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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    Implementation Issues Impeding Evidence-based Instruction for Students with Significant Cognitive Disabilities in One Public School System
    (2023) Stephanson, Janet; McLaughlin, Margaret J.; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    For over 50 years, providing relevant and individualized instruction for students with significant cognitive disabilities (SSCD) has challenged school systems because of the heterogeneity of the population and the complicated nature of their learning characteristics, warranting the implementation of specific instruction using targeted, evidence-based instruction, not common practice in most school settings. The intention of this mixed-method Participatory Action Research (PAR) study is to investigate the barriers to providing evidence-based practices in District A while creating a framework of the PD required to increase teacher capacity to deliver the instruction. An Innovation Configuration Matrix (IC Matrix) created by Browder et al. (2014) will be used as the foundation for the study, as it details the evidence-based practices (EBPs) for students with severe disabilities by detailing what instruction is needed, how the instruction should be provided, and what supports are needed for the instruction to occur. The PAR process will occur through the administration and evaluation of a survey for all teachers of SSCD, followed by three convenings of a group of nine District A teachers of SSCD who will use the information of the survey, the IC Matrix, and federal and state guidance to create a PD Framework detailing the learning needs for all teachers of SSCD in District A.
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    “Just Like the Library”: Exploring the experiences of former library student assistants' post-graduation careers and perceptions of job preparedness as impacted by library work
    (2022) Ofsthun, Franklin; O'Grady, Ryan; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Career success is a major component of assessing student success, and at the Universities at Shady Grove (USG), a small campus supporting nine state universities, post-graduation success is understudied. Students employed by USG’s Priddy Library are subject to a professional development (PD) program that emphasizes skill building, professional experiences, and career competencies. This thesis uses interviews from seven former student employees to determine what students retain from the program a year after graduation, to explore their feelings on early career experiences, and to determine what Priddy Library and USG can do to better prepare students for their post-graduation careers. Job satisfaction was most positively correlated with workplace social support and most negatively correlated with overwork. Participants felt overall positively about their experiences at USG and the library, and emphasized the role that social support played in their success. Participants identified many career competencies developed at the library that they continue to use in their post-graduation careers, most notably, customer service, communication, critical thinking, time management, and professionalism. Participants shared feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy despite degree and skill acquisition, indicating that more effort should be made to build students’ professional confidence.
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    “EMBRACING THE UNCERTAINTY”: AN EXPLORATORY CASE STUDY OF IMPROVISATION-BASED TEACHER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
    (2022) Placek, Dale S; Peercy, Megan; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    While many education researchers have characterized the impromptu nature of classroom teaching as improvisation, few studies of teacher education or professional development (PD) have examined the potential of improvisation workshops for equipping teachers to face unforeseen classroom moments productively. In this dissertation, I introduced an applied theatrical improvisation framework I call Pedagogical Improvisation (PI), and used it to design, implement, and conduct a qualitative case study of an improvisation-based professional development experience (the PIPD) for a group of nine high school teachers. The research questions were:1. How, if at all, did PIPD participation influence teacher-participants’ attitudes toward, and beliefs about, improvisation and improvisational teaching? 2. How, if at all, did PIPD participation influence teacher-participants’ teaching practices, especially with respect to unforeseen classroom moments? Additionally, during the data analysis process, I added a third research question, based on participating teachers’ responses about the benefits of group participation in the PIPD:3. How, if at all, did the PIPD promote the formation of a Community of Practice for teacher-participants? Findings indicated that, as a result of their PIPD experiences, teacher-participants came to see the role of teacher as a professional improviser more clearly, became more comfortable with uncertainty in both the workshop setting and their classrooms, and experimented with various types of teaching practices related to the PIPD workshop activities and the Elements of Improvisation. Teacher-participants also identified several ways in which the PIPD workshops supported their development of improvisational skills/mindsets, and several constraints that served as obstacles to experimenting with improvisational activities or teaching practices in their classrooms. Beyond their individual reflections and applications of the workshop activities to their classroom, PIPD teachers experienced the benefits of group participation through the Community of Practice that formed as a result of the PIPD workshops. By laughing, playing, and learning together in a workshop setting characterized by psychological safety, teachers also came to see themselves as responsible for creating that type of atmosphere for students in their own classrooms, and experimented with many ways of doing so. This dissertation has implications for research, teaching, teacher education, and professional development, and joins a body of now-quickly-growing research across many fields that supports Tint, McWaters, and Van Driel’s (2015) assertion that applied improvisation is “consistently transformative and successful.” Further, it seeks to respond to their call for “rigorous and structured research to ground the findings in larger, evidence-based processes” (p. 73).
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    COMPUTATIONAL THINKING IN THE ELEMENTARY CLASSROOM: HOW TEACHERS APPROPRIATE CT FOR SCIENCE INSTRUCTION
    (2021) Cabrera, Lautaro; Clegg, Tamara; Jass Ketelhut, Diane; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Researchers and policymakers call for the integration of Computational Thinking (CT) into K-12 education to prepare students to participate in a society and workforce increasingly influenced by computational devices, algorithms, and methods. One avenue to meet this goal is to prepare teachers to integrate CT into elementary science education, where students can use CT by leveraging computing concepts to support scientific investigations. This study leverages data from a professional development (PD) series where teachers learned about CT, co-designed CT-integrated science lessons, implemented one final lesson plan in their classrooms, and reflected on their experience. This study aims to understand how teachers learned about CT and integrated it into their classroom, a process conceptualized as appropriation of CT (Grossman et al., 1999). This dissertation has two parts. The first investigates how teachers appropriated CT through inductive and deductive qualitative analyses of various data sources from the PD. The findings suggest that most teachers appropriated the labels of CT or only Surface features of CT as a pedagogical tool but did so in different ways. These differences are presented as five different profiles of appropriation that differ in how teachers described the activities that engage students in CT, ascribed goals to CT integration, and use technology tools for CT engagement. The second part leverages interviews with a subset of teachers aimed at capturing the relationship between appropriation of CT during the PD and the subsequent year. The cases of these five teachers suggest that appropriation styles were mostly consistent in the year after the PD. However, the cases detail how constraints in autonomy to make instructional decisions about science curriculum and evolving needs from students can greatly impact CT integration. Taken together, the findings of the dissertation suggest that social context plays an overarching role in impacting appropriation, with conceptual understanding and personal characteristics coming into play when the context for CT integration is set. The dissertation includes discussions around implications for PD designers, such as a call for reframing teacher knowledge and beliefs as part of a larger context impacting CT integration into schools.
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    The Art of Unemployment: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Search for Work
    (2021) Roegelein, Hillary; Levine, Robert S; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The Art of Unemployment narrates the twin development of professional women’s authorship and the category of unemployment in nineteenth-century America, shedding new light on the former and first light on the latter. Scholars of American literary history have established the nineteenth century as a pivotal period of professionalization for women’s authorship in which women like Louisa May Alcott, Fanny Fern, and others of import to this study achieved great popularity and financial success in their careers. But in our attentiveness to the art of working as a woman writer in this period, we have missed the efforts these same writers invested in giving expression to unemployment in the nineteenth century. This period in American history witnessed dynamic booms and busts, financial panics, and influential developments in unemployment policy, yet it remains overshadowed by the 1930s in studies on American unemployment. My project narrates the emerging concept of unemployment in nineteenth-century America—as it was imagined in women’s fiction and poetry and as it actually existed in the period. Combining economic and literary history, The Art of Unemployment provides a new understanding of the conflict between success and failure in models of nineteenth-century women’s authorship and prompts a larger reconsideration of what it means to be unemployed.The specter of unemployment looms large in the novels and poems nineteenth-century American women wrote about their chosen work, even and especially when those women experienced professional success. Authors Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Fanny Fern, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Frances E.W. Harper were some of the most profitable and popular writers of their time, yet their accounts of authorship force us to dwell in the crises of unemployment that attend professional literary pursuits—crises they describe as financial, emotional, social, and aesthetic. Unemployment gave successful women writers a language to critique the aspirational models of work that readers both past and present regularly ascribe to their professional biographies. That this subject causes some of the most successful nineteenth-century American women writers to question why and what they write warrants asking what unemployment does to the stories we tell ourselves about professional development and success.
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    FROM VISION TO PRACTICE: A CASE STUDY OF WRITING PROJECT TEACHERS
    (2019) Singleton, Elizabeth M.; O'Flahavan, John; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation examines the experiences of three practicing teachers involved in a professional learning program focused on writing instruction as they envisioned and enacted new practices for teaching writing in their classrooms. A secondary aim of the study was to uncover the supports and barriers the teachers encountered as they attempted to implement their new ideas for improving their students’ writing in the midst of a reform-oriented literacy initiative in their high-needs school district. This study employed a qualitative multi-case study methodology to take an in-depth look at each teacher’s vision-to-practice process. Data sources from an examination of the visions, practices, and reflections of each of the three case study teachers included semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and analysis of documents produced during the professional learning program that captured teachers’ visions of good teaching. Findings lend insights into the dilemmas that teachers experience assimilating new teaching practices within their existing theoretical perspectives, beliefs, and established principles of practice. Teachers selected new practices that were aligned with their theoretical perspectives of writing development which informed their beliefs about students’ writing challenges and guided their implementation efforts in their classrooms. While beliefs about students’ challenges remained mostly unexamined, teachers developed new practices to address their beliefs about how they could help students improve as writers. Teachers engaged in productive struggle to balance the competing demands of content coverage, fulfilling their professional responsibilities, and meeting their students’ needs. Although teachers made different instructional decisions, they each prioritized preparing their students for their futures over other considerations. Teachers did not find many supports in their schools to encourage their efforts, and they experienced a lack of professional learning opportunities and a data-driven culture as barriers. Findings suggest that teachers require supports to enact professional identities as learners, knowers, and leaders within reform-oriented contexts. The study findings support the utility of teacher vision as a lens for examining practicing teachers’ professional learning and growth.
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    Wording their own worlds: A phenomenological exploration of teachers' lived experiences of teacher leadership
    (2019) Hamilton, Kristin Buckstad; Hultgren, Francine H.; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Teacher leadership remains prominent in policy, career ladder programs, research, and professional discourse, yet few studies center what teacher leadership is like for teachers or what teachers are seeking when they construct their own career pathways. This gap is important to address. Teacher dissatisfaction certainly leads to recruitment and attrition challenges, but there is also an imperative for education as a human institution to attend to teachers’ needs. This study describes the lived experiences six teachers and the author had of teacher leadership. Following the methodology of hermeneutic phenomenology as articulated by Heidegger, Gadamer, and van Manen, participant descriptions and other lifeworld texts are analyzed to render themes that evoke the lived bodies, time, spaces, and relationships of teacher leadership. Metaphorically, teacher leaders travel into between-spaces, across borders, and over edges in response to their callings. Teachers experience teacher leadership bodily, insatiably growing and enacting pedagogic knowledge. They experience leadership as a following of a pedagogic need that compels them. They navigate the world with finely tuned sense-abilities that perceive what students, teachers, and pedagogy need. Lastly, they experience leadership relationally, feeling connected with other teachers near and far. Teachers in this study also experience a profound tension. The decision to accept new responsibilities as their professional vision expands is rooted in their being as a teacher, whether the roles are in the classroom or not. Yet, teacher leadership asks them (via policy, titles, and other cultural signals) to replace their teacher identities with teacher leader or educational leader identities. The teacher leader name does not always feel right to them. The final chapter of the study invites us to wonder about expanding the teaching profession’s scope in a way that resonates with teachers. In a world where “teachership”—the state of being a teacher, just as leadership is the state of being a leader—is recognized, the name “teacher” would be expansive enough to invoke all the opportunities teachers seek in pedagogy’s name. The study explores implications for a profession that empowers itself to claim teachers’ right of participation as teachers in other worlds within education.
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    SCHOOL DISTRICT LIBRARY SUPERVISORS AND THEIR ROLE IN PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR BUILDING-LEVEL SCHOOL LIBRARIANS: A BASELINE STUDY
    (2019) Kodama, Christie; Weeks, Ann C.; Butler, Brian; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The advent and ubiquity of mobile technologies, the Internet, and broadband have allowed people to access, use, and create a seemingly endless amount of information in unprecedented ways. This has led to an information world that is more connected, more complex, and more overwhelming than ever before. For children, learning how to use these 21st century advances is important not only for their current needs in and out of school, but also for their future as they go on to college and enter the workforce. As information specialists, school librarians play a unique role in ensuring students are equipped to access, use, and create information in ways that are meaningful and productive. However, with the ever-changing landscape of technology and the multiple literacies now necessary for children’s success, school librarians need to remain current in their knowledge and skills related to these topics. Continuing professional development (PD) is a way for practicing school librarians to stay up-to-date on digital literacies and information and communication technologies (ICTs) so that they are able to be the information specialists and experts the students in their school communities need. Using Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Framework for Human Development (1977, 1988, 1994) and what the education literature states is effective PD as the foundation, this dissertation first describes the multiple parties responsible for the effective PD of school librarians. It then examines the role that one party responsible in librarians’ PD, school district library supervisors, play in the planning and implementation of PD for building-level school librarians through a nationwide survey of 267 library supervisors and semi-structured follow-up interviews with 8 supervisors. School district library supervisors are those individuals who work at the district-level and are generally responsible for creating and providing PD for building-level school librarians. This dissertation is a first attempt at illustrating what PD looks like for school librarians in districts nationwide and to compare what is being done to what the literature says are effective means of PD. Findings show that supervisors are providing PD for their librarians that adheres to at least one or two of the characteristics of effective PD. Supervisors are using the affordances of technology to create avenues and spaces for their librarians to connect and collaborate with each other. Findings also showed that the content of PD sessions were widely varied and ranged from more traditional library skills that focused on traditional literacy and administrative skills to more current topics such as makerspaces and digital literacy. As a whole, supervisors revealed a need to grow in the areas of providing long-term PD for their librarians and creating a coherent plan for the PD they provided. This study also illustrated several conditions that facilitate effective PD, including having a culture of continued learning with leaders who support this growth and a budget to support these PD activities. These findings provide an initial look into the PD that is offered to school librarians as planned by the district-level library supervisor and the areas in which PD for librarians can be improved.
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    Learning to teach for social justice in early childhood classrooms of privilege
    (2018) Blackmon, Laurel Catherine; Imig, David; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The purposes of this study were to examine how Social Justice Education (SJE) was envisioned and enacted at an elite school and to examine what the experiences of the school’s early childhood teachers were as they participated in professional development (PD) programming around SJE. Through embedded case study methodology, the researcher analyzed the school as one unit, with the five teacher participants as bound cases within this context. Conducted in 2017, data included interviews with school leaders, curriculum documents, school documents, PD materials, teacher interviews, and classroom observations. These data were analyzed in the context of a theoretical framework of SJE developed from the literature. Findings indicated that SJE was largely defined by the teacher participants and the School Head as a way to create a welcoming school community and that observed classroom practices aligned with this definition. Administrators and the School Mission & Statement of Community Values, however, included taking action against inequity in the definition, a conceptualization of SJE that would be challenging to fully realize in the context of the school and professional cultures at the time of the study. The school and professional cultures were also found to be key factors in how teacher learning was experienced by the teachers. Each teacher participant positioned herself as an outsider to these cultures in some way, and each described this position as having an impact on her implementation of SJE. Participants described their learning experiences as both personal and professional, and they expressed that PD that supported development of their critical lenses and their classroom practices was impactful. Implications for professional developers and school leaders include the importance of understanding the school and larger socio-political context in which teachers are learning about SJE. Three areas of focus for PD were also identified: teacher self-knowledge, critical lens development, and training programs for specific curriculum and pedagogy that supports SJE. Implications for research include inquiry into the role of school and professional culture in shifting schoolwide practices to SJE and into the impact of PD that emphasizes teacher self-knowledge, critical lens development, and training in SJE curriculum programs.
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    Habits of Mind: A Case Study of Three Teachers' Experiences with a Mindfulness-Based Intervention
    (2016) Dunn, Molly; Croninger, Robert; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    K-12 teachers encounter numerous occupational stressors as part of their profession, and these stressors place them at risk of job-related stress and burnout (Maslach & Jackson, 1981; Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001). Given the prevalence of stress and burnout among school personnel, concrete interventions designed to address the unique demands of teaching are necessary (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009; Jennings, Snowberg, Coccia, & Greenberg, 2011). This dissertation examined one mindfulness-based intervention (MBI) for teachers, Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education (CARE). The study employed a qualitative case study methodology; data sources included in-depth interviews, field observations of CARE, and analysis of documents such as the CARE Facilitator Manual and Participant Handbook. The current study investigated how participants perceived the MBI immediately after the completion of the intervention and how they utilized experiences from the intervention at a five-month follow-up point. This study reveals that participants identified immediate and longer-term benefits from participating in this MBI, with aspects of compassion, adaptability, and community emerging as important factors in MBI interventions for teachers. Subsequent follow-up interviews suggested that participants, to varying degrees, incorporated aspects of the intervention into their daily and professional lives. The study concludes with recommendations on how to strengthen MBIs as a professional development protocol and identifies areas for future research on how MBIs might influence teacher performance.