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 Literacy and anger regulation among upper elementary students(2022) Weinberg, Hayley Ilana; O'Neal, Colleen; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The contribution of this study is the examination of the relation between literacy and use of anger regulation strategies in upper elementary children. This short-term longitudinal study includes two time points, approximately four months apart. This study examines whether performance on a literacy achievement task predicts later self-reported frequency of anger regulation strategy use. I will also examine the effects of gender on the relation between literacy and anger regulation. Participants included a sample of 253 students between ages 8-11 years old from two Maryland elementary schools (mean age = 9.7; 57% female; 32% dual language learners; 5% Asian, 10% Black, 6% Latinx, 65% White, 12% multiethnic students). Path analyses were conducted to test a model of Time 1 literacy achievement impacting the outcome of later Time 2 anger regulation, controlling for related demographic variables and Time 1 literacy achievement scores. Literacy was not found to be a significant predictor of anger regulation. However, this study provides insight into the relation between literacy achievement and anger regulation and ideas for future directions for research in this area.Item Tutors’, Spanish-Speaking Students’, and Writing Center Directors’ Dispositions Toward Literacy and the Effect of their Dispositions on Tutoring Sessions(2023) Ellis, Marina; Wilder, Sara; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)University composition classrooms and writing centers have continued to see an influx ofmultilingual students, particularly self-identified Hispanic students entering the academy and bringing with them a plethora of knowledge and experiences of their lived realities within and outside of academia. Yet these experiences are often overlooked for the sake of identifying one particular system for aiding them in their writing needs. This study uses semi-structured narrative inquiry-based preliminary interviews, observations of tutoring sessions, and follow-up interviews to examine the ways in which writing center tutors, heritage Spanish-speaking writing center tutees’, and writing center directors’ attitudes toward language and literacy are formed from their academic, sociocultural, linguistic, and cognitive experiences to understand the effects their lived realities have on tutoring sessions. In this way, this interdisciplinary study responds to calls from researchers in education, rhetoric and composition, and writing center studies for more research and expands upon current scholarship that highlights multilingual students’ lived realities as assets to the writing classroom and writing center rather than as deficits. Results from this study highlight the ways in which tutors and Spanish-speaking tutees’ dispositions toward literacy do have a positive impact on tutoring sessions, whether it is specific teaching styles the tutors have developed over time that are influenced by their own learning experiences, taking small moments within sessions to find commonalities with one another that therefore facilitate a collaborative rapport, utilizing techniques that encourage tutee agency, finding ways to empathize with tutees so that they feel comfortable enough to return to the center, and much more. These findings then have implications for improved tutor training initiatives that emphasize individualized instruction for multilingual students who attend writing center sessions, and assignments that require tutors to examine and reflect on their own literacy learning practices.Item THE INTERSECTIONS OF MASCULINITY, GENDER, AND RACISM: EXPLORING THE LIVED EXPERIENCES AND INTERACTIONS OF BLACK MALE GRADUATE STUDENTS ATTENDING A PRIMARILY WHITE INSTITUTION(2021) Perry, Jamar J; Slater, Wayne; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Negative perceptions of Black boys and men have persisted and have been analyzed through numerous studies over the years, showcasing both educator’s low gendered schooling expectations of them and their racial trauma and stress they experience attending PWIs if they are able to graduate from secondary school. Placing Black men in deficit positions starts in our nation’s PreK-12 public schools through their experiences in college, affecting their ability to participate successfully in the labor market, obtain higher earnings and savings, and their professional and personal mobility. Research that focuses on these negative perceptions impoverishes our understandings of Black men who do succeed in schools, from PreK-12 through doctoral study. The purpose of this collective case study was to explore Black male doctoral students understanding of their lived histories of masculinity, race, and racism through their connection with their childhood, schooling, and doctoral study. Data sources included an individual interview, journal entries, member checking, and a focus group. This study took place at a primarily white institution (PWI) in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States and focused on three Black male doctoral students. Through the adoption of racial/critical race literacy, Critical Race Theory, and Black masculinity literacy as theoretical frames, the findings highlight four common themes—or what I call “dimensions”—from participants’ interviews and journal entries of their experiences and interactions with doctoral study based on their historical understandings of themselves: a) feelings of loneliness/not being able to forge closeness with other Black male doctoral students; b) negative perceptions of and racial microaggressions attending a PWI; c) the influence of Black masculinity to progress; and d) the ways PWIs can establish progressive spaces for Black men. One participant inhabited a dimension that was unique to him with how he claimed masculinity for himself based on his historical positioning and socialization: e) using traditional masculinity to claim manhood. The findings from participants’ focus group highlight two common dimensions of participants’ understanding of their experiences as they reflected together: a) reflecting and learning from Black masculinity in relation to white spaces; and b) recommendations for recruiting and retaining Black men in doctoral study. These findings show how Black male graduate students reflect upon their masculinity histories and schooling and connect them to their understandings of themselves as Black doctoral students. This work contributes to our understanding of successful Black male doctoral students and breaks new grounds by showcasing that Black men do uphold ideals of progressive masculinity that do call for the liberation and protection of all people of color. It also shows how Black men are historically socialized and grounded as gendered and racial beings and how they view white spaces from these lenses as navigational tactics. It also demonstrates how Black men can and do communicate with each other when given the chances to, interrogating their own masculinity practices in conjunction with modeling their own behavior in progressive ways for other Black men. Finally, this study advocates for educational stakeholders to act in concrete and tangible ways to increase Black male doctoral student presence at PWIs.Item The Chick or the Egg? Multi-Group, Short-Term Longitudinal Relations Between Grit and Literacy Achievement(2019) Boyars, Michal Yablong; O'Neal, Colleen R; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The impact of grit on achievement is well established, but it is unclear whether achievement impacts grit. This short-term longitudinal study examined the direction of relations between grit and literacy among diverse elementary school student groups. Most grit research features a unidirectional design (e.g., grit affects achievement). Yet, recent research supports cross-lagged models in which socioemotional skills and achievement affect one another. In addition to testing cross-lagged effects, this study examined the direction of grit-literacy relations for different demographic groups (i.e., age, gender, and dual language status). Method: Participants included upper elementary students (N = 396; 3 schools; Mage = 9.61; 55% female; 59% dual language learners; 11% Black, 6% Asian, 29% Latino/a, 8% Multiracial; 39% White). Measures were student-reported grit, teacher-reported grit, and a student literacy achievement performance task (Test of Silent Reading Efficiency and Comprehension, TOSREC). Analytic Approach: An autoregressive cross-lagged design included two time points over 4 months. A cross-lagged model was compared to unidirectional models (i.e., direct and reverse) for best fit. Multi-group analyses were then used to examine whether grit-literacy relations differed as a function of demographics. Results: The data fit the cross-lagged model better than the direct or reverse models. Within the context of a cross-lagged model – which contained both the direct and reverse effects – there was a significant relation between Time 1 literacy achievement and Time 2 student-reported Grit-PE, suggesting that literacy achievement can predict later Grit-PE. There were no demographic differences in the fit of the data with the cross-lagged model between gender, DLL status, and age groups. Findings of the current study support the examination of reciprocal effects in grit-literacy relations and its generalizability among students. Longer-term cross-lagged studies are needed to further understand the temporal sequence between grit and literacy.Item Immigrant Literacies: Language and Learning in the African Diaspora Novel by Twenty-First Century Anglophone African Writers(2019) Okereke-Beshel, Uchechi Ada; Nunes, Zita C; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Immigrant Literacies: Language and Learning in the African Diaspora Novel by Twenty-First Century Anglophone African Writers” examines the fiction of contemporary African Diaspora writers that introduces new tropes of reading and writing in narrating the experiences of African migrants to Europe and the United States. The writers who are the focus of this dissertation—Teju Cole, Chimamanda Adichie, Brian Chikwava and NoViolet Bulawayo— grapple with the difficulties of migration and its impact on preconceived notions of the self and the world. Each writer links the different pathways that their immigrant characters must take to multiple forms of teaching and learning, demonstrating that literacy is a contextual cultural practice that fosters social connections across the African Diaspora, even as it takes power relations into account. Using the work of Brian Street and other New Literacy theorists, I explore four versions of literacy as a socially embedded cultural practice in novels mainly about Nigerian and Zimbabwean immigrants in the United States and Britain. These theorists are key to my understanding of how revised attitudes to self in an expanded community are being developed in the contemporary African novel because they enable a shift in attention from learning to read and write in order to master a stable and transferrable set of skills to teaching and learning to read and write using a range of codes that characterize hybrid environments. Early criticisms of the African novel focused on the integration of written and oral forms in literature that would nurture a nationalist and postcolonial agenda. Twenty-first century African Diaspora literature expands these goals in demonstrating the transnational and transcultural evolution of both writing and orality. My dissertation organizes each chapter around an exemplary novel to argue that contemporary African novelists writing in English and living in and outside of Africa address the defining question of literacy they have inherited from previous generations by suggesting that multiple and fluid forms of literacy characterize the experience of Africans in the context of migration in the Diaspora.Item Living in the Constellation of the Canon: A Phenomenological Study of African American Students Reading Great Books Literature(2017) Prather, Anika Prather; Hultgren, Francine; Wiseman, Donna; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this phenomenological study, I take a journey into the lived experiences of African American students reading Great Books literature. The research question that guides my study is “What are the lived experiences of African American students reading Great Books literature?” In order to unpack the enlightenment gained through this study on the students’ lived experiences, I call upon the phenomenological writings of Martin Heidegger, Hans George Gadamer, Max van Manen, Edward Casey, John O’ Donohue, and David Abram. African American educators and philosophers speak into the journey, such as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Marva Collins, Anna Julia Cooper, Gloria Ladson-Billings, James Baldwin, and others. My research path follows the methodological guidance of Max van Manen. Years ago, I taught a Great Books literature class for 6 years at a small private school in Southern Maryland. Twenty-two African American students came through my class years ago and 5 of those students were able to participate in this study where I explore their lived experience reading Great Books literature. For this study, we all met around a table, just as we did years ago for the Great Books class that I taught. The five former students who participated in this study and I went away for a weekend retreat to engage in conversation about their lived experiences. Upon careful review of the transcripts from these conversations I identified themes that reflected their progression through the course. The themes are the following: The Flickering Light, When the Flame Catches, Being in the Light, and The Lived Experience Shining into the Present. These themes reveal how students started out struggling with embracing and internalizing the books, but then progressed to transformative insights they brought forth—even allowing the lived experience of reading the literature to affect their current lives as adults. As a culminating event, the participants created and performed a play, entitled “The Table,” which provided a visual representation of their lived experiences reading Great Books literature. They chose the title “The Table” because as we all reflected on the lived experience, they realized that my classes were only taught around a table and from the unity created around the discussions at the table, something happened to their inner selves. The play was performed at St. John’s College during President’s Day weekend and Frederick Douglass’ birthday. After the play, the former students responded to questions from the audience, expressing their journey into reading Great Books literature and also provided insight as to how teachers can help African American students engage in the literature. This was included as a part of my study as well, in order to bring to the light how the students’ present lives were affected by their lived experience reading Great Books literature. The insights gained from this study are a guiding light for me as I move forward as an educator of primarily African American students, especially in the area of literacy education (literary and cultural literacy). The school I opened is a way for me to put into practice the insights gained in this study. In addition, my interests in forming multi-age Great Books literature circles of all races, backgrounds, etc.; round table discussions with educators, parents, etc. on these matters; and teacher training sessions where these insights can be shared, have become more illuminated for me.Item Which Skills Predict School Success? Socioemotional Skills and the Achievement Gap(2016) Boyars, Michal Y.; O'Neal, Colleen R; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This cross-sectional study examined the relations of four socioemotional skills with academic achievement among ethnic minority (e.g., Asian, Black, Latino/a, and multiethnic) and White elementary school students. Method: Participants included public school upper elementary students (N = 257; Mage = 9.71; 58% female; 10% Black, 5% Asian, 6% Latino/a, 12% multiracial; 61% White). Measures included student-reported grit, growth mindset, engagement, and emotion regulation, in addition to a student literacy achievement performance task (Test of Silent Reading Efficiency and Comprehension, TOSREC) and student reading achievement scores (Measures of Academic Progress in Reading; MAP-R). Results: Across all analyses, socioemotional skills were more related to literacy achievement for ethnic minority students than for White students. While simple regressions supported several skills’ relation to achievement for both groups of students, multiple regressions suggested that grit was the sole significant predictor of achievement, and it was only predictive of minority students’ achievement. Although literacy achievement differed between the full samples of ethnic minority and White students, moderation analyses indicated that this achievement gap disappeared among high grit students. Yet, while these regression and moderation results suggested grit’s unique role as a predictor, SEM analyses suggested that the magnitude of all of the socioemotional skills’ prediction of achievement were more similar than different. These findings support a novel but cautious approach to research on socioemotional skills and the achievement gap: results suggest that the skills operate differently in students of different ethnicities, with grit playing a uniquely predictive role for minority students. The skills, however, may be more similar than not in the strength of their association with literacy achievement.Item CROSS-LINGUISTIC TRANSFER OF SPELLING SKILLS IN SPANISH-SPEAKING ADULT ESL LEARNERS(2016) Bai, Yu; MacSwan, Jeff; Martin-Beltran, Melinda; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Spelling is an important literacy skill, and learning to spell is an important component of learning to write. Learners with strong spelling skills also exhibit greater reading, vocabulary, and orthographic knowledge than those with poor spelling skills (Ehri & Rosenthal, 2007; Ehri & Wilce, 1987; Rankin, Bruning, Timme, & Katkanant, 1993). English, being a deep orthography, has inconsistent sound-to-letter correspondences (Seymour, 2005; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). This poses a great challenge for learners in gaining spelling fluency and accuracy. The purpose of the present study is to examine cross-linguistic transfer of English vowel spellings in Spanish-speaking adult ESL learners. The research participants were 129 Spanish-speaking adult ESL learners and 104 native English-speaking GED students enrolled in a community college located in the South Atlantic region of the United States. The adult ESL participants were in classes at three different levels of English proficiency: advanced, intermediate, and beginning. An experimental English spelling test was administered to both the native English-speaking and ESL participants. In addition, the adult ESL participants took the standardized spelling tests to rank their spelling skills in both English and Spanish. The data were analyzed using robust regression and Poisson regression procedures, Mann-Whitney test, and descriptive statistics. The study found that both Spanish spelling skills and English proficiency are strong predictors of English spelling skills. Spanish spelling is also a strong predictor of level of L1-influenced transfer. More proficient Spanish spellers made significantly fewer L1-influenced spelling errors than less proficient Spanish spellers. L1-influenced transfer of spelling knowledge from Spanish to English likely occurred in three vowel targets (/ɑɪ/ spelled as ae, ai, or ay, /ɑʊ/ spelled as au, and /eɪ/ spelled as e). The ESL participants and the native English-speaking participants produced highly similar error patterns of English vowel spellings when the errors did not indicate L1-influenced transfer, which implies that the two groups might follow similar trajectories of developing English spelling skills. The findings may help guide future researchers or practitioners to modify and develop instructional spelling intervention to meet the needs of adult ESL learners and help them gain English spelling competence.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 LITERACY AND EDUCATIONAL QUALITY IMPROVEMENT IN ETHIOPIA: A MIXED METHODS STUDY(2012) McCormac, Meredith; Lin, Jing; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines the development of early grade reading skills as a means for quality improvement in global education. Specifically, this study explores the contextual factors that affect the achievement of early reading skills in Ethiopia and investigates the relationship between literacy and educational quality. The sequential explanatory mixed-methods design is employed to answer four research questions: 1. According to the Ethiopia Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) dataset in the Addis Ababa region, what contextual factors affect achievement in basic literacy skills and how are they related? 2. According to qualitative data, how do parents' and teachers' perspectives explain and substantiate the contextual factors identified in the EGRA dataset and do other factors emerge? 3. Given the answers to the first two research questions, what are the factors associated with achievement that are most favorable and most challenging for literacy development? 4. Given the answer to the third research question, how can interventions for literacy development be best implemented in relationship to overall educational quality improvement? The first, quantitative phase of this study shows that a vast majority of students do not perform at expected levels on the Ethiopia EGRA. The results from three multiple regression analysis models for oral reading fluency and reading comprehension outcomes suggest that both in-school and out-of-school variables have a significant influence on student achievement. The second, qualitative phase of this study reveals several important findings above and beyond those identified in Phase I. First, the findings from both Phase I and Phase II demonstrate the importance of out-of-school variables, but the importance of these to both teachers and parents was underestimated in Phase I. School directors, parents, and teachers highlight the home environment as the most important factor in student achievement. This study demonstrates the utility of a mixed-methods approach to investigate more holistically the practice of literacy in Ethiopia and its relationship to the pursuit of educational quality more broadly. This study also provides a responsive, critical, and theoretical grounding for understanding conflicting perspectives, policies, and approaches to improving the quality of education through literacy development.