Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
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 PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT THAT DEFIES THE TRADITIONAL CONSTRUCT OF TEACHER LEARNING: A Charter School's Commencement(2012) Oliver, Rollia Mandrell; Mawhinney, Hanne; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In August 2006, in accordance with a recently passed charter school law, a Mid-Atlantic school district opened its first public charter schools. The charter schools' staff had opportunities to exercise autonomy over their instruction and had very little in-service training. This study examined what seven teachers at a newly created charter school did with their time to achieve on-going professional development in the absence of frequent traditional structured in-service training. I employed a case study approach to portraiture that was guided by Desimone's (2009) core features of professional development as the theoretical framework. The data were specific activities that teachers used in place of frequent in-service that reported by the participants. Elements of the activities teachers used to construct knowledge were analyzed using the core features of professional development. Content focus, collective participation, coherence, active learning, and duration were present throughout the data. The data from this study revealed that teachers were deliberate in their actions. They constructed their own professional experiences and held themselves accountable. The retrospective nature, small sample of teachers, and limited span of focus for this study posed limitations. These findings have implications for designing professional development, facilitating autonomous instructional development, and future research.Item Teacher In-service Training for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): Influence on Knowledge about ADHD, Use of Classroom Behavior Management Techniques, and Teacher Stress(2006-08-24) Jones, Heather; Chronis, Andrea M.; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) evidence many problems in the classroom, including difficulty staying seated and trouble with organizational tasks. Such behaviors cause impairment for the child in their academic functioning and place a burden upon their teachers. Despite the large evidence base for classroom behavioral interventions, teachers often lack specific training on and accurate knowledge about ADHD. Teacher in-service training is routinely utilized to inform school professionals about a number of special topics. However, the efficacy of such training for ADHD has not been established. The present study examined the efficacy of brief in-service training in improving teacher knowledge about ADHD, use of behavior management techniques, and levels of stress related to teaching a child with ADHD. Six schools in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area participated. Teachers at these schools were randomly assigned to receive in-service training immediately or to a waitlist control group that received in-service training one month later. Teacher ratings of ADHD knowledge, use of behavior modification techniques, and stress were measured pre in-service intervention and 1 month post in-service intervention. Behavioral observations of behavior modification strategies were gathered on a random subset of teachers from each school at each time point. Mixed model analyses of variance were used to examine the effects of the intervention on ADHD knowledge, use of behavior modification techniques, and teacher stress. A Treatment Group X Time interaction was found for teacher-reported ADHD knowledge, such that the immediate in-service group reported significantly increased knowledge from pre to post in-service intervention while the waitlist control group did not. Teacher use of reported behavior modification techniques appeared to change for special education teachers only. Stress did not change as a result of the intervention. Observational data did not correlate highly with teacher self-report data. Limitations of this study include the use of a newly- developed measure of ADHD knowledge that requires psychometric testing and the lack of observations of child behavior. Future studies should examine ways to better measure and promote actual behavior change among teachers of children with ADHD.