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 EXPLORING THE DIMENSIONS OF GENDER AND STUDENT EPISTEMOLOGIES IN A REFORMED LEARNER-CENTERED ORGANISMAL BIOLOGY COURSE: A MIXED METHODS APPROACH(2019) Klosteridis, Jennifer Hayes-; Hultgren, Francine; Croninger, Robert; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Gender and student epistemology play a role in how students interact with STEM content and knowledge development in the classroom and may influence the retention of women in the sciences. Reform agencies have called for changes to the undergraduate biology curriculum to produce students with high level quantitative and critical thinking skills. As educators seek to reform college biology courses to align with policy maker recommendations, it remains important to consider how these dimensions influence student learning of reformed content and pedagogy. This mixed methods study explored the dimensions of gender and epistemology as they related to student learning in a reformed learner-centered organismal biology course at a large east coast university. Pre-test and post-test epistemological survey results and qualitative interview data collected over two semesters by Hall (2013) were analyzed. The results indicated that there was no significant relationship between gender and student epistemologies at pre-test or post-test on the MBEX I instrument or in 3 of the 4 epistemological clusters. Both women and men experienced significant positive shifts on the instrument overall and in two clusters of the survey instrument. Specifically, women and men became more sophisticated in their view of the structure of biological sciences knowledge as composed of principles, and how biology knowledge should be constructed rather than memorized. Qualitative findings, however, suggested that gender and level of epistemological sophistication played a role in how women and men experienced the reformed content and pedagogy in the course. Specifically, women expressed resistance to the inclusion of physical science content in the course, while most men expressed receptivity. This study is unique in that it explored the interplay between gender and epistemology as it related to course content and pedagogical reform. Through integration of the quantitative results and qualitative findings, the study concluded that the reformed learner-centered course was successful at creating more epistemologically sophisticated men and women who viewed biological knowledge as principles-based and developed a belief that biological knowledge is a process of knowledge construction. The results also suggested that women had a more favorable response to the active learning pedagogy. Gender may have created a potential resistance to the inclusion of other disciplinary perspectives and content in the course. The results and findings add to the higher education curriculum reform and instruction literature by providing some insight into how student epistemology and gender may influence faculty efforts to develop courses that align with national reform efforts.Item Visual Insight in Geometry(2016) Fletcher, Logan; Carruthers, Peter; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)According to a traditional rationalist proposal, it is possible to attain knowledge of certain necessary truths by means of insight—an epistemic mental act that combines the 'presentational' character of perception with the a priori status usually reserved for discursive reasoning. In this dissertation, I defend the insight proposal in relation to a specific subject matter: elementary Euclidean plane geometry, as set out in Book I of Euclid's Elements. In particular, I argue that visualizations and visual experiences of diagrams allow human subjects to grasp truths of geometry by means of visual insight. In the first two chapters, I provide an initial defense of the geometrical insight proposal, drawing on a novel interpretation of Plato's Meno to motivate the view and to reply to some objections. In the remaining three chapters, I provide an account of the psychological underpinnings of geometrical insight, a task that requires considering the psychology of visual imagery alongside the details of Euclid's geometrical system. One important challenge is to explain how basic features of human visual representations can serve to ground our intuitive grasp of Euclid's postulates and other initial assumptions. A second challenge is to explain how we are able to grasp general theorems by considering diagrams that depict only special cases. I argue that both of these challenges can be met by an account that regards geometrical insight as based in visual experiences involving the combined deployment of two varieties of 'dynamic' visual imagery: one that allows the subject to visually rehearse spatial transformations of a figure's parts, and another that allows the subject to entertain alternative ways of structurally integrating the figure as a whole. It is the interplay between these two forms of dynamic imagery that enables a visual experience of a diagram, suitably animated in visual imagination, to justify belief in the propositions of Euclid’s geometry. The upshot is a novel dynamic imagery account that explains how intuitive knowledge of elementary Euclidean plane geometry can be understood as grounded in visual insight.Item How Electrical Engineering Students Design Computer Programs(2014) Danielak, Brian Adam; Elby, Andrew; Gupta, Ayush; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)When professional programmers begin designing programs, we know they often spend time away from a computer, using tools such as pens, paper, and whiteboards as they discuss and plan their designs (Petre, van der Hoek, & Baker, 2010). But, we're only beginning to analyze and understand the complexity of what happens during such early-stage design work. And, our accounts are almost exclusively about what professionals do. For all we've begun to understand about what happens in early-stage software design, we rarely apply the same research questions and methods to students' early-stage design work. This dissertation tries to redress that imbalance. I present two case studies — derived from my 10 study participants — of electrical engineering (EE) students designing computer programs in a second-semester computer programming course. In study 1, I show how analyzing a student's code snapshot history and conducting clinical interviews tells us far more about her design trajectory than either method could alone. From that combined data I argue students' overall software designs can be consequentially shaped by factors — such as students' stances toward trusting their code or believing a current problem is a new instance of an old one — that existing code snapshot research is poorly equipped to explain. Rather, explanations that add non-conceptual constructs including affective state and epistemological stance can offer a more complete and satisfactory account of students' design activities. In study 2, I argue computer science and engineering education should move beyond conceptual-knowledge and concept deficit explanations of students' difficulties (and capabilities) in programming. I show that in doing design students do, say, write, and gesture things that: – Are outside the phenomenological scope of most (mis)conceptions accounts of programming – Would be explained differently under frameworks that emphasize manifold epistemological resources. Some student difficulties can be recast as epistemological blocks in activity rather than conceptual knowledge deficits. Similarly, some students' productive capacities can be understood as epistemologically-related stances toward an activity, rather than evidencing particular knowledge of specific computational concepts. – Would suggest different instructional interventions if teachers attended to the stabilizing aspects — such as epistemological dynamics — that help these episodes of activity cohere for students.Item More than just "plug-and-chug": Exploring how physics students make sense with equations(2013) Kuo, Eric; Gupta, Ayush; Elby, Andrew; Physics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Although a large part the Physics Education Research (PER) literature investigates students' conceptual understanding in physics, these investigations focus on qualitative, conceptual reasoning. Even in modeling expert problem solving, attention to conceptual understanding means a focus on initial qualitative analysis of the problem; the equations are typically conceived of as tools for "plug-and-chug" calculations. In this dissertation, I explore the ways that undergraduate physics students make conceptual sense of physics equations and the factors that support this type of reasoning through three separate studies. In the first study, I investigate how students' can understand physics equations intuitively through use of a particular class of cognitive elements, symbolic forms (Sherin, 2001). Additionally, I show how students leverage this intuitive, conceptual meaning of equations in problem solving. By doing so, these students avoid algorithmic manipulations, instead using a heuristic approach that leverages the equation in a conceptual argument. The second study asks the question why some students use symbolic forms and others don't. Although it is possible that students simply lack the knowledge required, I argue that this is not the only explanation. Rather, symbolic forms use is connected to particular epistemological stances, in-the-moment views on what kinds of knowledge and reasoning are appropriate in physics. Specifically, stances that value coherence between formal, mathematical knowledge and intuitive, conceptual knowledge are likely to support symbolic forms use. Through the case study of one student, I argue that both reasoning with equations and epistemological stances are dynamic, and that shifts in epistemological stance can produce shifts in whether symbolic forms are used to reason with equations. The third study expands the focus to what influences how students reason with equations across disciplinary problem contexts. In seeking to understand differences in how the same student reasons on two similar problems in calculus and physics, I show two factors, beyond the content or structure of the problems, that can help explain why reasoning on these two problems would be so different. This contributes to an understanding of what can support or impede transfer of content knowledge across disciplinary boundaries.Item Spirituality in the Laboratory: Negotiating the politics of knowledge in the psychedelic sciences(2010) Corbin, Michelle Dawn; Kestnbaum, Meyer; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this study I argue that psychedelic substances served as a doorway through which spirituality entered the scientific laboratory to an unprecedented degree given their traditionally demarcated relationship by making spirituality more amenable to scientific paradigms and accessible to scientific methodologies. I conduct a feminist discourse analysis of the politics of knowledge enacted in this unique intersection of spirituality and science in the psychedelic sciences. I draw on feminist theories of science and knowledge which conceptualize science as a dominant knowledge constituted through and productive of the intersecting and historically hierarchical systems of power of race, class, gender and nation. Using discourse analysis techniques, I analyze a documentary archive I created through a theoretically driven sampling of the psychedelic sciences of spirituality from the 1930's to the present. In Chapter 2, I analyze how spirituality was brought forward and negotiated in these sciences. I argue that psychedelic scientists utilized a range of what I call tactics of legitimation to justify the scientific study of these peculiar substances and the spirituality with which they are associated vis-à-vis dominant scientific knowledges and I analyze the attendant epistemological costs of this assimilation. In Chapter 3, I analyze the efforts to integrate psychedelic substances and the spiritual experiences they induce into western therapeutic assumptions and practices. I argue that their efforts to scientifically determine the mysticality of mystical experiences and their pursuits of scientific liturgical authority over the administration of psychedelic sacraments resulted in the emergence of a would-be psychiatric clerical authority. In Chapter 4, I analyze the efforts to integrate and develop indigenous spiritual psychedelic knowledges and practices across each step of a bioprospecting model from plant identification to the determination of mechanisms of action and finally to drug development studies. I argue that in each step indigenous spiritual knowledges were assimilated into dominant scientific assumptions and practices reifying western scientific authority over indigenous knowledges and practices and reinforcing historically hierarchical colonial relationships despite the `good intentions' of these psychedelic scientists. In the final chapter of this study I discuss future sociological and feminist projects analyzing these peculiar psychedelic sciences and spiritual substances.Item COMPARING AND CONTRASTING DIFFERENT METHODS FOR PROBING STUDENT EPISTEMOLOGY AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT IN INTRODUCTORY PHYSICS(2009) McCaskey, Timothy Lee; Redish, Edward F; Elby, Andrew R; Physics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I perform and compare three different studies of introductory physics students' epistemological views - their views about the nature of knowledge and how it is learned. Physics education research (PER) shows that epistemological views affect how students learn, so they are important to understand and diagnose. The first study uses a Likert-scale instrument, adapted from the Maryland Physics Expectation Survey, designed to assess to what extent students see physics knowledge as coherent (rather than piecemeal), conceptual (rather than just formulas), and constructed (rather than absorbed). Using this survey, I documented several results, including that (i) a large lecture class can produce favorable changes in students' epistemological views, at least in the context of the class, and (ii) teaching a rushed modern physics unit at the end of an introductory sequence can lead to negative epistemological effects. The second study uses the Force Concept Inventory with modified instructions: students indicated both the answer they think a scientist would give and the answer that makes the most sense to them personally. A "split" between these two answers shows that the student does not think she has reconciled her common sense with the formal physics concepts. This study showed that attention to reconciliation in a course allows students to see initially-counterintuitive ideas as making sense. Finally, I did a detailed study of one student by (i) watching video of her in tutorial, where she and three other students answered a structured series of conceptual and quantitative physics questions, (ii) formulating interviews based largely on what I observed in the video, and (iii) interviewing her while the tutorial was still fresh in her head. I repeated this cycle every week for a semester. I found that her tendency to focus on the multiple and ambiguous meanings of words like "force" hampered her ability to reconcile physics concepts with common sense. This last method is time-consuming, but it produces rich data and allows for a fine-grained analysis of individual students. The first two survey methods are best suited for measuring the effect of epistemologically-centered course reforms on large groups of students.Item VIEWS OF GOD AND EVIL: A PERSPECTIVAL APPROACH TO THE ARGUMENT FROM EVIL(2008-06-30) Bernard, Christopher William Thomas; Stairs, Allen; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A view referred to as "skeptical theism" has received much attention in recent discussions of the argument from evil against the existence of God. According to skeptical theism, humans are not in an epistemic position to make the inferences necessary for the evidential argument from evil to go through. In this dissertation, I defend the importance of individual variations in epistemic position to our evaluation of the argument from evil. Skeptical theists highlight the inadequacy of the human epistemic position to make the relevant judgments. I underscore the importance of individual differences in epistemic position---perspectival differences---to our evaluation of the argument from evil. (Some would prefer the term "worldview" over "perspective." As I use the term, an epistemic perspective includes a worldview but includes factors that are broader than our beliefs, like practical interests and social factors.) I argue that believers and nonbelievers may be epistemically justified in drawing different conclusions about God from similar evidence because the evidence is judged from different epistemic perspectives. In particular, my discussion focuses on two perspectival factors which have received relatively little attention by analytic philosophers of religion: practical interests and social factors.