2024 Doctoral Capstone Projects

With an ever-increasing mental health concerns and social-emotional needs of adolescents, it is more important than ever for schools to go beyond academics, and therefore, it is imperative to provide a universal social-emotional curriculum for students. Despite limited resources and the logistical challenges of scheduling additional content during the academic day, school districts must prioritize social-emotional learning in the same manner as core content as ELA and mathematics. Using a mixed-methods approach, this research study honed in on middle school teachers’ perception of SEL and its impact on student behavior. Qualitative data was collected from self-reflection pre- and post-surveys so that the researcher could better comprehend the depth of teacher’s understanding of SEL and its purpose. Quantitative data was gathered from the surveys to show to identify how effective staff felt an SEL curriculum is for students and to what degree they would be willing to implement an SEL curriculum during the instructional day. Additionally, student behavioral data, in the form of state reportable offenses, was collected before and after the implementation of the School-Connect SEL curriculum and then analyzed and compared to see if there was a causal relationship. Although there was no clear correlation between the SEL curriculum and a decrease in student behavior, there was, however, a positive change in teacher perception of SEL. At the inception of the SEL, general optimism existed as staff expressed a willingness to facilitate SEL lessons and saw value in the curriculum. The post-survey results saw that optimism evolve into enthusiasm to continue with the School-Connect SEL platform, as staff perceived SEL to be effective and were far more willing to facilitate the social-emotional learning lessons with their students. However, the research did not come without limitations, and therefore, further studies are recommended to better understand the impact of SEL on student behavior, and ultimately, student achievement.

Community colleges face unique challenges in educating students due to their open-access policies and the need to retain students through successful completion of courses, especially those identified as barrier courses. This study examined the impact of applying a mandatory tutoring requirement in a first-year writing course to increase course success rates and writing proficiencies. A Communications-121 writing course taught at a community college in Southeastern Pennsylvania was identified as one of the top 10 barrier courses with a low course success rate of 62%. In order to address this issue, a quasi-experimental study was designed to examine the impact of three different tutoring models on course success rates: mandatory, embedded, and voluntary. The study also explored the relationship between at-risk student populations (first-generation, ethnicity, and Pell Grant recipients) and the various tutoring models. The mandatory tutoring intervention used in this quantitative study was not shown to be the best model; however, there was a positive relationship between at-risk students and the mandatory tutoring model. Exit surveys also showed that a majority of students who used tutoring services reported that they would use a tutor in future courses and would recommend tutoring to their classmates.