Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item THE PERCEIVED RELATIONSHIP OF PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT ON TEACHER SELF-REPORTED USE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS(2014) Tresler, Tiffany D.; Kivlighan, Dennis; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Beginning in 2012 teachers from 44 states have been challenged to make significant changes in curriculum and classroom instruction to meet the rigor of the Common Core State Standards. However, available research does not provide definitive methods to impact wide-scale reform, such as Common Core Standards adoption. This preliminary, quantitative study seeks to examine professional development and one component of the Common Core. The purpose is to determine if specific teacher perceived features of professional development are related to self-reported classroom use of the six English language arts (ELA) Common Core instructional shifts. The specific professional development features studied and the statistical analysis are based on the work of Garet, Porter, Desimone, Birman, and Yoon (2001), examining what makes professional development effective. The features are type (reform vs. traditional), duration, collective participation, content focus, coherence, and active learning. The ELA instructional shifts are balancing informational and literary text, teaching reading and writing through disciplines, use of complex text, text-based answers, writing from sources, and use of academic vocabulary. The study population consists of 89 elementary school teachers in one school system in Maryland who completed a survey asking them to describe their most recent professional development experience and their classroom use of the six ELA Common Core instructional shifts. The survey is modified from the Teacher Activity Survey (Garet et al., 1999) used in a large-scale national study (Garet et al., 2001) and a follow-up three-year longitudinal study (Desimone, Porter, Garet, Yoon, & Birman, 2002). The results of the correlation and ordinary least-squares regression analysis indicate that alignment, a component of coherence, and content focus are the only two perceived professional development features that are strongly correlated with teacher self-reported use of the Common Core instructional shifts. Specifically, the feature of content focus is likely to be a predictor of reported use of students reading and writing through disciplines and writing from sources. Alignment is likely to be a predictor of the reported use of teaching students using complex text. Content focus and alignment are predictors of the reported use of the shifts in total.Item PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICES IN THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN SECONDARY PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN PARKER COUNTY(2011) Wilson, Peggy Lynn; McCaleb, Joseph L.; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)State and local learning standards consistently call for student proficiency in standard English usage and grammar. NCTE standards for secondary teachers (grades 7-12) include expectations for English language knowledge, including English grammar. High stakes tests, as well, both for teacher candidates and secondary students, include assessments of grammatical knowledge and proficiency. However, there have been few studies of ELA teachers' attitudes toward or practices in grammar instruction over the past 30 to 40 years (see Godley [2007] and Smagorinsky [2011]), an absence not surprising given NCTE perspectives and research (e.g., Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer [1963], Hillocks [1986], and Weaver [1996]) that question the efficacy of teaching grammar as a means for improving writing ability. After the close of the first quarter of the 2008-2009 school year, I surveyed 369 English/language arts teachers from a large, highly-diverse, semi-urban mid-Atlantic public school system to determine their attitudes toward and practices in the teaching of grammar. Results based on 91 completed surveys from teachers in grades 7-12 indicate that nearly 85% of Parker County English/language arts teachers who responded include grammar and language study -- and about half are regularly doing so. Just over half include it one or two days per week, and half give it less than one-quarter of their (average) 81-minute period. Common practices include selected-response grammar exercises, sentence combining and transformation, and use of students' own writing as material for review or editing, all with an "emphasis on standard American English." Nearly 72% believe students who are proficient in standard English will have greater opportunity for success in higher education or the workplace, but only 36% welcome all students' dialects/language as valid in the classroom -- and only 15% would like students to acknowledge and respect language diversity. Although the findings indicate little direct association between teachers' attitudes and practices regarding grammar instruction, they nonetheless raise serious questions about attitudes toward students' personal dialect and language and the decisions teachers make regarding grammar instruction in their classrooms.Item Spring Tide Wait(2011) Leverone, Julia Eva; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)These poems work the geography they possess, moving as fully as their peripheral vision permits; their area delineated by a quietly biding moment revealing the narrator's uncertainties and desires, and especially her romantic relationship. The visual efforts are detailed and many times drawn from the natural and/or the foreign, traveling from the New England coast to Spain and Argentina, while incorporating translated works from Latin American poets--Heberto Padilla and Dulce María Loynaz--, the wonder at the expansiveness of another place isolating and contrasting.Item Behind a Crystal Veil, A Novel-in-Progress and Stories(2011) Nissan, Jenna; Norman, Howard; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This novel-in-progress and collection of stories aims to explore the role of collective memory and storytelling within families. Each narrative is interested in investigating what parts of heritage are intuitively known by younger generations, as well as what pieces of family history are lost over the years. The concept of the title, Behind a Crystal Veil, stems from the idea that when looking back on the past, there are some memories that can be seen anew by younger generations through storytelling, yet other aspects of heritage that will always be obscured and veiled by the passage of time.Item Positioning and Identity in the Academic Literacy Experiences of Elementary English Language Learners(2011) Hickey, Pamela J.; Martin-Beltran, Melinda; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study investigates the academic literacy experiences of elementary English Language Learners (ELLs) in first grade, fourth grade, and sixth grade. Participants included students as well as their reading/language arts mainstream teachers and their English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teachers. Informed by both cross-sectional cross-case study and narrative inquiry methodology, this study used positioning theory and identity theory as complementary analytic lenses. Students' positionings, both reflexive self-positioning and interactive positioning by others, were identified and named through analyses of their interactions in academic literacy events during reading/language arts. In order to consider the ways that students' positionings may afford or constrain their access to and engagement with academic literacy events, the researcher created an analytic framework naming student positions. Additionally, positions were considered in light of the ways that they mediated students' levels of engagement as literacy events unfolded. To investigate the construction of students' literate identities, the researcher examined students' patterns of positioning during literacy events and considered interview data from students and teachers as well as field notes that documented conversations with participants. The researcher also gathered two self-portraits from student participants, including one self-portrait showing the student engaged in an academic literacy task at school and one showing the student engaged in a fun activity outside of the school context. The study demonstrated that students' positionings, both positive and constraining, may work to construct and re-construct students' literate identities even as students' literate identities may inform the ways that students take on and negotiate positions in a recursive process. The study also found that students with strong literate identities bridging home and school contexts took on more positive positions thus engaging more deeply with academic literacy tasks than students with striving literate identities. Students with striving literate identities often took on positions of constraint in strategic moves that allowed them to get through literacy tasks without engaging deeply. Finally, this study demonstrated the powerful ways that teachers may support students' deep engagement with literacy tasks through positive positioning and following through on their lesson implementation by offering opportunities for re-positioning and the use of scaffolds.Item The Ethics of Allegory in /Paradise Lost/(2011) Vasileiou, Margaret Rice; Grossman, Marshall; Leinwand, Theodore; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation reframes the debate about whether Paradise Lost is an allegorical poem by focusing on Milton's assertion that all language is allegorical because it reflects the difference-from-Himself that God has inscribed into language and built into human ontology. Milton emphasizes this allegorical difference in two ways in Paradise Lost. First, he points out the difference between the logic of language and the landscape by which we try to describe and apprehend it, even ascribing the fall to Eve's decision to ignore this difference and to embrace the logic of language as if it captured truth. Second, he forces the allegorical figures of Sin and Death to contend with and participate in Christian history, thereby destabilizing their figurations as representations of abstract ideas, and displaying the impossibility of fusing word and thing (i.e., of collapsing allegorical difference) in the historical context of pre-apocalyptic time. This dissertation argues that Milton uses both of these strategies to oppose the universal language ideology of the late seventeenth century, whose proponents promised to speak the world exactly as it is, to fuse word and thing. From Milton's perspective, these proponents threatened to write over God's truth with a language that reflected their desire for intellectual domination of the world more than it reflected the natural world they supposedly sought to describe. Thus, Paradise Lost reminds us that word and thing cannot be fused, that other-speaking not only reflects human ontology--that is, humankind's suspension in a state of difference from and similarity to God--but also represents the only kind of speaking that refers to God. Language that does not admit its difference from truth, in contrast, writes over the sublime truth with a verbal idol that purports to embody what it can only allegorically represent.