UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
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Item PRIORITIZING NEW TEACHER RETENTION FOR PRINCIPALS IN HARD TO STAFF DIVERSE SCHOOLS(2024) Lane-Pettway, Kimberly; Eubanks, Segun; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Teacher attrition is a major challenge for public school districts across the country, especially in poor, urban and/or high needs schools. Sixty-one percent of school district superintendents identified teacher retention as a top concern. The majority of the teachers who leave are the new, well-prepared, successful teachers and the mid-career teachers. The study design used a mixed methods approach, with an improvement science methodology and an action research design to explore the principal’s role in the retention of non-tenured effective teachers. The design incorporated a focus group, implementing a teacher retention change strategy/change idea, and a survey to assess the potential influence of the teacher retention change strategy/change idea. The research was conducted in three phases. Phase 1 consisted of a qualitative focus group and brief training. Phase 2 consisted of a qualitative and quantitative implementation of a Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle and the completion of a PDSA instrument. Phase 3 consisted of a quantitative survey. The findings supported that principals do consider the retention of effective teachers to be important, however they are not implementing effective strategies. Findings highlighted that when principals implement specific, research-based retention strategies it can enhance the focus on retaining effective teachers; and it shows promise that it may help to retain new teachers. Two recommendations of this study include identifying new and innovative teacher retention strategies and providing principals with targeted training opportunities in order to enhance collaboration and retention strategy implementation at the school level.Item TEACHER RETENTION AS A PREDICTOR OF STUDENT PERCEPTIONS OF SCHOOL CLIMATE(2024) Miller, Julie Elizabeth; Brantlinger, Andrew; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the relationship between teacher retention and student perceptions of school climate in an urban school district, both in individual school years and across multiple school years. This secondary analysis uses a school-level measure of teacher retention from New York City (NYC) public schools and measures of school climate constructed from the student version of the NYC School Surveys for 2014-2015 through 2018-2019. Specifically, I constructed an overall measure of school climate that was a school-level, unweighted mean and I used exploratory factor analysis which resulted in three factors (Teacher Support, Classroom Behavior, and School Safety). Using linear regression for individual school years, I found teacher retention rates collected in the fall were a significant, positive predictor of school-wide averages of student school climate survey scores collected in the spring. Using a fixed effects regression model of repeated measures I also found a significant, positive relationship between teacher retention and student perceptions of school climate over the five-year period. Teacher retention was a significant positive predictor of the Teacher Support factor in the fixed effects regression of repeated measures for 2015-2016 through 2018-2019 and also in three of the five individual school years. Teacher retention had a significant, positive relationship with the Classroom Behavior factor in each individual school year but was not significantly related in the multi-year model. Teacher retention was not significantly related to the School Safety factor in any individual school year nor in the multi-year model.Item WHY DO THEY STAY? A STUDY OF HIGH SCHOOL MATH AND SCIENCE TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONS OF WORKING CONDITION FACTORS IN A LARGE URBAN SCHOOL DISTRICT(2018) Laney, Nathaniel Richard; Richardson, Patricia M; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In most U.S. school districts, a number of teachers are leaving the profession, and more specifically, math and science teachers. Moreover, school work conditions are important predictors of teacher attrition and it is important to understand both when and how these conditions affect teachers. The purpose of this mixed methods study design was to explore the extent high school mathematics and science teachers perceive the importance of specific working conditions and the principals control level in a large, urban, mid-Atlantic school district. Using purposive sampling the quantitative data collected used an anonymous web based survey distributed to 246 high school math and science teachers at eight high schools while using six items to collect background information (gender, ethnicity, years of teaching experience, certification status, current position, and grade level currently being taught). The qualitative data collected were face-to-face interviews with the eight high school principals for augmenting the survey data with layered and detailed expressions specifically pertaining to teacher retention. The results of the study indicate; teachers perceive pedagogical matters as the most important factors to teacher retention and that principals have a high level of control over the physical plant of a school as a working condition factor that may influence retention. In contrast, the principal identified that they have little to no influence on the physical plant and that it could be a factor to teacher retention for their specific school. However, all of the principals identified professional development and support as working condition factors that were important to teacher retention and that the responsibility was completely under their purview.