Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Religious education Education, Secondary'

The culture of American education that is largely predicated on acquiring the proverbial golden ticket for entrance to an esteemed college has produced the most anxious, stressed, and sleep-deprived generation ever (Jones & Jones, 2006). As students strive to graduate from high school with perfected profiles that impress and garner admission to these colleges, high school success and educational practices are typically focused on achievement as reflected by test scores, grades, college acceptance results, and scholarship offers (Zins, Bloodworth, Weissberg, & Walberg, 2004). As a result, instead of prioritizing process-oriented learning that is associated with a growth mindset, achievement performance measures focus on extrinsic rewards often linked with a fixed mindset such as grades, scores, rankings, and awards (Dweck, 2006). As students pursue accolades and marks of achievement, various aspects of learning are supplanted including risk, struggle, persistence, resilience, and growth, often at the expense of character, values, integrity, and psychological well-being (Guang, Hanchao, & Kaiping, 2016).

The study revealed the relationship between mindset and psychological well-being for a sample of 123 high achieving, college-bound senior students attending private, college-preparatory Christian high schools in Orange County, California. It also reviews the factors related to the college admission process that affects and shapes the life experiences of these students. Quantitative data reveal the relationships and themes related to mindset and psychological well-being and offer insight and strategies that may promote positive, healthier outcomes for college-bound students as well as topics for future research. This study adds to the current body of knowledge related to implicit theories of intelligence, mindset, adolescent psychological well-being, and social emotional learning.

Furthermore, this study is relevant because it reveals the underlying factors related to the emotional needs of today’s adolescents, providing teachers, counselors, and school administrators with important information that may influence vision, goals, policies, and instruction. The results of this study support the need to reevaluate the effects of the college admission process on adolescent mindset and psychological well-being.

As the continuous search for educational alternatives in Philadelphia intensifies, one only has to look at the current landscape, our surrounding communities, and fiscal pressures to appreciate the need for better alternatives to our public system. This study examines one such “alternative,” though long-standing education model, Philadelphia’s Catholic schools. Within these schools, perhaps we have leaders and a system that may be positioned to play an even greater role in providing a set of experiences that may impact the later life pathways of graduates, potentially predisposing them to community or civic service interests in their adult lives. I have completed an analysis of recollections of Catholic high school graduates across multiple graduation eras and collected insights from their narratives, to help illuminate those potential connection points. Further, unlike many previous longitudinal and correlational studies, in both Catholic and secular schools, I have conducted qualitative research to map earlier student experiences to current-day life practices and dispositions. Through surveys, one-on-one interviews and a focus group with graduates of Philadelphia’s area high schools, I am surfacing findings to determine if graduates are embracing certain values from their experiences and whether and how this may have helped shaped their civic and community interests years later.

This grounded theory study explored the experiences of lay faculty, administration and Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet (CSJ) to capture how the spirit of the CSJ continues in the organizational culture of their sponsored secondary schools. Since 1950, CSJ in the Los Angeles Province, have experienced a very similar decline as other orders of religious across the United States. In order to preserve the culture and history of the CSJ in their sponsored secondary schools, the researcher conducted twenty semi-structured interviews to capture the lived experiences of those currently serving, and those who have served, on the four secondary school campuses.

Utilizing the literature on preserving organizational culture from Edgar Schien, and Lee Bolman and Terrance Deal, the research seemed to conclude that this charism has been preserved even through transitions to lay leadership. A series of seven distinct themes emerged indicating that a CSJ school: consistently incorporates the gospel values into all aspects of the school community; seeks out opportunities to model service to the dear neighbor in how faculty, staff and students serve one another, and in turn impact the broader community; serves a diverse population of students and intentionally creates a culture of unity and support, and a sense of belonging, to cultivate a community of acceptance, love and sisterhood; fosters an environment of excellence through the intentional actions of teachers and leaders to be capacity builders, assisting all young women to become all of “which woman is capable”; recognizes the essential role that leadership plays in fostering a gospel-driven, nurturing environment, evidenced in the faculty, staff and sisters as models; is marked by a spirit of joy and fun that is tangibly felt among the students, the faculty and staff, and throughout the entire school community, and recognizes the challenges with living out the gospel values and being called to building a spirit of unity and love.

The results of the study suggest that the organizational school culture has been able to preserve the charism of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, echoing their foundational spirituality dating back to 1650 Le Puy, France.

There has been very limited research on the possible role religion has in its influence on teacher choices, especially within a Social Science classroom. The purpose of this study was to examine how secondary Social Studies teachers explicitly and implicitly treat religion as a factor in the teaching of history and how their own affinity with/to a religion and beliefs about religious institutions influence their curricular choices. The following research question informed the study: How are teachers’ religious identities, affinities and positionality revealed in their curricular choices?

Through the use of the multiple case study model using interviews, observations and artifacts, this dissertation examined how secondary Social Studies teachers explicitly and implicitly treat religion as a factor in the teaching of history and how their own affinity with/to a religion and beliefs about religious institutions influence their curricular choices. Using the lenses of positionality and presence, while explicitly being aware of American Civil Religion, religious hierarchies and Christian Privilege, this study examined two Atheist/Agnostic teachers in a comprehensive urban high school settings.

The findings are presented as single case studies with a cross case analysis. The analysis of findings found that both teachers did not include religion as a significant factor of history and therefore, did not privilege religion as a topic in their classes. The data showed that both teachers, despite their religious identifications, had internalized Civil American Religion and its alignment with Christianity.

This project, Brothers for Life, is a curriculum of formation designed for seniors at an all-male Lasallian high school so they can join faculty in their efforts to facilitate retreats, prayer, and service activities for younger students. This project takes root in the writings of St. John Baptist de La Salle (the founder of Lasallian schools) which state that students in Christian schools should receive an education that moves the students toward full and abundant lives, not just an accumulation of numbers and facts. To give this project proper shape and direction, the unit design is organized through the Understanding by Design framework created by Wiggins and McTighe (2005, 2011). Through an organized structure that maintains authenticity to the Founder, this project opens the door to a fuller and more abundant life for the students enrolled in the course and by extension, the students and faculty to whom they minister.

Educational leaders have many choices of organizational, curricular, and instructional interventions for academically underprepared high school freshmen. In the past decade, doubled instructional time in core subjects has become an increasingly popular intervention in large public school districts. Results so far have been mixed and there are no studies investigating the effects of this strategy in the private school sector. The purpose of this retrospective, pretest-posttest quasi-experiment with nonequivalent groups was to examine whether significant differences existed in the academic achievement gains of academically underprepared Catholic high school freshmen who received double-dosed mathematics and/or English instruction during ninth grade compared to equally underprepared peers who did not. The study used a dataset of 493 cases from an urban Catholic diocese in the San Francisco Bay Area. Academic achievement data consisted of archived mathematics and reading scores from two standardized, norm-referenced batteries with a published predictive validity metric of r = .83 (pretest: HSPT, posttest: PLAN). Independent t-test, ANCOVA, and ANOVA analyses were conducted to identify differences between group means and variances. Analyses revealed no statistically significant differences in posttest scores in mathematics or reading between the groups, challenging existing assumptions from previous effectiveness findings in the public school sector. The results indicate that, as a stand-alone intervention, doubled instructional time in the core subjects does not accelerate achievement gains for academically underprepared freshmen at urban Catholic high schools.

This study examined the perceived value of academic support service types for post-secondary students with learning disabilities in the Christian higher education milieu. Grounded in a model of service utilization (Pescosolido, 1992), the research methodology applied in this study addressed the following research question: What is the perceived value of academic service types to provide support for individuals with learning disabilities from the perspective of post-secondary student participants, specifically at accredited institutions of the Association for Biblical Higher Education (ABHE)? Results reported student perceptions of the value of academic service types—both personally utilized and theoretically rated. The results of online survey responses, representative of eligible individuals selected by a criterion sampling protocol (N = 116) from 17 colleges and universities, indicated that the categories of accommodations perceived most valuable by students who utilize intervention services were those that were relationally implemented. Student respondents as an aggregate reported personally utilizing all categories of the 16 academic service types set forth by the researcher. Assistive technology was the only category found not to be statistically significant when value rated by survey respondents. Conclusions related to the three qualitative thematic findings emergent from the open-ended survey questions are reported. These qualitative themes include a focus on relational connectedness, the importance of self-understanding, and an expressed concern with the attitudinal perceptions of academic service program offerings. The conclusions of this study are purposed to assist program directors, researchers, and other practitioners in implementing academic services for post-secondary students with learning disabilities.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate whether the lower secondary school teaching in religion leads to a positive understanding and openness, concerning different religions and cultures. We want to study how pupils in grade eight and nine in two lower secondary schools in a multicultural community comprehend different religions. Since we choose a pupils perspective we decided to do a questionnaire to get a wide ground. As a complement we interviewed twelve pupils and also did observations during their religion classes. During our study we focused on three different themes. These themes are the abrahamitic religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) Hinduism & Buddhism and attitudes to religion.

Our theoretical point of view is the intercultural perspective. Therefore we have studied government’s documents and propositions about intercultural education and we have also used an anthology by Pirjo Lahdenperä called Interkulturell pedagogik i teori och praktik (2004). We aim to investigate if the teaching in religion is compatible with the intercultural education.

The thesis reveals that there are lots of prejudices among the pupils in these two schools. We think that it is important that the teaching in religion must focus not only at the Christianity in younger ages. The subject must contain other religions like Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism in much earlier age. Otherwise the pupils will create their own picture of the different religions through media.

The Swedish governments goals about school (LPO 94) and the document about the teaching in religion (kursplanen i religionskunskap) both can, according to us, be used as tools for intercultural education. The problem is that the teachers do not know how to use these tools. The methods of intercultural education must be clearer and the teachers more conscious. Before that happens, we can not state that the education is totally intercultural.

We have a big challenge in front of us when we finally will step out on the labour market!

Over the last decade, many Christian high schools in the United States have been adapting to an exponential increase of Chinese international students. Chinese families have shown increased interest and ability to send their teenage students to American high schools. Public high schools can only host an international student for a year, but private high schools can enroll the students multiple years. There have been few educational research studies for private high schools to refer to if they wanted to read research that would directly aid them in creating supports for their increasing amount of Chinese international students. This study’s purpose was to explore what school supports Chinese international secondary students attending Christian high schools in the United States perceived to be effective. Three Christian high schools in California participated, with a total of 23 Chinese international students completing a questionnaire in which they rated existing schools supports and answered open-ended questions. The students showed overall satisfaction with existing schools supports, while also having many ideas for improvement. The students rated the following supports most highly: opportunities to be in service projects, the performing arts, the opportunity to learn about the Bible in club meetings and camps, teachers providing help for international students, and connection with international student alumni. Students voiced that they strongly desired help building stronger connections with local students, more academic support, and more culturally appropriate food.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand the perceived experience of Chinese students during their first year attending a Catholic co-educational boarding and day school in the United States. Data collection included semi-structured interviews of five current students, a faculty and staff questionnaire, and an analysis of the schedule of events for the new boarding student orientation. The data was analyzed using the inductive method for data analysis. The data showed that Chinese students face challenges in four key areas: 1) academic adjustment; 2) social adjustment; 3) emotional support; and 4) developing autonomy. Differences between Chinese culture and American culture provide challenges across the four key areas, leading culture to be best suited as a lens for analyzing the challenges faced by Chinese students transitioning to life at an American boarding school. There should be continuing research to identify the challenges faced by other ethnic and cultural groups in adjusting to life at boarding schools.