taken into account. The main theoretical contribution is an alternative explanation for the apparent cross-regional disparity in the proportion of involved parents, which highlights how schools can make a difference in whether or not parents become involved. Such an approach promises a way out of the dead-end reached by previous theorists. However, this dissertation also draws attention to the limitations of the existing data. At present, there is not enough information available to substantiate the policy recommendations made in previous studies. As such, a central aim of this dissertation is to put research onto sounder methodological footing. / Sociology

<p> College student mental health is a significant issue for educational leaders, as mental health needs are increasing in prevalence and severity (ACHA, 2013; Gallagher, 2013). Eisenberg, Downs, Golberstein, and Zivin (2009) note that mental health issues cause adverse occupational, academic and social outcomes, impacting student success, retention, and persistence (Belch, 2011; Cleary, Walter, &amp; Jackson, 2011). Anxiety and depression, which are more prevalent in women (ADAA, 2007; APA, 2013), are the most common mental health issues affecting college students (ACHA, 2013; Gallagher, 2013). </p><p> Coyne and Downey (1991) correlated social support with improved mental health outcomes. Baron (2010) indicated that involvement in student organizations may promote development and connection, thereby enhancing learning and retention (Chambliss &amp; Takacs, 2014). Female students may engage in campus life by joining sororities, which are prominent and influential on many campuses (Lien, 2002). The purpose of this research was to investigate sorority member mental health, specifically anxiety and depression. The relationships between anxiety, depression, and student characteristics were examined. </p><p> This correlational, ex-post facto study explored the presence and severity of anxiety and depression of women (N =72) who self-identified as living in sorority housing. Permission was obtained to review data from the 2013-2014 Healthy Minds Study (Eisenberg &amp; Lipson, 2014), including demographic information and results from the PHQ-9 (Kroenke, Spitzer, &amp; Williams, 2001) and the GAD-7 (Spitzer, Kroenke, Williams, &amp; L&ouml;we 2006). Data analyses produced frequencies, correlations, and t-tests. </p><p> Findings revealed the following: 20% of respondents reported anxiety, with 8% percent reporting severe anxiety; 15% of respondents reported depression, with 5% reporting major depression. Financial difficulty was correlated with depression (<i>r</i> =.27, <i>r²</i>=.07, <i> p</i>=.008) and a significant relationship existed between the presence of anxiety and depression (<i>r²</i>=.36, <i> r</i>2=.13, <i>p</i>=.004). No statistically significant difference existed in reported symptoms of anxiety and depression of women residing in sorority housing compared to those residing elsewhere. Information about mental health may assist sororities in providing support and resources to members. Educational leaders, mental health practitioners, faculty, and student affairs staff can also benefit from this information as they work to help address student mental health needs, student retention, persistence, and success. </p>

<p> The 2011 East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami suddenly took the homes, family members, friends, and familiar neighborhoods away from the children of Iwate. In the midst of this difficult situation, early childhood development (ECD) programs provided protective environments for the young children to access continuous care and development opportunities. This case study examines how these daycare centers in Iwate prepared for, responded to, and coped with the severe natural disaster, providing physical, cognitive, and psychosocial protections to these children.</p><p> The study re-affirmed that daycare centers in Iwate had integrated the national standards for disaster risk reduction (DRR). On the day of the disaster, personnel safely evacuated the children while practicing monthly drills. Despite the challenges, the daycare programs quickly re-established normalcy in children&rsquo;s lives, ensuring continuous access to care. Not only did daycare personnel act in loco parentis for these children, but also re-installed daycare programs during the recovery.</p><p> The study revealed that local governments also faced serious challenges in their leadership and coordination roles. Their response capacities had been severely affected by the disaster. Governments&rsquo; appropriate and timely guidance was most beneficial for the daycare providers. Among other recommendations, I assert that in the future, local governments could take more active roles in coordinating the massive influx of humanitarian organizations. </p><p> This interpretivist research was based on my one-year fieldwork in Iwate immediately after the disaster, and employed a series of survey instruments (questionnaires and interviews). This case study contributes to the field of education and ECD in emergencies through the use of qualitative, ethnographic research. It also recognizes significant and complimentary contribution of qualitative inquiry methods, including on-site fieldwork, ethnographic analyses, and follow-up interviews, for better understanding of crisis situations.</p><p> While pre-school programs are not compulsory in Japan, the study calls attention to the valuable protection that they provide for both young children and their childhoods in emergencies. A recovery strategy that focuses on protective environments for children has great potential as a harmonizing approach, rather than as a parallel one, in the complex nature of humanitarian assistance. </p>

<p> The purpose of the qualitative phenomenological study was to describe the phenomenon of being a student-parent by identifying the lived experiences of nursing students that are parents, specifically their perceptions of their experiences of how they balance their family life with their academic life successfully. Two participants were involved in the pilot test and 21 main study participants were included in the sample. The data obtained through semi-structured one-on-one interviews were analyzed using Giorgi&rsquo;s method of phenomenological research. The findings of this study identified eight themes resulting from descriptions provided by the student-parents while in undergraduate nursing school and included: (1) <i>All challenges are subjective to the personal circumstance</i> reflecting the unique home situation, (2) <i>Unmet personal expectations occur while in nursing school</i> through role conflict and guilt, (3) <i>Post-secondary education has particular demands</i> through financial and academic obligations, (4) <i>Support is essential to nursing school success</i>, (5) <i> Processes enabling student-parent success</i> contain compromises and strategizing balance with flexibility, (6) <i>Interactions and outcome from negative spillover</i> imbalance family and academic obligations, (7) <i>Organization culture of campus attributes to the student-parent perspective</i>, and (8) <i>Participant recommendations to stakeholders </i>. The essence of the student-parent experience influenced a formation of a comprehensive model, titled PARENTS to inform campus leaders of strategies to enhance the student-parent experience and accommodate family influences brought to campus. Future qualitative research suggestions include exploring support systems of student-parents, children experiences of student-parents, and campus stakeholder perspectives of breastfeeding and parent planning and family-centred accommodation on campus.</p>

<p> With a focus on socioeconomic issues considered important by the international students in the host nation, this study asks two research questions: How do United States and Canadian universities provide information on immigration policies that address the socioeconomic issues pertaining to international students? How are American and Canadian universities similar and different in the information they provide on immigration policies on socioeconomic issues pertaining to international students? Five universities each from U.S. and Canada that received most international students were purposively selected. A qualitative content analysis was conducted on the websites of the universities. The U.S. and Canadian universities are similar in the approach of presenting policies on employment and costs of education, and different in regard to the focus on immigration policies and international students' immigration status maintenance in the presentation of the policies. Despite presenting restrictive U.S. immigration policies, international students have selected the U.S. universities for their higher education. Conversely, the presentation of flexible Canadian immigration policies has seemingly helped in the enrollment of international students in the Canadian universities.</p>

This study is about the school teachers’ positions in contemporary Swedish society. In order to grasp the social characteristics of their profession and its transformations it has been important to conduct thorough analyses of the recruitment of teacher students and the recruitment to the teaching professions. The explanations to the findings are mainly based on analyses of how different kinds of assets – such as for example cultural capital and educational capital – are distributed among the students and within the school teacher corps. The data material consists of individual based statistic of all teachers 1978–2008 and all students enrolled in higher education 1977–2009, and of interviews with teachers and students. Regarding theory and methods, the study belongs to the sociological tradition founded by Pierre Bourdieu, which means that capital, strategies and social space are key concepts. The statistical techniques employed comprise mainly of different variants of correspondence analysis as well as logistic regression. As shown in the first part of the thesis an increasing share of the teacher students possess small amounts of acquired school capital, as well as weak resources inherited from their parental home. This change has been especially noticeable within the programmes educating upper secondary school teachers. In the second part, the focus is on the social positions of those upper secondary teachers. The correspondence analyses indicate a cleavage within the profession based on the teachers’ qualification and merits. Teachers richer in educational capital tend to occupy more stable professional positions and are also overrepresented at schools where the pupils feature significant educational and social assets, which in turn further contributes to the density of educational capital. One of the main results is that school teachers have been exposed to two partly opposing processes during the past decades. On the one hand, there has been increasing homogeneity, namely convergences between the employment conditions of different categories of school teachers and between different teacher education programmes. On the other hand, the social divergences within the profession tend to widen. Those gaps have increased over time because of the more differentiated school system and changes in recruitment patterns.

<p> In light of the paradigm shift from teacher-centered to learner-centered instruction occurring globally, the need for committed teachers is critical. Due to the influx of foreign nationals securing positions in the U.S. educational system, the teacher workforce has become more diverse. This diversity manifests a broad range of beliefs and values in regard to the teaching and learning process that are culturally inherited by an individual. Hence, "cultural incongruence" between the teacher and school organization is more likely to occur. A lack of understanding of how the cultural and educational aspects of normative commitment influences teachers' implementation of learner-centered instructional practices can lead to school systems experiencing organizational conflict. </p><p> Six multicultural English-as-a-second language teachers, three males and three females, representing six countries were purposely selected to participate in the study. The normative commitment survey from Meyer and Allen (2009) Three Component Model of Organizational Commitment, professional performance documents and a semi structured interview served as the data collection methods. The interview data was analyzed using Laughlin et al. (2006) to the start coding process. The information gathered from the surveys and professional review documents was triangulated with the interview data to evaluate consistencies or inconsistencies amongst the sources. The data yielded six reoccurring themes throughout the study. (1) Cultural Congruence, (2) Cultural Incongruence, (3) Paradigm Shifts in Teacher Training, (4) Pedagogical Identity Manifestation, and (5) Societal Obligation. Further, the findings of this study can contribute to the development of cultural educational training with a focus on instructional methodology for school districts with high English-as-a-second language populations. These findings can also be used in the hiring process in order to evaluate potential organizational congruence.</p>

The purpose of this dissertation is critically to illustrate discursive recontextualization between sociocultural production and reproduction, with respect to both relations within and relations to music education in Swedish upper-secondary school. The starting point for the study is the Swedish upper-secondary school reform, Gy 2011, which has involved a marked reformulation of the agenda for music education in upper-secondary school. The general Artistic Activities disappeared, at the same time as the significance of a specialising education in the field was strengthened. This dissertation is driven by the desire to understand the results of the upper-secondary school reform by explaining the processes and principles involved. But, in a wider perspective, the dissertation deals not only with a single reform, but encompasses a search for the underlying principles that have had, and are having, a regulating effect on the design and positioning of music in publicly regulated education. The results show that structuring of the subject of music takes place primarily through the classification and framing of social relationships in general, and of interactional relationships in particular. The focus of these relationships has shifted from time to time, and varies from context to context, but has always been in relation to something that has been regarded as sacred. In recent times, the framing within music-oriented knowledge practices has become weaker. At the same time, such knowledge practices have shown an increasing need for the drawing of boundaries in relation to other knowledge practices. The latter also has a value in explaining why general music content was removed from the upper-secondary school curriculum, whereas a special and specialising educational programme was able to gain legitimacy.

This thesis focuses on changes in the value of educational capital over time. Taking as a point of departure Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of a multidimensional social space, the thesis examines how this value is affected when educational assets—through the democratization of education—are becoming more widespread across this space (i.e. the population). The studies are based on datasets from Statistics Sweden, comprising the complete censuses of 1960 to 1990, LISA-registers, and registers of wealth and income. Different approaches are employed: the use of the Gini-coefficient to catch changes in the distribution of education; comparative models to investigate cohorts at different points in time; and specific multiple correspondence analysis to study the distribution of several assets simultaneously.  Three aspects are explored: the distributions, returns, and uses of education. Firstly, while there is a steady increase in the average number of years of schooling, there is a different pattern in the development of the distribution of education. Three phases were distinguished: one of increasing levels of inequality, one of decreasing inequality, and one in which the inequality levelled out. Secondly, the returns of education have diminished as far as economic gains are concerned, causing a fracture between different social generations, at the same time as the returns in a wider social sense have remained relatively stable. However, the relative stability hides crucial discrepancies. Groups with the lowest level of education are further marginalized and distances between ‘economic’ and ‘cultural’ groups are growing. Thirdly, in their modes of using the educational system, there are glaring differences between the economic elite and the cultural elite, although both utilize prestigious educational institutions as sites of social reproduction. The fundamental difference consists in that exclusive educational strategies are not as necessary to the dominant fraction of the economic elite. Their children are able to choose more freely among the offers of higher education.  The paradoxical development of the value of education is that while the absolute value of educational capital has decreased in general, the differences in relative value persist.

<p> Ample data exists indicating that immigrant-origin students are underperforming in education at all levels. In particular, immigrant-origin students are disproportionally the least prepared for higher education. As a result, a majority of these students begin their academic careers at community colleges where they enroll in remedial courses at rates far higher than those for other student populations. Such is the common pathway for immigrant-origin students entering an Urban Public University system (UPU). Research tells us that students who enter college academically underprepared and who struggle in introductory courses are more likely to drop out or withdraw, thus lowering their chances of earning a degree. This dissertation examines the intermediate variables associated with retention and academic achievement during a critical juncture in the college experience: remedial English.</p><p> This case study will focus on the institutional context in which the student experience takes place juxtaposed with the student perspective of remedial English. Thus, the overarching research question is: How do English remediation policies and practices (with regard to admissions, placement, testing and remediation classroom experiences) at a large public institution shape the student experience and how does the experience contribute to academic achievement?</p><p> In hopes of capturing a comprehensive understanding of the intermediate factor of remedial English, I designed my research with the entirety of the UPU system in mind. To gain the greatest insights into how enrollment in remedial English can influence the academic achievement of immigrant students at UPU, I asked the following research questions: Q1. What are the perceptions of faculty and administrators about remedial English policies and practices and their role in structuring the experiences, opportunities and impediments for immigrant-origin students in community college? Q2. What are students' perceptions of remedial English policies and practices and their role in structuring experiences, opportunities and impediments in community college? Q3. How do faculty, administrators, and students perspectives converge and diverge regarding the experiences, opportunities and impediments for immigrant-origin students in remedial English? By increasing our focus on immigrant-origin students in developmental writing courses, we may contribute positively to student retention and academic achievement overall. Additionally, this study may serve a national purpose by providing critical insights to advance the "completion agenda" endorsed by the federal government as well as numerous private foundations and advocacy groups that share the goal of drastically improving college graduation rates particularly in community colleges by 2020.</p>