Summit Institutional Repository @ PSU
Summit Institutional Repository @ Plymouth State University is a digital repository for gathering, indexing, preserving, and making available a treasury of research and scholarly work generated by PSU faculty, students and staff. Based on the principle of Open Access, one of Summit's key missions is to ensure that these scholarly and creative endeavors are accessible to the widest possible audience.
These collections are freely available, organized, made accessible by PSU's Lamson Library. They demonstrate the summit of academic production at the University and its commitment to encourage transformational teaching and connected learning, to advance the Plymouth State University motto - Ut prosim (That I may serve). The content is available to be used responsibly under fair use US copyright law for personal and educational purposes or with the permission of the authors and/or copyright holders. For more information about submitting your work to Summit, please contact us at psu-lamson-repository@plymouth.edu.
Recent Submissions
Item Redesigning for Tomorrow's Classroom(2026-05)"A one-hour professional development for educators on incorporating Artificial Intelligence and Universal Design for Learning into school instruction."Item What Would You Do Tomorrow? A Scenario-Vignette Study of Library Workers’ Responses to Intellectual Freedom Challenges(2026-03)This mixed-methods exploratory study examines how library workers reason through realistic intellectual freedom challenge scenarios and identifies the factors that shape their responses. A national sample of 149 library workers across public, school, and academic settings completed an online scenario-vignette survey featuring a forced-choice decision item and open-ended reflection prompts. Twenty participants were purposively selected for semi-structured interviews. The quantitative results revealed a near-unanimous forced-choice consensus: 88.6% of respondents selected the policy-aligned response. However, qualitative analysis of 3,107 coded segments across 102 analytic codes revealed that workers who selected the same action arrived through markedly different reasoning, moderated by symbolic capital, administrative support, and organizational readiness. Seven findings emerged: the divergence between knowledge and feasibility, the structural nature of preparedness, the mediating role of symbolic capital, policy as both a tool and point of failure, scenarios as reflective triggers, the under-resourced emotional dimension of challenge work, and setting-specific authority structures. Overall, the findings indicate that the library workforce largely knows what to do but faces uneven organizational conditions for doing it. This study provides a diagnostic foundation for evidence-based training programs that address the organizational environment, professional capacity building across all staff levels, and setting-specific preparation.Item Teacher Socialization in Health Education: Factors that Influence Curriculum and Pedagogy Used by K‒12 Health Education Teachers(2026-03)Teacher socialization is the process by which an individual’s environment and lived experiences influence their teaching practice. This research examined the socialization of health education teachers in K‒12 settings to identify influences on their curricular and pedagogical choices. A qualitative semistructured interview was used to examine how each of the three phases of socialization can affect curricular and pedagogical choices. The phases of socialization are: acculturation (time-period prior to entering a formal teacher preparation program), professional socialization (begins at teacher training and continues throughout an in-service teacher’s career), and organizational socialization (specific to teaching setting and includes a teacher’s beginning to identify with the knowledge and skills that are valued by their own school and school district) with a specific emphasis on how the environment surrounding teachers influences the curriculum and pedagogy used in the classroom. Findings were analyzed using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) and emphasized that each phase of socialization holds unique value in the development of a health teacher, with acculturation and professional socialization phases forming the strongest influence. Findings also elevated the direct role that the environment surrounding a health teacher had on curricular choices for the K‒12 health education classroom.Item Critical Thinking in ELA Classrooms: From Buzzword to Blueprint(2026-03)This qualitative single-case study examines how New Hampshire (NH) high school English Language Arts (ELA) teachers conceptualize, teach, and assess critical thinking. Despite its prominence in policy, standards, and graduation requirements, critical thinking has remained operationally undefined in classroom practice. Guided by the Delphi Report’s six cognitive skills as a conceptual lens, inquiry in this study set out to examine how experienced ELA teachers across five NH public high schools describe and implement critical thinking within their instructional contexts. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analysis of curricular artifacts, including assignments and curriculum maps. Findings reveal that although teachers do not share a single formal definition of critical thinking, they demonstrate consistent expectations for student reasoning in practice. Critical thinking is embedded in lesson design and developed over time through reading, discussion, and writing rather than taught as a discrete skill. A recurring six-stage instructional sequence emerged across sites, suggesting coherence in instruction despite variation in terminology. As such, this study adds to the discourse on critical thinking in ELA by shifting attention from definitional ambiguity toward a practice-based understanding of the instructional structures through which critical thinking functions in secondary classrooms.Item Teacher Well-Being During Covid-19: Disrupted Like Never Before(2026-03)The purpose of this qualitative research study is to give voice to the well-being of New Hampshire pre-K-12 teachers during the Covid-19 pandemic. The study aimed to identify the primary stressors and challenges experienced by teachers in a single district, during and after the pandemic, to highlight the protective factors and support mechanisms that reduced teachers’ stress and anxiety. Literature has suggested using teachers’ lived experiences that describe how they were able to persist through the disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic would be beneficial. Analysis of their lived experience provided data to identify self-management strategies targeted interventions that were used to assist their Covid-19 induced stressor and enhance teacher wellbeing in their workplace. The four individual teachers interviewed, ranging from elementary, middle, and high school, recognized the stress and anxiety that occurred due to the job demands placed on them and the lack of resources available. This unprecedented health crisis heightened workloads, stress, anxiety, health concerns, and professional uncertainty. A recurring theme was the challenge of the pandemic's abrupt shift from traditional teaching to virtual learning. By providing a thematic overview of teacher’s lived experiences, this research offers insights to guide practices, inform policy, and contribute to future research on supporting teachers retention and mitigating attrition. This study reinforces the need for systemic, sustained support and safeguards for school leaders and policymakers to provide teachers during times of disruption and beyond.
Communities in Summit Institutional Repository
Select a community to browse its collections.