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
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Interdisciplinary Reasoning about Energy in an Introductory Physics Course for the Life Sciences(2014) Dreyfus, Benjamin William; Redish, Edward F; Physics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Energy is a unifying concept that cuts across physics, chemistry, and biology. However, students who study all three disciplines can end up with a fragmented understanding of energy. This dissertation sits at the intersection of two active areas of current research: the teaching and learning of energy, and interdisciplinary science education (particularly the intersection of physics and biology). The context for this research is an introductory physics course for undergraduate life sciences majors that is reformed to build stronger interdisciplinary connections between physics, biology, and chemistry. An approach to energy that incorporates chemical bonds and chemical reactions is better equipped to meet the needs of life sciences students than a traditional introductory physics approach that focuses primarily on mechanical energy, and so we present a curricular thread for chemical energy in the physics course. Our first set of case studies examines student reasoning about ATP hydrolysis, a biochemically significant reaction that powers various processes in the cell. We observe students expressing both that an energy input is required to break a chemical bond (which they associate with physics) and that energy is released when the phosphate bond is broken in ATP (which they associate with biology). We use these case studies to articulate a model of interdisciplinary reconciliation: building coherent connections between concepts from different disciplines while understanding each concept in its own disciplinary context and justifying the modeling choices in deciding when to use each disciplinary model. Our second study looks at ontological metaphors for energy: metaphors about what kind of thing energy is. Two ontological metaphors for energy that have previously been documented include energy as a substance and energy as a location. We argue for the use of negative energy in modeling chemical energy in an interdisciplinary context, and for the use of a blended substance/location ontology in reasoning about negative energy. Our data show students and experts using the blended ontology productively when the two ontologies are combined in a coherent structure, as well as students getting confused when the ontologies are not coherently combined.Item Using Elaborative Interrogation Enhanced Worked Examples to Improve Chemistry Problem Solving(2012) Pease, Rebecca Simpson; Holliday, William G; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Elaborative interrogation, which prompts students to answer why-questions placed strategically within informational text, has been shown to increase learning comprehension through reading. In this study, elaborative interrogation why-questions requested readers to explain why paraphrased statements taken from a reading were "true." Although previous research in elaborative interrogation has examined the effect of utilizing these why-questions while reading biology content, they have not been explored with chemistry text or chemistry textbooks that include worked example problems, according to a review of the literature. This study investigated the effect of answering elaborative interrogation why-questions placed adjunct to worked examples which were embedded within a section of a college chemistry textbook, compared with the commonly used study strategy of rereading the same text as a placebo-control. A randomized two-group posttest only design was used in this study. Specifically, the ability to solve quantitative chemistry problems in terms of a problem solving posttest requiring comprehension (dependent variable) was estimated for both groups and statistically compared. The subjects in this research were 74 students enrolled in an introductory chemistry course at a community college in the southwestern United States. Prior chemistry knowledge, mathematics skills, and verbal ability were also measured and statistical methods were employed to assess their correlations with posttest results in both groups. The use of elaborative interrogation why-questions was found to significantly benefit students' quantitative chemistry problem solving requiring comprehension compared to the rereading strategy, even after the effects of prior chemistry knowledge and mathematics skill (factors that were statistically determined to be significant predictors of posttest score) were statistically controlled.