The emergence of machine intelligence, which is superior to the best human talent in some problem-solving tasks, has rendered conventional educational goals obsolete, especially in terms of enhancing human capacity in specific skills and knowledge domains. Hence, artificial intelligence (AI) has become a buzzword, espousing both crisis rhetoric and ambition to enact policy reforms in the educational policy arena. However, these policy measures are mostly based on an assumption of binary human-machine relations, focusing on exploitation, resistance, negation, or competition between humans and AI due to the limited knowledge and imagination about human-machine relationality. Setting new relations with AI and negotiating human agency with the advanced intelligent machines is a non-trivial issue; it is urgent and necessary for human survival and co-existence in the machine era. This is a new educational mandate. In this context, this research examined how the notion of human and machine intelligence has been defined in relation to one another in the intellectual history of educational psychology and AI studies, representing human and machine intelligence studies respectively. This study explored a common paradigmatic space, so-called ‘cyborg space,’ connecting the two disciplines through cross-referencing in the citation network and cross-modeling in the metaphorical semantic space. The citation network analysis confirmed the existence of cross-referencing between human and machine intelligence studies, and interdisciplinary journals conceiving human-machine interchangeability. The metaphor analysis found that the notion of human and machine intelligence has been seamlessly interwoven to be part of a theoretical continuum in the most commonly cited references. This research concluded that the educational research and policy paradigm needs to be reframed based on the fact that the underlying knowledge of human and machine intelligence is not strictly differentiated, and human intelligence is relatively provincialized within the human-machine integrated system.

Transfer students have emerged as a growing student population in higher education. There is a need for higher education professionals to understand the needs of transfer students. In this study, the implemented intervention consisted of restructuring retention programming for first-semester transfer students. This qualitative action research study explored how first-semester transfer students understand and experience academic and social engagement across the semester they participate in retention programming. Students identified perceived barriers and facilitators to engagement. The researcher also examined transfer students’ experiences of the intervention. The findings indicate that students’ understanding of engagement align with their expectations of their first semester and remained consistent throughout the study. One of the biggest perceived barriers to engagement was lack of time. Overall, transfer students found the intervention useful during their transition to a new institution.

The purpose of this action research was to work with Brazilian trained educators in a Community of Practice (CoP) to explore how teachers collectively define and talk about critical thinking (CT). The research also examined how past teaching experiences shaped their attitudes toward emphasizing CT in teaching. In addition, the research studied how participation in a CoP focused on CT changed classroom planning. The study is grounded in Community of Practice and Social Constructivism. As an international school, this study examined related research conducted in Jordan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Pakistan. This qualitative action research was 12 weeks in length with six participants who were all from Brazil and worked at a private bilingual international secondary school. Participants completed an initial interview and final interview. They also completed online journals, which were assembled weekly for 45 minutes, and maximized their efforts constructing a unit plan utilizing the Understanding by Design method. The results of the study describe the teachers’ definition of critical thinking, and also present an understanding of how the CoP shaped their attitudes. This, in turn, resulted in members’ updated classroom planning, which was due to participation in the cohort. Further issues and credibility, contextualization, and transferability as well as researcher positionality were discussed.

Affirmative action is an education policy adopted by higher education institutions in the 1960s, where an applicant’s race is taken into account to some degree when being evaluated for admission to a college or university. The practice of affirmative action, or race conscious-admissions, has been repeatedly challenged in the legal system and remains a controversial and polarizing topic amongst the general public, campus leaders, and policy makers. Despite a vast amount of research on the effects of affirmative action policies on student and institutional behaviors and outcomes, such as college applications and enrollments, considerably less research has examined students’ attitudes towards race-conscious admissions policies. Even less research has focused on students in academic disciplines, especially STEM or engineering. Likewise, there is a paucity of research that explores students’ perceptions and knowledge of how affirmative action is implemented in practice. To address these gaps, this study investigates undergraduate engineering students’ knowledge of and attitudes towards affirmative action admissions policies in higher education. The Student Attitudes Towards Admissions Policies Survey (SATAPS) was designed to assess students’ knowledge of and attitudes regarding affirmative action practices in higher education admissions. This survey was administered to undergraduate engineering students and a comparison group of education students at 42 colleges/universities in the United States. Data were analyzed utilizing confirmatory factor analysis and hierarchical regression. Results demonstrated that students have low levels of knowledge about affirmative action, and have misconceptions about how the policy functions in practice. There was no difference in engineering and education students’ level of support for affirmative action; however, underrepresented minority students in engineering were more supportive of affirmative action. Results also indicated that students’ beliefs and values were the strongest predictors of attitude towards affirmative action, so much so that this negated the significance of demographic and personal characteristics, which was observed in the majority of previous studies. Results highlight a complicated relationship between demographic characteristics, personal variables, knowledge, institutional context, beliefs/values, and attitude towards affirmative action admissions policies in higher education.

In this convergent mixed methods research project, I address the question of why large numbers of college students take women’s studies courses yet are reluctant to major in the field.  Using availability bias and intersectionality as my theoretical framework I hypothesized that the reluctance to declare women and gender studies as a major stems from 1) the failure to see the applicability of the major to career goals and aspirations, 2) social stigma associated with feminism, 3) social location. As a part of my intervention I designed and tested two 10-minute video modules; one on job applicability featuring women studies alumni discussing their career paths and their decision to major in the field, and a second on deconstructing stereotypes about feminism.  The control group was shown a generic video on cinematic representations.  Students were randomly assigned to one of the three groups and administered a pretest and posttest survey designed to measure job applicability, social attitudes about feminism and social location. Interviews were conducted with 6 students. My goal was to better understand perceived practicality of the women’s studies degree, social attitudes about feminism and the

impact of these perceptions as they relate to a student's selection of the major.

My research questions include:  

RQ 1) Among students taking a course in women’s studies, how and to what extent does participation in a module on job applicability influence a student's perceptions of the potential career applicability of the women’s studies degree? 

RQ 2) Among students taking a course in women’s studies, how and to what extent does participation in the module regarding feminism impact a student's perceptions of the value of the women’s studies degree?  

RQ 3) How does one’s social location interact with the findings of RQ’s 1 & 2? 

My sample (n=115) was drawn from students enrolled in online and hybrid courses I taught in the WST program at Arizona State University, the largest such program in the country, drawing over 6,000 students annually. However, the number of majors at 84 students is not commensurate with the growth we are experiencing in terms of enrollment or the popularity of the courses. These research addresses these

My findings showed that the job applicability module increased student knowledge about the applicability of the women and gender studies major and that students had a better overall understanding of the degree in relation to career applicability, while the module about feminism did not have an effect on the choice of major.  My findings suggest that students lack of previous career knowledge in terms of job paths available to WST graduates proved to be an obstacle for our program and intervening may allow for the increase of majors.

The purpose of this action research study was to explore the impact instructional choices had on student participation in the classroom learning environment, growth of knowledge in social studies, and self-efficacy in the learning process. The instructional choices implemented through a flipped learning instructional approach were designed to target motivation and participation in the learning process via individualized student-learning opportunities. This action research study was conducted to compare the effectiveness of collaborative student-centered learning environments to traditional instructional style learning environments. This study provided students with opportunities to analyze, think critically of, and apply studied content in a Participation in Government course to their personal lives through experiential out-of-class assignments and collaborative hands-on in-class activities. The theoretical foundations for this study include social cognitive theory, theory of self-efficacy, and social constructivism. Participants included 32 high school seniors from the High School of Fashion Industries in New York, NY. Participants completed a pre-/post-self-efficacy survey, pre/posttest measuring their knowledge of government, and several short interviews. Eight participants, four from the Treatment group and four from the Control group, completed a semi-structured interview at the conclusion of the study. Results showed participants experienced an increase in self-efficacy and participation in the learning process. Participants from the Treatment group outperformed the participants from the Control group with regards to knowledge of government. In the discussion, outcomes related to the theoretical frameworks and the problem of practice were discussed. Finally, limitations and a discussion regarding future iterations of the action research in a larger context were outlined.

This mixed methods study examined whether participation in a virtual community of practice (vCoP) could impact the implementation of new skills learned in a professional development session and help to close the research to implementation gap.

Six participants attended a common professional development session and completed pre- , mid- , and post-intervention surveys regarding their implementation of social emotional teaching strategies as well as face-to-face interviews.

Both quantitative and qualitative data was examined to determine if participation in the vCoP impacted implementation of skills learned in the PD session. Quantitative data was inconclusive but qualitative data showed an appreciation for participation in the vCoP and access to the resources shared by the participants. Limitations and implications for future cycles of research are discussed.

ABSTRACT

Closing the achievement gap between low-income, marginalized, racially, and linguistically diverse students has proven difficult. Research has outlined the effects of funding on student achievement in a manner that focuses the attention on dollars expended, in order overcome barriers to learning. Arizona has long been recognized for its education funding disparity, and its inability to balance fiscal capacity in a manner that serves to improve educational outcomes.

This dissertation examines how Arizona funds its education system. It measures horizontal inequity in a robust manner by examining those fiscal capacity resources directly related to learning and poverty. Recognizing districts with higher concentrations of special needs students will impact fiscal capacity at the district level, this dissertation applies a non-linear analysis to measure how English language learners/ limited English proficient (ELL/ LEP) student proportionality impacts federal and state revenue per pupil, ELL expenditures per pupil, and total expenditures per pupil.

Using the Gini Ratio, McCloone Index, Coefficient of Variation, and Theil inequality index, this dissertation confirms that significant education funding disparity exists across Arizona’s school districts. This dissertation also shows the proportion of English language learners is negatively related to local revenue per pupil, and ELL expenditures per ELL pupil.

Arizona has characteristically funded the public education system inequitably and positioned its students in a manner that stratifies achievement gaps based on wealth. Targeted funding toward ELLs is in no way meaningfully related to the proportion of ELLs in a district. Conceptually the way in which equity is defined, and measured, may require re-evaluation, beyond correlated inputs and outputs. This conceptual re-evaluation of equity must include the decision making process of administrative leaders which influence the quality of those resources related to student learning.

Over the last fifty years, education funding has been litigated and debated in the United States. In an effort to uncover more into the effects of state dollars on education, I used the guiding research question: did differences in state-level education funding trends in the 1990s affect crime rates? With the help of literature on changing education-funding trends, I selected the timeframe of 1990-1995 because some states and jurisdictions increased their funding while others decreased it. For my research, I outlined the independent variable of per pupil expenditures in order to focus directly on the dollars that impact the individual student, and the dependent variables of burglary, robbery, and motor vehicle theft crime rates because juveniles typically commit these crimes. Unemployment rates and household income served as confounding variables, as these economic factors have been proven to affect crime rates. Using the difference-in-difference method, I was able to test the effect of the implementation of a treatment, increased education funding, on my control and treatment group over the 1990-1995-time period. After running a regression on each of my selected juvenile-specific crime rates, I found my results to be inconclusive; however, by factoring in more confounding variables, I believe this quasi-experimental approach can be repeated to find more solid results.

The current debate over graduate rate calculations and results has glossed over the relationship between student migration and the accuracy of various graduation rates proposed over the past five years. Three general grade-based graduation rates have been proposed recently, and each has a parallel version that includes an adjustment for migration, whether international, internal to the U.S., or between different school sectors. All of the adjustment factors have a similar form, allowing simulation of estimates from real data, assuming different unmeasured net migration rates. In addition, a new age-based graduation rate, based on mathematical demography, allows the simulation of estimates on a parallel basis using data from Virginia's public schools.

Both the direct analysis and simulation demonstrate that graduation rates can only be useful with accurate information about student migration. A discussion of Florida's experiences with longitudinal cohort graduation rates highlights some of the difficulties with the current status of the oldest state databases and the need for both technical confidence and definitional clarity. Meeting the No Child Left Behind mandates for school-level graduation rates requires confirmation of transfers and an audit of any state system for accuracy, and basing graduation rates on age would be a significant improvement over rates calculated using grade-based data.