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 An Exploration of Motivation, Transfer, and Implementation During Self-Regulated Instruction and Cognitive Apprenticeships in Secondary Science and Social Studies Classrooms(2021) Butler, Cameron; De La Paz, Susan; Special Education; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Next Generation Science Standards and the Common Core State Standards for Social Studies emphasize the importance of disciplinary literacy in helping students to think and interact with texts like experts (NCSS, 2013; NRC, 2013). Developing these skills, however, is difficult and students do not naturally display disciplinary thinking and literacy skills (Hogan & Maglienti, 2001; Wineburg, 1991). Researchers have determined several effective practices for addressing these cognitively demanding skills including the cognitive apprenticeship model with embedded self-regulated instruction (SRI; see De La Paz et al., 2017; Levin et al., 2021). In this dissertation, I discuss a range of topics that focus broadly on supporting students and teachers while they learn and teach cognitively demanding disciplinary literacy skills. I begin by examining SRI and its effects on motivation for students with or at risk for learning disabilities (LD). Next, I analyze the impact of a cognitive apprenticeship model that incorporates SRI on students’ literacy skills in science. Finally, I analyze the implementation of a similar cognitive apprenticeship model in history by observing fidelity, chronicling teacher curricular adaptations, and documenting the important factors that influence teachers’ instructional decisions. The first study identified that SRI has a positive impact on student motivation in addition to its positive impact on academics (see Antononiou & Souvignier, 2007; Graham & Harris 1989a; Schunk & Cox, 1986). The second study corroborates research on the cognitive apprenticeship model in science (Lee et al., 2021a; Levin et al., 2021) by demonstrating that the model can support the development of literacy skills in science inquiry settings. This study also shows how the model helps students to transfer learning to functionally different scenarios. The final study details the implementation of a cognitive apprenticeship intervention that supported the use of historical literacy skills during historical inquiries. This study establishes that with online professional development (PD) and continued coaching, teachers showed high degrees of fidelity and made adaptations that adhered to the tenants of the model and supported their specific students. Additionally, this study demonstrated how important factors such as teachers’ beliefs and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) affect teacher implementation.Item One Woman Show: Directing, Designing, Writing, Performing, and Self-Producing termiNATION.(2018) Colburn, Alexandra Kelly; Mezzocchi, Jared M; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this document is a full description and analysis of the creative and administrative process of directing, designing, writing, performing, and self-producing termiNATION, a one-woman dance theatre multimedia piece created under the NextLOOK Residency, a creative partnership between The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center’s Artist Partner Program and Joe’s Movement Emporium. Included in the documentation of the process is the original proposal, initial concept, discussion of how these concepts developed over the course of the rehearsal and production process, research images, photos from the pre-production process, and the final dress rehearsal. This production was performed at Joe’s Movement Emporium on November 17, 2017 in collaboration with Jeannette Christensen (Costumes and Assistant Direction), Dylan Uremovich (Lighting), Jeff Dorfman (Sound), and Jonathan Hsu (Choreography, Training, and Photography).Item Writing Transfer Across Domains: Academic, Personal, and Extracurricular Writing(2015) Lindenman, Heather; Enoch, Jessica; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Over the last decade, scholars in composition studies have devoted significant attention to the issue of student transfer at the collegiate level. That is, they ask whether and how students repurpose their writing knowledge and abilities for new and alternate writing situations. This existing research provides insight into the ways that students do or do not productively repurpose their writing experiences and suggests that successful transfer occurs less often than writing instructors might hope. Drawing on data from a survey, focus groups, writing samples, and interviews, my qualitative study extends this existing research in three primary ways. First, I expand the scope of contexts included in studies of writing transfer. Much of students’ writing, and thus writing education, occurs outside of school. Rather than focus primarily on academic settings, as most scholarship does, my study investigates students’ writing experiences across academic, personal, and extracurricular domains. Second, my study discerns the specific ways that students relate their writing experiences across these domains. Most scholarship in composition examines how students repurpose their writing knowledge by tracing vertical transfer, or the ways students transfer their learning from one writing class to another. My study redirects scholarly attention by focusing instead on how students forge connections between disparate contexts, establishing a “transfer mindset.” Based on students’ writing samples and commentary, this dissertation analyzes five relational reasoning strategies that students use to connect their writing across contexts. Finally, this study examines how students transfer prior experiences and knowledge to create a credible persona, or effective ethos, in many writing situations. My study examines three types of sources that students draw on to project an ethos appropriate to a given writing task. Throughout “Writing Transfer Across Domains,” I emphasize the importance of viewing transfer from students’ own perspectives and valuing students’ idiosyncratic ways of making meaning. Ultimately, this project shows that students can and do draw productive connections between their writing experiences, cultivating a “transfer mindset.” “Writing Transfer Across Domains” offers both theoretical and pragmatic insights into college students’ ability to move their writing knowledge between all the writing situations they encounter and create.Item The Project of Memory: Life Writing the Holocaust(2014) Peterson, Margaret Polizos; Hultgren, Francine; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This phenomenological study explores the lived experience of life writing the Holocaust. Life writing is the term used to describe personal biographical and autobiographical accounts in many genres (Jolly, 2001). As research concerned with how personal writing of the Holocaust is experienced by the writers themselves, this work explores the ways in which memory, narrative and history intersect in the writing processes of each writer. What insights might we gain about personal writing as a tool for helping to understand the past? What might we learn about historical events, such as the Holocaust, from crafted writing made by eyewitnesses? What does it mean for these writers to do this work? What may we learn about personal writing as a mode of learning? This research is done in the tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology and draws on the work of philosophers such as Heidegger, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, and particularly Levinas, as foundational grounding for this study. The work of David Carr, who describes our understanding of experience and history as narrative in nature helped to guide this research as well. Van Manen provides a systematic process by which research employing hermeneutic phenomenological philosophy can be done. Through engagement with the literature surrounding the existential phenomenon; research on writing after trauma; literature and research on survivor testimony; philosophical and psychological research concerning the nature of memory and critical analysis of historical consciousness and historiology, I formed questions that guided my conversations with participants. I recruited twelve participants, members of The Memory Project, a writing group of Holocaust survivors at The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for this study. My phenomenological data suggests that life writing the Holocaust acts as a mode of seeking coherence for these writers. The narrative structure of memory, as pre-writing for life writing, is employed as a tool for greater self understanding and communication of a self by these writers. In addition, multiple communities are called upon by these writers as they craft and revise the texts they make. Conversations with historians of the Holocaust, dialogue with family members and the interactions within our group guide the remembering and writing of these writers and help add to a sense of their own "narrative coherence" described by Carr (1986). Drawing from insights gained from my participants, I suggest that the lived experience of life writing the Holocaust is a pedagogical process. This process is one in which narrative memory, expanding historical consciousness and writing as impetus and mode of questioning engage these survivors in ongoing discovery and communication of their own life stories. Additionally, I offer an understanding of life writing, memory and history conceived differently than in an objectivist tradition as transformative to a pedagogical sense of engaging in processes of memory, historical consciousness and writing.Item CHANNELING THE CURRENT: THE LIVED EXPERIENCE OF MOVING MEDITATION FOR FINDNG A FLOW IN THINKING AND WRITING(2013) Morris, Sarah Lynn; Hultgren, Francine H.; McCaleb, Joseph; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)CHANNELING THE CURRENT: THE LIVED EXPERIENCE OF MOVING MEDITATION FOR FINDNG A FLOW IN THINKING AND WRITING Sarah Lynn Morris, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Dissertation Directed by: Professor Francine H. Hultgren Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership, University of Maryland, College Park This phenomenological study explores lived experience of moving meditation for finding flow in thinking and writing. Moving meditation is intentional practice of mindfulness that brings us deeply into our selves and the world. Connecting to pedagogical implications for teaching composition, this study suggests embodied practices may open a flow of words and ideas for those practicing movement meditation. Grounded in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and van Manen, this work explores embodiment and lived experience, using human science phenomenology as method. Further grounded in writing process and moving meditation texts, this work connects body movement and writing practices through lived experience. I first turn toward my own experience to examine moving meditation as method of finding flow in my thinking and writing. Next, I explore the phenomenon in a range of traditions to further uncover the lived experience of moving writers. The metaphor of the circuit as descriptive of writing process and body process further illuminates the phenomenon. Initial emergent themes include process, practice, flow, solitude, and nature. Recognizing the intersubjective in the particular, this study focuses on lived experience of four high school English teachers as they make meaning through focused movement. In four sessions of meditative contemplation, these teachers walked in the woods, wrote reflections, and considered personal and pedagogical experiences. Renderings of these teachers' journals and conversations suggest themes including fear, care, wholeness, and transcendence. Drawing from these conversants' insights, I explore ways in which meditative movement opens a flow in thinking and writing for these teachers, writers themselves in the current of life. Orienting toward pedagogical implications, I engage with lived experience in order to suggest ways in which teachers of writing may create wholeness of experience for classroom communities: taking students outside, seeing students in wholeness, positioning themselves as more experienced writers, focusing on process rather that product, and being bodies themselves. In doing so, they may generate a culture of care that fosters growth of writing and writers--body, mind, and spirit wholeness-- with the world as classroom and lived life as text.Item INVESTIGATION OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN DOMAIN-SPECIFIC BELIEFS ABOUT WRITING, WRITING SELF-EFFICACY, WRITING APPREHENSION, AND WRITING PERFORMANCE IN UNDERGRADUATES(2010) Sanders-Reio, Joanne; Alexander, Patricia A.; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Writing has been called the "neglected `R'" in the traditional trilogy of reading, `riting, and `rithmetic (National Commission on Writing, 2003). Writing performance continues to languish, despite societal expectations that students should be able to write clearly and precisely. Sociocognitive theory predicts that writing beliefs are related to writing performance. Much research has focused on writing self-efficacy beliefs and their link to writing apprehension and writing performance, while research exploring another type of belief, domain-specific beliefs about writing itself, is sparse. This study examined the relations between these beliefs about writing, writing self-efficacy, and writing apprehension, and their links to writing performance. This research was a three-phase study. Phases I and II involved instrument construction and validation, while Phase III examined the relations among the research variables. Two hundred eighty-seven Hispanic women students completed a test battery in class measuring demographics, beliefs about writing, writing self-efficacy, and writing apprehension. Writing performance was measured separately on an authentic writing task, a take-home paper, by both an overall grade and six component grades. Inter-rater agreements on these grades ranged from r = .83 to .91. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that beliefs about writing independently predicted writing performance and that some beliefs about writing (e.g., Good writers adapt their message to their readers) are adaptive and associated with strong writing performance, while other beliefs about writing (e.g., Readers are impressed by big words) are maladaptive and relate to weak writing performance. In addition, apprehension about making grammatical and other mechanical errors had a stronger negative effect on writing performance than the more traditional concept of writing apprehension, which concerns sharing one's writing with others and having it critiqued. After controlling for domain-specific beliefs, writing self-efficacy weakly predicted writing performance as well. These results support the need for future research examining the relations among the research variables and writing performance in samples that are more balanced with respect to gender and ethnicity, and with other writing tasks. Because beliefs about writing demonstrated the largest beta weights in the regression equations, these beliefs may have the most promise for promoting both writing research and practice.Item JOY AND OTHER STORIES(2006-05-16) Sawhney, Nitin; Collins, Merle; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Four short stories and the first chapter of a novel.