Five Doctoral Students in Educational Policy and Leadership Take Top Prizes
Professor Emeritus Bill Loadman wanted to honor exceptional dissertations by doctoral students in the School of Educational Policy and Leadership. So in 2009, he made a gift to create the Loadman Dissertation Prizes Competition. The award is $500 for one dissertation from each section of the School of Educational Policy and Leadership. He repeated his gift in 2010, and this year, he made the award again to five outstanding students.
With the many PhD students whose dissertations are groundbreaking contributions to our knowledge, competition for the awards was fierce. The five awardees were honored at the school's annual May ceremony celebrating student achievement.
Professor Eric Anderman, interim director of the school, emphasized the importance of Ohio State's focus on research. Students trained as top researchers carry on the tradition of improving our world through discovery.
He also praised both faculty and staff of the school for going above and beyond to support these students in their scholarly inquiries.
Loadman spoke about his passion for supporting new knowledge. He urged everyone present to thank both mentors and family for their support.
The recipients of the five prizes for academic year 2010-2011 were as follows:
Sara M. Childers
Sara M. Childers ( Advisor: Dr. Patricia Lather) dissertation is titled On Their Own Terms: Curriculum, Identity, and Policy as Practice in a Successful Urban School is the result of an 18-month ethnographic case study of a nationally ranked high-performance, high- poverty college preparatory public high school in Ohio. As a multi-sited qualitative study, it brings together field work, interviews, and focus groups with historical and policy document analysis. Through a sociocultural analysis of policy as practice it examines how a complex set of federal and district policies are negotiated and re-appropriated by critical schooling actors as material practices aimed at supporting equity and excellence in urban student achievement. At the same time by unraveling the discourses that overburden urban educational identity with notions of disadvantage and risk, it uses an analytics of disruption to unfix urban students from these constructions to resituate them as educational agents on their own terms. This project makes apparent that even after Brown v. Board of Education and the No Child Left Behind Act, race continues to matter in school and hopes that bearing witness to such "difficult knowledge" will bring us closer to meeting our expectations for a more just and democratic education.
Monica Minor Gant
Monica Minor Gant ( Advisor: Dr. Helen Marks) writes that the purpose of this study was to explore collective responsibility within a cultural framework, as an attribute of the work of teachers contributing to the academic success of African-American students in poverty. Her dissertation, Culturally Relevant Collective Responsibility Among Teachers of African-American Students in a High Poverty Elementary School is information-rich, descriptive data gathered through interviews, observations, and document analysis about the relationship between culturally relevant pedagogy and collective responsibility, what it looks like in school culture, and how it influences the academic success of African-American students in poverty. This case study provided meaningful and insightful details into better understanding what is happening in a school that has achieved academic success for African-American students in poverty.
Samuel Rocha
Samuel Rocha (Advisor: Dr. Phil Smith ) Education, Study, and the Person, presents ontological investigations into education, study, and the person using everyday stories and examples, philosophical arguments, mystery and paradox, and a phenomenological approach to interpreting the life and thought of William James. More importantly, this work is motivated by a sense of existential urgency: that philosophers, educationalists, students, and schoolteachers are in need of methodologies for seeking, sensing, and seeing things that are neither fundamentalist nor relativistic, that are attentive to being-within and dwelling as opposed to fragmented learning or knowing-about. In effect, this book mediates between relativistic epistemologies and fundamentalist ideologies by turning towards ontological re-enchantment during a time and educational climate of disenchantment, alienation, and nihilism.
Mitsu Narui
Mitsu Narui (Advisor: Tatiana Suspitsyna) The dissertation is titled A Foucauldian analysis of Asian/American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Students' Process of Disclosing their Sexual Orientation and Its Impact on Identity Construction . The purpose of the study was to better understand how and why Asian/American gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) students disclosed their sexual orientation to others during college and the impact of that disclosure on their construction of identity. Methodologically, she framed the discussion by using the works of Michel Foucault. After interviewing and observing several undergraduate and graduate Asian/American GLB students, she found that the students navigated multiple discourses within higher education, and their decisions about revealing their sexual orientation were based on relationships formed within those discourses. These decisions, in turn, helped many of the students grasp their emerging agency (or self-identity) within the dominant discourse. This data shed insight into how these students perceived the overall campus climate. This, in turn, has implications for administrators wanting to make campus open and welcoming for all populations.
Jian Li
Jian Li (Advisor: Richard Lomax) Effects of Multiple Imputation, Expectation Maximization and Similar Response Pattern Imputation on Structural Equation Modeling with Incomplete and Multivariate Nonnormal Data The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of missing data techniques in SEM under different multivariate distributional conditions. Using Monte Carlo simulations, this research examines the performance of four missing data methods in SEM: full information maximum likelihood (FIML), expectation maximum (EM) procedure, multiple imputation (MI), and similar response pattern imputation (SRPI) in the missing data mechanisms of missing completely at random (MCAR) and missing at random (MAR). The effects of three independent variables (sample size, missing proportion, and distribution shape) are investigated on parameter and standard error estimation, standard error coverage and model fit statistics. An inter-correlated 3-factor CFA model is used. The findings of this study indicate that FIML is the most robust method in terms of parameter estimate bias; FIML and MI generate almost equally accurate standard error coverage; and MI is the best in terms of estimation efficiency/accuracy and model rejection rate. The results of SRPI in this study are consistent with previous studies in the literature. When there are severe missingness or nonnormality conditions in the data or when the sample size is very small, it can biased parameter estimates. However, the findings also indicate it is comparable to FIML when data not only have small to moderate missingness, but also are severely nonnormal. Recommendations regarding when to use each of the missing data techniques are provided at the end of the study.