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 Learning to Elicit, Interpret, and Respond to Students’ Historical Thinking: A Case Study of Four Teacher Candidates(2015) Neel, Michael Alan; Imig, David G.; Valli, Linda R.; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Teacher education researchers have argued that teacher candidates must learn to attend to students’ disciplinary thinking if they are to improve student learning. In history education, such attention must focus on student thinking about evidence because interpretation of evidence is at the heart of historical discourse. This study explores how four teacher candidates who had learned to attend to students’ historical thinking in a social studies methods course engaged in the practice of eliciting, interpreting, and responding to that thinking during their internships. Data collected over a nine-month period included observations of candidates in their methods courses, a pretest administered before the methods course, observation of at least four lessons per candidate in the internship, interviews with teachers after each observed lesson, and analysis of methods coursework. Case study analyses indicated that two of the candidates elicited, interpreted and responded to students’ historical thinking while another did not, and a fourth did so only under certain conditions. The cross-case analysis showed that although all of the candidates used methods course tools in the internship, some were unable to use these tools to elicit students’ historical thinking. While three of the four candidates noticed historical thinking and considered that thinking in determining an instructional response, what candidates noticed was limited to the scope of their instructional objectives. Only one candidate consistently responded to student thinking in evaluative ways, and all four struggled to deliver responses that maintained a focus on student reasoning. Instead, candidates preferred to demonstrate their own reasoning, either by building on a student idea or simply as a means to make a point not directly related to a student idea. This study highlights the interconnected nature of eliciting, interpreting, and responding to student thinking and offers insight into how teacher educators can facilitate attention to student historical thinking. It also points to factors that are important for the development of this ability including candidate disciplinary knowledge and the social contexts of learning. Furthermore, this study provides a framework and analytical tools that can enable future researchers to examine this phenomenon more deeply.Item Exploring what stabilizes teachers' attention and responsiveness to the substance of students' scientific thinking in the classroom(2013) Richards, Jennifer; Elby, Andrew; Hammer, David; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Teachers' attention and responsiveness to the substance of students' disciplinary thinking is critical for promoting students' disciplinary engagement and learning, yet such attention is rare and fleeting in American classrooms. In this dissertation, I aim to learn more from teachers who do attend and respond to students' scientific ideas while teaching. I explore the classroom practices of three focal teachers in a professional development program who consistently place students' ideas at the core of their instruction with an eye toward the following research question: What might stabilize teachers' attention and responsiveness to the substance of students' scientific thinking during sustained classroom episodes? Examining three episodes from each teacher, I identify aspects within these episodes that are salient to the teachers and plausibly interrelated with their attention and responsiveness to student thinking. My primary data chapters include analyses of specific pairs of episodes that speak to my broader research question as well as other relevant topics in the literature on attending and responding to student thinking. The first data chapter makes the case that professional development efforts aimed at supporting responsiveness to student thinking primarily help teachers within planned discussions or progressions, but struggle to help teachers adapt their ongoing instruction in response to unexpected directions from students. I examine two episodes in which the discussions that emerged were not preplanned but rather emergent from students' contributions, with an eye toward what initiated and sustained teachers' responsiveness. The second data chapter contributes to discussions on what constitutes favorable change in attending and responding to the substance of student thinking, emphasizing the importance of disciplinary-specific considerations. Finally, I draw on the entire data set in noting specific commonalities within and across teachers, suggesting two complementary professional development approaches: 1) remaining open to and aware of what hooks and sustains individual teachers and their classroom practice, and 2) emphasizing aspects that cut across teachers, which might serve as meaningful foci for professional development efforts aimed at promoting an instructional focus on students' ideas.