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 Using Elaborative Interrogation Enhanced Worked Examples to Improve Chemistry Problem Solving(2012) Pease, Rebecca Simpson; Holliday, William G; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Elaborative interrogation, which prompts students to answer why-questions placed strategically within informational text, has been shown to increase learning comprehension through reading. In this study, elaborative interrogation why-questions requested readers to explain why paraphrased statements taken from a reading were "true." Although previous research in elaborative interrogation has examined the effect of utilizing these why-questions while reading biology content, they have not been explored with chemistry text or chemistry textbooks that include worked example problems, according to a review of the literature. This study investigated the effect of answering elaborative interrogation why-questions placed adjunct to worked examples which were embedded within a section of a college chemistry textbook, compared with the commonly used study strategy of rereading the same text as a placebo-control. A randomized two-group posttest only design was used in this study. Specifically, the ability to solve quantitative chemistry problems in terms of a problem solving posttest requiring comprehension (dependent variable) was estimated for both groups and statistically compared. The subjects in this research were 74 students enrolled in an introductory chemistry course at a community college in the southwestern United States. Prior chemistry knowledge, mathematics skills, and verbal ability were also measured and statistical methods were employed to assess their correlations with posttest results in both groups. The use of elaborative interrogation why-questions was found to significantly benefit students' quantitative chemistry problem solving requiring comprehension compared to the rereading strategy, even after the effects of prior chemistry knowledge and mathematics skill (factors that were statistically determined to be significant predictors of posttest score) were statistically controlled.Item Effectiveness of false correction strategy on science reading comprehension(2008-05-01) Ghent, Cynthia; Holliday, William G; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)False-correction reading strategy theoretically prompted college students to activate their prior knowledge when provided false statements linked to a portion of their biology textbook. This strategy is based in elaborative interrogation theory, which suggests that prompting readers to answer interrogatives about text students are reading increases their comprehension of that text. These interrogatives always asked "why" statements pulled from a text, one sentence in length, were "true." True statements in this study based on a text were converted by the experimenter into false statements, one sentence in length. Students were requested to rewrite each statement (n=12) on average every 200 words in a text as they were reading, converting each false statement into a true statement. These students outperformed other students requested to reread the same biology text twice (an established placebo-control strategy). These students, in turn, outperformed still other students reading an unrelated control text taken from the same textbook used only to establish a prior knowledge baseline for all students included in this study. Students participating in this study were enrolled students in an undergraduate introductory general biology course designed for non-majors. A three-group, posttest-only, randomized experimental control-group design was used to prevent pretest activation of students' prior knowledge thus increasing chances of producing evidence of false-correction effectiveness and to begin augmenting potential generalizability to science classrooms. Students' (n=357) general biology knowledge, verbal ability, and attempts to use the false correction strategy were collected and analyzed. Eight of the participants were interviewed by the researcher in a first attempt in this domain to collect data on participants' points of view about the strategy. The results of this study are not yet recommended for use in authentic school settings as further research is indicated.