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 SYNTACTIC AND LEXICAL ALIGNMENT DURING NATURALISTIC CONVERSATIONS AMONGST AFRICAN AMERICAN PARENTS OF 4-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN FROM PROFESSIONAL- AND WORKING-CLASS FAMILIES(2023) Ogbonna, Chidinma; Bernstein Ratner, Nan; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Parents play an important role when it comes to child language development. This study examines differences in lexical and syntactic alignment, in child-directed speech (CDS), between African American mothers and fathers from the professional- and working-class. The Hall (1984) corpus from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES; MacWhinney, 1991) was used to analyze syntactic and lexical alignment in African American professional- and working-class parent-child dyads (children aged 4;6). We investigated the proportion of overlapping nouns shared between mother-child and father-child dyads, as well as differences between parent-child syntactic complexity scores (i.e., Mean Length of Utterance-words (MLU-w), and Verbs per Utterance (Verbs/utt). Results revealed there to be no significant differences regarding lexical and syntactic alignment between the professional- and working-class families; however, fathers were found to produce a significantly higher average proportion of overlapping nouns compared to mothers.Item Influence of Latinx Fathers' Behaviors, Cognitions, Affect, and Family Congruence on Youth Energy Balance-Related Health Outcomes(2022) Rodriguez, Matthew Rene; Roy, Kevin; Hurtado Choque, Ghaffar Ali; Family Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)For decades, researchers have studied and theorized about the ways fathers interact with children and other members of the family. While this research provides important evidence, few father involvement studies have included Latinx fathers. Numerous father involvement conceptual frameworks have helped us understand the ways fathers interact with their families. Much of this research has focused on fathers' behaviors, but research suggests other domains need more investigation, such as fathers' cognitions and affect. Understanding these additional domains of father involvement can provide important evidence for understanding the ways fathers influence the health of children. Fathers influence the health of their children within different cultural and socio-political contexts. When considering Latinx father involvement within a social determinants of health approach, research has encouraged focusing on upstream factors that can contribute to the health of Latinx families. Addressing these upstream factors can shape the health and wellbeing of children. Currently, Latinx youth suffer disproportionately from obesity compared to all other racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. Through investigating Latinx father involvement, I fill an important gap by researching the extent to which Latinx fathers' affect, behaviors, and cognitions shape youth health outcomes. I also investigate theorized moderators that may influence the relationship between fathers' involvement and youth health outcomes. Using a cross sectional study design with a community-based sample of Latinx fathers and youth (ages 10-14) (n=193), I use latent moderation structural analyses to test the theorized causal mechanisms.Item More Than Thoughts and Prayers: Social Justice Leadership Preparation(2021) Burris, Jennifer; Scribner, Campbell F; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)School administrators often lack the preparation to recognize and act against educational injustices. This qualitative case study examines how a graduate-level educational leadership course at a private Christian university serving primarily white in-service teachers attempted to prepare administrators to be social justice leaders. Through interviews, course observations, and document analysis, this case study explores administrators' preparation for reflection and action across multiple dimensions of inequity, including personal, interpersonal, communal, systemic, and ecological. Findings indicate that participants consistently reflected across all dimensions, yet these reflections centered on surface-level inequities often without a systemic analysis of power and oppression. Deficit views on historically marginalized populations dominated participant discourse and reflection. Instead of educators being asked to consider their own role in creating and sustaining inequities in their classroom, school, and society, the course focused more on individuals being “good people” and loving students. Throughout the course discussions, assignments, and presentations, participants separated their personal actions from broader systems of power. Additionally, in both design and practice, the course provided only limited opportunities to develop skills to identify, respond to, and redress asymmetric systems of power. When considering the causes of continued educational inequities, participants either failed to consider their role in the upholding or dismantling of oppression, or they took on the role of white saviors. Throughout the course, participants made tenuous assumptions about developing future administrators’ capacity for praxis, including participants’ prior knowledge level and the degree to which educational equity was covered in other classes in the program. These assumptions resulted in several deficit perspectives about marginalized communities and falsely implied that specific knowledge and skills are not required to be social justice leaders. Using a social justice leadership as praxis framework to more fully understand administrator preparation, this research has significant implications for preservice teacher and administrator courses that focus specifically on injustice in education, and for educational leadership programs more broadly.Item The place of race in past and present: Student and state narratives of race in U.S. History(2021) Lee, Justine Hwei Chi; Brown, Tara M; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This three-study dissertation addresses the broader question of identifying a collective memory of race in the Northern United States. The studies are conceptually linked by a critical race perspective and are distinct in research focus, methods, and findings. In the first study, I examined how 128 students from two New England states represented their understandings of the history of enslavement in the United States. I used inductive and deductive approaches to investigate how they connected this history to race and notions of national progress. In the second study, I used document analysis to investigate the representation of people of color in New York’s state standards for 11th grade U.S. history. I found that less than one-third of standards cited people of color, and the majority of such standards cited them alongside White people. This practice of exclusionary grouping reinforced Whiteness as normative by implying a essentialist view of race and ethnicity. In the third study, I employed discourse analysis to examine the representation of race in the New York U.S. history curricular framework and in the policy context of its intended use. I found that policy defining the purpose of social studies promoted nationalist and race-evasive discourses. Through strategic periodization, the curriculum segregated explicit references to race into an “alternate timeline,” whose narrative arc strongly implied racial progress. Moreover, I found that the selectively ahistorical use of the word “American” was used to mark groups as non-White. Ultimately, the state’s manipulation of time and language functioned to preserve discourses of national progress and U.S. moral exceptionalism and to suppress the study of race in history.Item The Initial Implementation Patterns of the C3 Framework in Maryland School Districts(2018) Pugh, Shannon Michelle; De La Paz, Susan; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This qualitative study examined the initial implementation patterns of the C3 Framework in Maryland school districts. The National Council for the Social Studies published the C3 Framework as a guide for state departments of education to revise social studies standards. This study sought to determine how district social studies leaders viewed the C3 Framework, how the district social studies leaders translated the C3 Framework in their districts, and why they chose to implement the C3 Framework as they did. The primary data sources were interviews and documents; the data were analyzed using constant comparative analysis to identify overarching attitudes toward the C3 Framework and implementation patterns. Policy implementation research specifically related to cognitive theory and capacity was used to help explain the implementation process. This study found that beliefs, financial and human resources, and time were the main factors influencing implementation. The study also found that how districts approach and support reform implementation for social studies might be different from how districts previously approached and supported new standards and curriculum in other content areas. In this study, all district social studies leaders focused primarily on disciplinary literacy components of the C3 Framework, specifically those related to history. District social studies leaders focused on document-based activities, student projects, and writing to source but few addressed the Inquiry Arc in a way that challenged or altered expected approaches to teaching and learning social studies. Many used the C3 Framework as leverage to justify the continued work and focus on historical thinking and other disciplinary literacy work in their districts. Most district social studies leaders used inquiry and disciplinary literacy as synonyms; the pattern suggests that further work to help educators distinguish between these related approaches to learning is necessary to help support the use of inquiry in the social studies. As more states use the C3 Framework in state standards, this study might help states and districts guide how they approach its implementation.Item SPEECH MODIFICATION TO NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS AND CONTENT DILUTION: IMPLICATIONS FOR ENGLISH AS A MEDIUM OF INSTRUCTION (EMI)(2018) Al Thowaini, Assma Mohammad; Long, Michael H; Second Language Acquisition and Application; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)With the rapid growth of language education programs, such as Content-and-Language-Integrated Learning (CLIL) and English as a medium of instruction (EMI), research on input modification shifted perspectives. The current study investigates L2 input modification by comparing the speech of non-native speakers to that of native speakers towards low-proficiency learners of English using quantitative methods. Furthermore, the study explores the effects of these modifications on learners’ content comprehension and the possible content dilution (e.g., loss of essential information) triggered by linguistic simplification. In this experiment, two types of participants were recruited: speakers and listeners. Twenty native and advanced non-native speakers of English participated (ten of each). The speaker participants were divided into two subgroups: those with language teaching experience and those without. For the listeners, three groups were recruited: 20 native speaker controls, 20 high-proficiency, and 20 low-proficiency English learners (listeners). Each speaker narrated stories to three assigned listeners (one from each condition) in one-on-one sessions. Each session included an introduction, two warm-up stories, and three main stories. Speech was audio-recorded to examine the types of modification employed with high- and low-proficiency listeners, as opposed to native listener controls, and the effects of those modifications on story content and listener comprehension. After each story, the listeners took a content comprehension assessment. The transcripts were coded for lexical complexity (diversity and sophistication), syntactic complexity, and content dilution. The results showed a significant difference between native and non-native speakers in their speech to the three listener conditions in terms of lexical sophistication and syntactic complexity, as well as a significant difference between speakers with language teaching experience and speakers without in terms of lexical diversity. Furthermore, all speaker conditions exhibited significant linguistic modification (lexical diversity, lexical sophistication, and syntactic complexity) in their speech towards low- and high-proficiency listeners compared to their speech towards the native controls. In addition, only native speakers showed significant content dilution (measured by the count of mentioned information bits) in their speech towards high- and low-proficiency listeners. Finally, the high- and low-proficiency listeners’ scores on the content comprehension assessment were significantly lower than the scores of the native controls.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 Re-Positioning Latino Heritage Language Learners: The Case of one adolescent's experiences in two different pedagogical spaces.(2015) Merrills, Kayra Zurany; Martin-Beltran, Melinda; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)To improve the education of heritage language learners, more research is necessary to understand alternative educational practices and learning contexts that tap into and further develop heritage language learners' bilingual competence. This inquiry investigates how one Latino heritage language learner (HLL), Yolanda, experienced distinct opportunities to use and develop her heritage language as she participated in a bilingual extra-curricular program and in a world language classroom. Drawing upon Positioning Theory (Davies & Harré, 1999; Harré & Moghaddam, 2003; Harré & van Langenhove, 1999), this study explored how her positioning promoted languaging and language use. Drawing from sociocultural theory, this study applied the concept of languaging to understand language learning (Swain, 2002, 2005, 2006; Swain et al, 2009). I use the term languaging to describe metalinguistic discourse in which students explain or discuss a linguistic problem to others or the moments when learners talk aloud to themselves to mediate understanding of language (Swain, 2006). This study provides an analysis of how the HLL's different positionings influenced the amount of languaging and the type of language (Spanish, English or both) she decided to use. This single-case study incorporated both qualitative and quantitative methodologies with exploratory purposes. Methods of data collection included observations, field notes, audio-recording, video-recording, and student interviews. Data analysis was guided by interactional ethnography, conversation analysis and grounded theory. I also used Dedoose software to code transcripts and identify the co-occurrence of languaging and positioning. This study found that a bilingual extra-curricular program afforded Yolanda positionings that promoted a higher quality and quantity of opportunities for languaging and use of linguistic multicompetence due to collaborative opportunities with linguistically diverse students. This study contributes to research on HLLs by focusing on classroom practices that promote languaging and use of linguistic multicompetence. This study has implications for teachers and teacher education by providing a rich description of an academic space that re-positions a heritage language learner as a multilingual expert and learner.Item Students as Investigators, Teachers as Researchers: Documenting a Critical History Pedagogy and its Impact on Diverse Learners in a Tenth-Grade World History Classroom(2014) Kelly, Timothy J.; Valli, Linda; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study documents a teacher's efforts to scaffold and support his students' investigations of modern world history and their interactions with the critical history pedagogy he implements in a diverse tenth-grade classroom. Using teacher research methods to generate descriptive quantitative and qualitative data, the study explores the role of the teacher, the students, and local contextual factors in the teaching and learning process. In particular, the teacher-researcher details his attempts to mediate the influences of curriculum and assessment measures in a high stakes accountability context, while equipping his students with powerful disciplinary tools aimed at deepening their understanding of the past and developing in them a capacity to shape those meanings. The data suggest that the teacher-researcher faced considerable challenges in implementing an inquiry-based approach to learning about the past. The breadth of the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL's) meant that in-depth learning centered on the analysis of conflicting sources and the interpretation of competing perspectives necessarily contended with coverage demands associated with SOL test preparation. These external constraints became background concerns when the teacher-researcher focused more on the internal knowledge-based constraints that were impeding student learning. In addition to the cultural, linguistic, and academic diversity of the learners in his classroom, the teacher was challenged by his students' lack of experience analyzing historical sources, exploring multiple perspectives, and writing evidence-based arguments. Study findings indicate that two main factors contributed to the growth of historical thinking and writing among study participants. First, the history domain's cognitive practices were progressively introduced and learning supports were designed to meet the range of aptitudes and skill levels present in this diverse public school setting. Although some students experienced more in the way of skill development than conceptual growth, evidence demonstrates that a range of students experienced progression. Second, the teacher-researcher learned to utilize traditional classroom structures in the context of open-ended inquiries and directed these practices toward more meaningful encounters with historical knowledge. Although elements of his instructional pedagogy seemed to align with more conventional practices, a disciplinary thread was woven throughout the fabric of the world history course.