How might learning principles be leveraged in learning environment designs to support increased academic success amongst traditionally underserved learners? This intervention is an example of a learning design that has successfully supported the recovery of credit amongst traditionally underserved students who previously failed introductory biology. This study sought to better understand potential relationships between the design components (program dynamics) and student success. The results show that the Blue group (students with the highest final course grade), on average, produced more words in their summaries and annotated more main ideas and supporting evidence items than their Green and Beige counterparts. After four-weeks, some students were able to articulate functions relating to the embedded support tools. Patterns do not appear to exist in support function awareness amongst students by performance groups. No discernable awareness characteristics distinguished successful and less successful students in the intervention.

In response to persistent inequities in the education of English learner-classified (EL-classified) students, scholars have increasingly called for the preparation of educators who are able to disrupt dominant hierarchies of language and knowledge in schools. One concept that has been developed to describe what it takes to disrupt these hierarchies is ideological clarity (Bartolomé & Balderrama, 2001), which refers to a process of critical and consistent reflection on ideologies underlying practice. Though scholars assert that ideological clarity will act as a catalyst for more equitable practice, this scholarship rarely makes explicit the policy contexts in which educators work. This is a glaring oversight, given that, in some cases, these policies have proven to act as a constraint on educators’ ability to engage in the kind of equitable instructional practices that scholars of ideological clarity praise. At the same time, educational language policy can also be an important lever for remediating inequities for linguistically marginalized students. In this dissertation, I explore the intersection of the processes of ideological clarity and policy sensemaking in the context of English language development (ELD) policy, a core component of contemporary policies intended for EL-classified students. In this relational and exploratory qualitative study (Ravitch & Carl, 2016), I illuminate the strategies that equity-focused educators engaged in to navigate the complexities of ELD policy. I identified four policy navigating strategies that reflected a spectrum of advocacy for EL-classified students: building allies, buffering, building student and family agency, and reimagining. Additionally, I found that educators were more willing to experiment with their agency in the context of ELD policy when they treated their own professional vision as an important object of their reflection when they were engaged in ideological clarity. In outlining the implications of these findings, I emphasize that while educators can resist harmful implementations of ELD policy, engaging in these strategies can carry varying personal and professional risk for educators. Thus, I also call for teacher educators, policymakers, and researchers to advocate for systemic changes that would make these strategies less necessary, or at least less risky, for educators who are pursuing educational language equity for EL-classified students.

This dissertation works builds rich understanding of why some community college developmental mathematics instructors perform better than their peers. We take up this work in Statway, a community college developmental mathematics course. To identify positive outer instructors, we use Hierarchical Linear Modeling and Empirical Bayes estimation to find instructors whose results are at least one standard deviation above the mean in math achievement with underprepared students. To build theoretical understanding of what accounts for positive deviance, we explore differences in instructor knowledge, with a particular focus on mathematical knowledge for teaching. Findings from our study of eleven Statway instructors (six positive outliers and five non-positive outliers) suggest that heightened empathy and heightened pedagogical agility in anticipating and responding to student challenges may be two key factors accounting for positive outliers’ successful outcomes. Our work offers several important contributions: it builds on our knowledge of mathematical knowledge for teaching by highlighting the role of instructor empathy and agility in deploying instructional knowledge; it highlights the importance of mathematical knowledge for teaching in the community college setting, a context not yet explored in the mathematical knowledge for teaching literature; it contributes rich understanding of effective instruction in community college developmental mathematics classrooms, especially in regards to instructional empathy and agility; and it offers new ways of studying variation in educational settings, as we examine the granular nature of positive outliers, focusing on the how and the why of what they do to understand the nature of their deviance.

Today, community college students are tasked with making high-stakes decisions about their major and career paths in a very complex and confusing decision-making environment, often without adequate labor market knowledge and career guidance which can have a direct impact on their future earnings, employment, and mental health (Baker, Bettinger, & Marinescu, 2018; Scott-Clayton, 2015; Rosenbaum, Deil-Amen & Person, 2006; Wolniak et al, 2008). This study utilized a mediated-action approach (Penuel & Wertsch, 1995) to examine the career development and decision-making processes of community college students. Researching the action of choosing a major and career path, rather than the individual making the decision, enabled the researcher to foreground structural and contextual affordances and barriers and provided a window into how students construct coherence (Erickson, 1968) in a complex decision-making environment (Baker et al., 2018). For the participants in this study, making a decision about their major and career path required navigating a dynamic and shifting labor market (Fouad & Bynner, 2009), a complex ecosystem of postsecondary credentials (Carnevale, Garcia, & Gulish, 2017), and various contextual and structural affordances, barriers, and constraints (Duffy, Blustein, Diemer, & Autin, 2016). For many participants, this complexity was confounded by a lack of labor market knowledge and knowhow (Baker et al., 2018); sociopolitical barriers and previous schooling experiences (Diemer, 2009; Duffy et al., 2016); efforts to balance peers, family obligations, and work (Saenz et al., 2018); and experiences in classes, especially math and science, that impacted their self-efficacy and outcome expectations (Baker et al., 2018; Lent & Brown, 2013; Lent, Hackett, & Brown, 2000). The findings of this study suggest that community college students need: (a) access to labor market knowledge and knowhow; (b) differentiated career guidance and career exploration opportunities; (c) career guidance that extends into the classroom and is contextualized in disciplinary learning; (d) opportunities to explore and cultivate their sociopolitical development across career fields; (e) career guidance focused on developing their career adaptability; and (f) emotional and psychological support to navigate the stress, anxiety, and uncertainty they report feeling throughout their career development and decision-making processes.

Background

Methods

Results

Conclusions