Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item Using Discourse to Improve the Quality of Student Talk and Historical Argumentative Writing(2024) Otarola, Josue; De La Paz, Susan; Special Education; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Frameworks that connect to the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in Social Studies, such as the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies States Standards, highlight the need to engage in inquiry-based instruction (NCSS, 2013). Participation in such inquiry requires students to engage in disciplinary thinking and to articulate that thinking to others, both verbally and in writing. However, such disciplinary thinking does not come natural to students (Wineburg, 1991). Thus, students require instruction in disciplinary thinking to learn its complexities and nuances. Once students can engage in disciplinary thinking, they can communicate it and participate in valuable discourse. Therefore, the current dissertation was conducted to explore how students use discourse to engage in argumentation and historical thinking. Chapter 2 of the dissertation is a research synthesis of studies that use discourse to improve learning outcomes in primary and secondary science and social studies classrooms. The purpose of the synthesis was to determine the impact of argumentative discourse on students’ learning outcomes and to understand the instructional components teachers use when holding discourse. Asterhan & Schwarz’s (2016) Argumentation for Learning (AFL) framework guided the research synthesis and the subsequent multiple-case study. Results indicate that discourse can be improved by using multiple instructional groupings, incorporating explicit instruction, modeling, graphic organizers and technology, and engaging students in deliberation. Chapter 3 offers findings from a multiple-case study that was designed to explore how argumentation inhibitors and enablers moderate dialogue characteristics and learning outcomes and to provide a rich description of discourse in ninth-grade US History classrooms with academically diverse students. More specifically, the study captured how students engaged in argumentative discourse and historical thinking using two different discourse structures. The study used a cross-case analysis (Yin, 2018) to compare the discourse across three cases. Each case included a teacher and four students. The first case occurred in a co-taught class, the second case included the same teacher in an honors class, and the third case included a different teacher in an honors class. The first and second case used a modified structured academic controversy (SAC), while the third case used Johnson and Johnson’s (1988) approach to SAC. The multiple-case study and the research synthesis informed the practitioner manuscript provided in Chapter 4. The manuscript details how teachers can use structure and supports to improve student participation and historical thinking in classroom discourse, especially for students with disabilities (SWD) and other struggling learners. The current dissertation provides several important findings. First, my synthesis indicated that students achieve higher learning outcomes when teachers use multiple instructional groupings, students engage in deliberative discourse, and teachers provide students with explicit instruction, modeling, and graphic organizers. Second, the findings from the multiple-case study offered insight into how students of differing academic abilities engage in argumentative discourse and historical thinking. Students of all academic abilities participated at high levels and engaged in deliberative argumentation, though there were differences in the quality of historical thinking skills. The instructional approach used in the multiple-case study is further expanded in the practitioner manuscript. Areas for future research are discussed in the dissertation.Item THE ‘NEXT GENERATION’ OF CONSTRUCTIVIST REFORM IN SCIENCE AND STEM: CASE STUDY EXPLORATIONS OF THE PRACTICES OF STUDENTS AND THE PERSPECTIVES OF TEACHERS(2017) Green, Amy Elizabeth; Elby, Andrew; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation provides insights into the potential for the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and a complementary instructional model, transdisciplinary STEM, to advance constructivist approaches to high-quality education by providing a framework and pedagogical model that authentically communicate these principles for practitioners. Through two research projects, I explore some of the dilemmas facing educators implementing these reform initiatives. First, I present a study of the relationship between discursive epistemic agency and scientific authenticity in school. I argue that epistemological misalignment between perspectives underpinning traditional approaches to school science and those of professional science contribute to tensions regarding the amount of control that students should be given over the discourse of science. Using NGSS as representative of authenticity, I explore and respond to a dilemma faced by many science educators of whether students must relinquish discursive agency for their participation in science to be considered authentic. Analyses of contrasting types of ‘talk’ in a first-grade classroom support the theoretical argument that increased discursive agency directly contributes to engagement in authentic science practices (as defined by NGSS). The second report represents a case study analysis of the perspectives of participants in a degree program focused on interdisciplinary approaches to learning. I ask, how do teachers’ epistemological beliefs affect their perceptions of the locus of perceived barriers and the extent to which those barriers may be overcome? My results indicate that accessing teacher beliefs is productive for understanding the relative alignment between their personal epistemologies and those of the reform. Furthermore, epistemological beliefs may be intimately entangled with, rather than function discretely from, these teachers’ perceptions of constraints to implementation of reform. The conclusions of these two research projects indicate that epistemological perspectives pervade the discourse of science, the text of curricular resources, and the language teachers use to talk about the implementation of pedagogical models. Furthermore, authentic enactments of science and meaningful learning are at least partially dependent upon a consistent alignment between the epistemologies underpinning reform efforts, those reflected in the language of school, and the personal epistemologies of educators.Item Neural Bases of Emotional Language Processing in Individuals with and without Autism(2015) Sand, Lesley Ann; Bolger, Donald J.; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A fundamental aspect of successful social interactions is the ability to accurately infer others’ verbal communication, often including information related to the speaker’s feelings. Autism spectrum disorder is characterized by language and social-affective impairments, and also aberrant functional neural responses to socially-relevant stimuli. The main objective of the current research was to examine the behavioral and neural effects of making affective inferences from language lacking overt prosody or explicit emotional words in individuals with and without autism. In neurotypical individuals, the current data are consistent with previous studies showing that verbal emotional stimuli enhances activation of brain regions generally responsive to discourse, and also “social-affective” brain regions, specifically medial/orbital frontal regions, bilateral middle temporal areas, temporal parietal junction/superior temporal gyri and pCC/PC. Moreover, these regions respond differentially to positive and negative valence, most clearly in the medial frontal area. Further, results suggest that mentalizing alone does not account for the differences between emotional and neutral stories, as all of our stories required similar inferencing of the feelings of the protagonist. In autism, there is general agreement that the neurodevelopmental disorder is marked by impairments in pragmatic language understandings, emotional processes, and the ability to “mentalize,” others’ thoughts, intentions and beliefs. However, findings are mixed regarding the precise nature of emotional language understandings. Results of the present study suggest that autistic individuals are able to make language-based emotional inferences, and that like neurotypical controls, social-affective brain regions show task-related facilitation effects for emotional compared to neutral valence. However, the neural activations in the autism group were generally greater than controls, especially in response to emotion. Additionally, results showed greater difficulty with incongruent judgments in participants with autism. Together, these findings represent a first step toward revealing social-affective abilities in the language context in autism, despite irregular brain response. Such understandings are critical to generating effective intervention strategies and therapeutic practices for autistic individuals and their families. For remediation to be most beneficial, one must understand and utilize areas of skill, and leverage those to positively impact deficits.Item Computational modeling of the role of discourse information in language production and language acquisition(2015) Orita, Naho; Feldman, Naomi H; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the role of discourse information in language production and language acquisition. Discourse information plays an important role in various aspects of linguistic processes and learning. However, characterizing what it is and how it is used has been challenging. Previous studies on discourse tend to focus on the correlations between certain discourse factors and speaker/comprehender's behavior, rather than looking at how the discourse information is used in the system of language and why. This dissertation aims to provide novel insights into the role of discourse information by formalizing how it is represented and how it is used. First, I formalize the latent semantic information in humans' discourse representations by examining speakers' choices of referring expressions. Simulation results suggest that topic models can capture aspects of discourse representations that are relevant to the choices of referring expressions, beyond simple referent frequency. Second, I propose a language production model that extends the rational speech act model from \citeA{frank2012predicting} to incorporate updates to listeners' beliefs as discourse proceeds. Simulations suggest that speakers' behavior can be modeled in a principled way by considering the probabilities of referents in the discourse and the information conveyed by each word. Third, I examine the role of discourse information in language acquisition, focusing on the learning of grammatical categories of pronouns. I show that a Bayesian model with prior discourse knowledge can accurately recover grammatical categories of pronouns, but simply having strong syntactic prior knowledge is not sufficient. This suggests that discourse information can help learners acquire grammatical categories of pronouns. Throughout this dissertation, I propose frameworks for modeling speakers and learners using techniques from Bayesian modeling. These models provide ways to flexibly investigate the effects of various sources of information, including discourse salience, expectations about referents and grammatical knowledge.Item Incivility in Mass Political Discourse: The Causes and Consequences of an Uncivil Public(2013) Gervais, Bryan T.; Uslaner, Eric M.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation project, I explore the effect that exposure to uncivil political talk has on deliberative attitudes and behavior. I hypothesize that incivility in political discourse can induce anti-deliberative attitudes among the public, and increases the use of incivility in political talk. I argue that an anti-deliberative spirit among the public helps fuel mass partisan polarization, and limits the positive effects that come from public deliberation. Using survey data, I find that use of incivility by the public when talking politics has increased. This trend has come alongside changes in partisan polarization and media over the last few decades. A separate analysis confirms the tie between exposure to partisan, uncivil media and uncivil political talk; using panel data, I find that exposure to political talk radio and pundit-based television programming leads audience members with like-minded political views to mimic uncivil language and tactics when expressing their own political opinions. I use experimental methods to explore incivility's effects more in-depth. Drawing from affective intelligence theory, I hypothesize that political incivility has the ability to induce anger, which in turn reduces deliberative attitudes. In one experiment, I manipulate the amount of incivility in an online message board. I find that uncivil political talk induced feelings of anger in individuals when one's partisan in-group was targeted, and led to an increased use of incivility when the partisan out-group was targeted. When feelings of anger are stimulated in people, they reprimand the uncivil "perpetrator" on the message board, and display anti-deliberative attitudes--including a reduced propensity to consider alternative views and lower levels of satisfaction with interactive online communication. A second experiment, embedded in a national survey, confirms that disagreeable incivility and like-minded incivility have different effects. Uncivil messages that are disagreeable induce feelings of anger, decrease willingness to compromise, and boost use of incivility. While the connection between like-minded incivility, anger, and anti-deliberative attitudes is less clear, uncivil messages lead like-minded messages to mimic uncivil and anti-deliberative behavior. My findings show that incivility limits political deliberation. I conclude by noting the consequences of this, as well as directions for future research.Item Reading the Defense: Conceptualizations of Literacy By College Football Student-Athletes(2013) Segal, Pamela H.; Turner, Jennifer D; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study investigated how college football student-athletes conceptualize the academic and athletic literacies they experience inside and outside the classroom. Participants included sophomore, junior, and senior football student-athletes who all attended a large public university in the Mid-Atlantic area. Three distinct research tools (questionnaire, focus group, individual interviews) were used in this study. The data was systematically coded and analyzed using qualitative content analysis procedures. This study demonstrated that the football student-athletes were able to demonstrate their understanding of literacy through use of the discourse of football. Moreover, the participants used their football discourse to express their thoughts, support their views, and analyze texts, all literacy skills valued in the college classrooms. Also, the football student-athletes perceived a connection between academic literacy and football literacy. The participants recognized literacy in football in reading the plays, communication between players and coaches and the media, and executing plays on the field. Several implications of this study are: the value of athletic literacy and football discourse in various settings, an improved connection between education and athletics, and the creation of future literacy programs to support the football student-athletes. This study is the first step in exploring the connection between athletic and academic literacy in order to improve the development of college football student-athletes. The results of this study compel us to rethink the stigma attached to football student-athletes in connection to their literacy, the locations of literacy events and the importance of literacy in football and school at the college level.Item The Textualization of Pat Tillman: Understanding the Relationships Between Person, Discourse, and Ideology(2011) Herbig, Arthur William; Gaines, Robert N; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project is a critical examination of the ways in which the life and death of Pat Tillman were shaped into a discursive Pat Tillman. This is not a project that examines the life led by the person Pat Tillman. The discursive Pat Tillman can be found in the pages of magazines, on television, invoked by politicians, and even memorialized in song. It is Pat Tillman, the discursive creation, that is my focus. In this project I take for granted that Pat Tillman only existed in places like the pages of books or on film. What is not lost on me and should not be lost on the reader of this project is my own participation in this process. With this project I have entered into the very discourses that I seek to critique. This is an analysis of the existence of a Pat Tillman that many people still know and the ideas that help shape how that existence is communicated. My critique focuses on the existence of a discursive Pat Tillman as a rhetorical phenomenon, drawing upon scholarship that can inform an understanding of how the life of Pat Tillman became the material for public discourse. My analysis interconnects Michel Foucault's (1972) work on knowledge and discourse with Michael Calvin McGee (1990) referred to as rhetorical fragments, in order to provide a foundation for understanding the discursive existence of Pat Tillman. Using how discourse producer connected various facts, stories, and images with conceptions of heroism, masculinity, and the American Dream, I reveal how the life and death of Pat Tillman was used as the material to represent political and cultural positions that exist external to that life. Through an analysis of the various news reports, books, documentaries, blogs, and other mediated texts that were produced in response to the life and death of Pat Tillman, this study presents a clearer picture of what is meant by "fragmentation" in critical analysis.