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.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item The Initial Implementation Patterns of the C3 Framework in Maryland School Districts(2018) Pugh, Shannon Michelle; De La Paz, Susan; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This qualitative study examined the initial implementation patterns of the C3 Framework in Maryland school districts. The National Council for the Social Studies published the C3 Framework as a guide for state departments of education to revise social studies standards. This study sought to determine how district social studies leaders viewed the C3 Framework, how the district social studies leaders translated the C3 Framework in their districts, and why they chose to implement the C3 Framework as they did. The primary data sources were interviews and documents; the data were analyzed using constant comparative analysis to identify overarching attitudes toward the C3 Framework and implementation patterns. Policy implementation research specifically related to cognitive theory and capacity was used to help explain the implementation process. This study found that beliefs, financial and human resources, and time were the main factors influencing implementation. The study also found that how districts approach and support reform implementation for social studies might be different from how districts previously approached and supported new standards and curriculum in other content areas. In this study, all district social studies leaders focused primarily on disciplinary literacy components of the C3 Framework, specifically those related to history. District social studies leaders focused on document-based activities, student projects, and writing to source but few addressed the Inquiry Arc in a way that challenged or altered expected approaches to teaching and learning social studies. Many used the C3 Framework as leverage to justify the continued work and focus on historical thinking and other disciplinary literacy work in their districts. Most district social studies leaders used inquiry and disciplinary literacy as synonyms; the pattern suggests that further work to help educators distinguish between these related approaches to learning is necessary to help support the use of inquiry in the social studies. As more states use the C3 Framework in state standards, this study might help states and districts guide how they approach its implementation.Item THE EFFECTS OF DISCIPLINARY LITERACY INSTRUCTION ON READING COMPREHENSION AND HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE(2015) Walker, Caroline Y.; De La Paz, Susan; Special Education; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examined the effects of three Tier 2 summer reading interventions on struggling readers who were about to enter the sixth grade. Students were assigned to one of three reading conditions: The first condition provided students with a disciplinary reading strategy utilizing primary and secondary documents on the history of China (N = 35); the second condition provided a generic comprehension strategy utilizing the same history of China materials (N = 30); the third, business as usual comparison condition, provided students with multiple, ad hoc comprehension strategies and varied texts (N = 45). The study sought to test whether a history-specific reading strategy would lead to greater comprehension gains than a generic comprehension strategy and whether both interventions, based in history content, would lead to greater content learning outcomes than ad hoc strategies and unconnected texts. Results indicate that in comparison to students in the business as usual comparison condition, students in both the disciplinary and generic strategy conditions showed greater growth on a researcher-created content measure of history. Students in these two conditions also showed more growth than peers in the comparison condition on a researcher-developed disciplinary comprehension measure. Contrary to the author's expectations, students in the two treatment conditions performed similarly on the disciplinary comprehension measure. This finding may have been due to problems with fidelity of implementation, the similarity of the two interventions, or the greater familiarity students and staff had with the generic comprehension strategy. Students in all three interventions showed growth on a standardized reading comprehension measure, the Gates-MacGinitie. In addition, regardless of condition, students did not show growth on a measure of reading motivation. Students who were diagnosed with reading disabilities performed similarly to peers who were struggling readers but not identified as having a disability on all measures. These results, which differ from those with older middle school students, suggest a need for future research on the relative effectiveness of both discipline-specific and generic reading comprehension strategies on comprehending and learning history content.