This page is intended to inform you about the doctoral dissertation research of my students. Some of their studies are completed, some are in progress, and some are in various stages of proposal development.  I have provided a photograph wherever possible so you can connect a face of a real person with the research.

    Sue Castleberry, Cohort III.  Dissertation Title: Do Alternative Schools Produce Results? Analysis of The Educational Effects of Alternative Learning Environments in Relation To Quality Program Features and Professional Practices. Sue's dissertation was completed in 1997.  She was a full time student working as a graduate assistant. Before that, she was director of an alternative school in Southern Arkansas. So it was natural for her to do a study that focused on alternative education. She is now principal of Valley View High School (she had the jr. hi. principal's job first after completing our program AND after a one-year stint as an administrator with ASU's Upward Bound program). Sue created a new instrument with which she was able to document the organizational design features and quality program indicators that lead to effective alternative schools. Among other things, Sue also measured self esteem, social development, self actualization, academic achievement, attendance and discipline problems among more than 600 regular education (control group) and alternative school students (experimental group) in Mississippi River Delta schools, cooperative arrangements, and stand alone models. For the alternative students, she had "pretest" measures with which to compare their performance after enrollment in alternative education and with their regular education counterparts. On virtually all measures she found that alternative students substantially improved over their prior records and that they made significantly greater gains over their regular education counterparts (being careful, of course, to control for problems associated with doing statistics on gain scores).

 Sharon Taylor, Cohort I. Dissertation Title: School Boards, School Governance and Religious Orientation: How Personal Values Shape Local Education Policy.  Before becoming the intermediate school principal at Valley View, Sharon was a parochial school principal in Blytheville, Arkansas. She had completed both Master's  and Education Specialist degrees at ASU. Her education specialist field study focused on the involvement of Christian fundamentalists in public education. Her dissertation significantly extended that work to examine how personal values embraced by religious conservative, moderate and liberal school board members and superintendents shape their decision processes and policy choices on controversial issues. Using the semantic differential technique, she developed a highly sophisticated instrument for measuring the cognitive behavior of participants, their belief systems and their preferences for educational policy choices. Last I looked, she was overseeing the construction of a new intermediate school wing (circa spring, summer, fall 2000).
 
 
     Aaron Hosman, Cohort I. Dissertation Title: An Analysis of Exemplary Middle Schools as Democratic Alternatives to Bureaucratic School Organization.  Aaron was principal of  Walnut Ridge middle school when he started our program. He was hired to open a new middle school in Booneville, Arkansas and shortly became superintendent of the same school district. He recently moved back to Northeast Arkansas to take an assistant level superintendency, which will probably lead to the superintendency.  His dissertation was an empirical study of how the bureaucratic school organizational structures and processes inherent in the vast majority of mid level schools produce substantially less positive outcomes for students and teachers when contrasted with schools that adhere to the structural and procedural design features of the middle school philosophy.  Building on earlier works that measured bureaucracy in schools he designed an entirely new approach that simultaneously measures the presence of democratic school community in schools against bureaucratic organizational structures, porcesses and outcomes. Using the semantic differential approach, he created a new instrument that examined substantive elements of bureaucratic versus democratic learning environments on a continuum in subscales measuring control orientation, interpersonal relations, hierarchy of authority, creativity, and a bunch of other things.  He was able to demonstrate that schools that follow the middle school precepts have abandoned the trappings of bureaucracy in favor of a democratic learning environment that nurtures a positive work place for teachers and superior behavioral and academic outcomes for students. This is one of the few studies that provide empirical evidence of the educational effectiveness of middle schools.

    Loria McKinnie, Cohort I. Dissertation Title: Research and Development in Higher Education: How Institutional Reward Systems and Special Incentives Affect Faculty Productivity. Loria came to us from Memphis Public Schools. She defended her study in April, 2000. This is one of only two productivity studies that included a national, multidisciplinary sample of faculty, a comprehensive definition of productivity (including research grants acquired by faculty), and an expansive list of factors that facilitate or hinder scholarly engagement. Multiple regression analysis revealed ten variables that predicted variation in productivity, mostly in agreement with findings from previous research.
 
 

Les Battles, Cohort III. Les' dissertation was a comparative study of leader power in high schools and two-year post secondary institutions. Les's basic premise was that the use and distribution of power between administrators in the two types of organizations would be different and that there would be differential effects on employees' sense of personal empowerment as a consequence. Well, that was sort of correct. High schools have a slightly more authoritarian or centralized power structure which corresponds with a comparatively diminished sense of autonomy among teachers.

Joe Cornellison, Cohort III. Joe has been gathering data from school librarians around the country pertaining to censorship in the schools with a focus on conflicts originating from conservative groups whose views on curriculum and library holdings intersect with contrary views on First Amendment tensions. One of his slants on 1st amendment questions has to do with pre-censorship; i.e., "to what extent does suspicion of actual or potential conflict over specific curricular materials result in unilateral actions by education professionals to remove or restrict access to those materials?" Stay tuned.

    Jim Haynes, Cohort IV.Dissertation Title:  Perceptions of the Relationship Between Participation in Shared Governance and Organizational Commitment by Nonacademic Staff in Public Research, Doctoral, and Master's Colleges and Universities. Jim was director of food services at ASU (but a graduate of Auburn University). After doing everything right as a long time ASU employee and doctoral student, he took a great teaching job with Eastern Kentucky University. His dissertation is a study of the participation of nonacademic staff  in shared governance in higher education.  Jim wanted to know whether universities that provide opportunities for shared governance involving such employees as physical plant workers and secretaries instill a greater degree of organizational commitment and sense of accomplishment among such employees compared with institutions that don't provide such opportunities. He found that they do. He also found that the proportion of institutions that provide formal shared governance systems for nonacademic staff has substantially increased in recent years. The downside is that shared governance is also a political pawn used by power oriented administrators who build careers on the time-honored tools of smoke, mirrors, and shuffling peas under walnut shells. In other words, his results correspond with the more recent studies of shared governance on the academic side of the enterprise... for the most part, it's a myth, but where it does occur for real, it accrues benefits for the employees and the institution (and hopefully the constituents).