Teaching, Learning, Policy & Leadership Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2759
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Item School District Adoption and Implementation of a Learning Management System: A Case Study Using Rival Theoretical Lenses(2018) Hyde, Laura Highstone; Croninger, Robert; Malen, Betty; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study explored school district adoption and implementation of a learning management system. A substantial body of literature exists on school district data systems. However, this literature is highly rational in its view of data system adoption, and contains limited studies on learning management systems. With these liabilities in mind, this study used rival theoretical lenses from organizational theory, the rational perspective and the institutional perspective, to investigate these central questions: 1) how does a school district adopt and implement a learning management system and 2) how, if at all, do rational theory and institutional theory explain contextual forces and organizational actions in this process? These questions were answered with a single, exploratory case study in a school district that had recently adopted and implemented a learning management system. The multivocal literature that guided this study contains four strands: evaluative, status report, prescriptive, and specialized. Study findings revealed that the district engaged in a three-stage process of adoption, planning, and implementation of a learning management system. Although the rational perspective explained findings that aligned with the multivocal literature in the adoption and planning stages, district actions in the implementation stage were more clearly understood from the institutional perspective. Organizational processes in formalization, coupling, alignment, adaptiveness, and accountability, and external, contextual forces in accountability, privatization, and diffusion of innovation, proved to be salient concepts. These findings suggest that rival, theoretical lenses have utility in an investigation of school district learning management system adoption and implementation.Item Organizational changes in state education agencies: Responses to standards-based accountability(2011) Zhang, Ying; Valli, Linda; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines organizational changes in state education agencies (SEAs) in the context of current standards-based accountability policies. It identifies the changing organizational characteristics of SEAs and depicts the organizational motivations and strategies adopted to bring about change. Based on institutional theory and empirical evidence from state departments of education, the study proposes a theoretical framework that explains the organizational change process. The organizational level analysis illustrates the impact of standards-based accountability policy on the structure and networks of SEAs and highlights the importance of organizational analysis in the policy design process. The study employs a mixed-methods design to investigation the changing experience of state departments of education in the past two decades with a focus on the post-No Child Left Behind era. Together with primary and secondary texts and documents, it draws data from interviews with state officials in ten state departments of education and national surveys of 50 states in 2003, 2004 and 2007. The study identifies internal changes regarding organizational structure, staffing, and technology as well as external changes in terms of their functions and working relationships with other educational agencies. To understand the process of organizational change, the study examines the organizational motivations and strategies that state departments of education used to bring about these changes. The study finds that, since early 1990s, state departments of education have gradually changed their role in the U.S. education system from monitoring finance administration to compliance with federal requirements to provide technical assistance. The organizational structure is changed to increase internal efficiency accompanied by a decrease in administrative staff but an increase in the need for technical staff, particularly staff that can help with the increasing technology in the organizations' data systems. State departments of education developed new relationships with local educational agencies with unprecedented attention on student academic performance and school management. These changes were pushed by both state and federal reforms that highlight the positive role state agencies can play to improve school performance. To make these changes happen, state departments have used networking as a way to expand organizational capacity and pushed cross-level collaboration to improve organizational efficiency.