College of Education
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Item Neuroimaging studies of pediatric social anxiety: paradigms, pitfalls and a new direction for investigating the neural mechanisms(Springer Nature, 2013-07-12) Jarcho, Johanna M; Leibenluft, Ellen; Walker, Olga Lydia; Fox, Nathan A; Pine, Daniel S; Nelson, Eric ESocial Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is a common and debilitating condition that typically manifests in adolescence. Here we describe cognitive factors engaged by brain-imaging tasks, which model the peer-based social interactions that evoke symptoms of SAD. We then present preliminary results from the Virtual School paradigm, a novel peer-based social interaction task. This paradigm is designed to investigate the neural mechanisms mediating individual differences in social response flexibility and in participants’ responses to uncertainty in social contexts. We discuss the utility of this new paradigm for research on brain function and developmental psychopathology.Item The Influence of Orthographic Experiences on the Development of Functional Phonological Unit in Spoken Word Production(2015) Li, Chuchu; Wang, Min; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The current dissertation project examined the influence of orthographic experiences on the development of the functional phonological unit in spoken word production in native Mandarin-speaking children. Functional phonological unit refers to the first selectable phonological unit after lexical selection in the planning of spoken word production. Previous research has shown that the acquisition of orthographic knowledge restructures literate speakers’ phonological representation and in particular, the acquisition of alphabetic orthographic knowledge improves children’s phonological awareness at the phonemic level. However, few studies have investigated the influence of orthographic experiences on phonological retrieval and encoding in spoken word production. The goal of this dissertation is to fill this gap. Four experiments were carried out to conduct the investigation. Participants consisted of native Mandarin speakers from four age groups with different orthographic experiences, including 1) Grade 1 children, who were comparatively more exposed to alphabetic Pinyin and had very limited Chinese character knowledge, 2) Grade 2 and Grade 4 children, who had better character knowledge and more exposure to characters, and 3) adult readers, who had the highest level of character knowledge and the most exposure to characters. Experiment 1 investigated whether the onset served as the functional phonological unit in producing monosyllables; Experiment 2 investigated whether the role of the onset in phonological retrieval and encoding was sustained when producing disyllabic words; Experiment 3 examined the role of the syllable segment (i.e., a syllable whose tone is indeterminate or an atonal syllable) in producing disyllabic words; Experiment 4 examined the role of the tonal syllable (i.e., tonal information is also included) in producing disyllabic words. Results showed that only Grade 1 children selected the onset as the functional phonological unit regardless of the word length during spoken word production and that additionally, they might process the rime segment and tone as a cohesive unit. By contrast, Grade 4 children and adults selected the syllable segment as the functional phonological unit. Grade 2 children were in their transitional stage of development, and they selected tonal syllable as the functional phonological unit. The different orthographic experiences of the four groups might contribute to the above differences. The current dissertation has important theoretical and pedagogical implications. The aforementioned findings help us better understand the mechanism of phonological processing, and as a result, may help educators develop more efficient pedagogical approaches to improve children’s phonological processing ability.Item AN EXPLORATION OF SOCIAL JUSTICE COMMITMENT: A GROUNDED THEORY INVESTIGATION OF STUDENT AFFAIRS PROFESSIONALS(2015) Pepin, Sean C; Drezner, Noah D; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As part of the project to create a more democratic society, social justice work is a critical component, especially within higher education. Social justice work comes with a wide array of deeply challenging issues and obstacles to remaining engaged. The purpose of this study was to expose those challenges and understand how individuals traversed those challenges. By looking at what the challenges were and how individuals navigated them, this study also dove into the personal reasons why social justice work can be incredibly challenging. Through this grounded theory investigation, a model for social justice commitment emerged, which illustrates the iterative nature of social justice commitment. The result is that one’s commitment is a cycle of growth, beginning with one’s internal and external engagement. As individuals engage in social justice work, nine distinct challenges emerged from the data. These challenges interrupt a person’s engagement, and can either be resolved through the use of three identified motivating forces or can cause a person to retreat to a time of pause. Finally, one of the unique findings within this study was the relationship commitment has with the concept of hope. As challenges increase, individuals have a decreased sense of hope. Hope is a fundamental component of long-term engagement, and individuals appeared to move to towards the edge of hope throughout their long-term engagement; however, they did not appear to ever fully leave hope or commitment behind. Finally, this research moved from the discovery of a social justice commitment model towards the practical implications for such a model. By weaving the identified challenges and the emergent commitment model together, applications were created for individuals, institutions, and future research. The resulting implications focused primarily on critical self-reflection for individuals, an increase in robust content and reflection for institutions, and a new direction for social justice research to explore the affective domain of development.Item EMERGING FROM THE SHADOWS: A CASE STUDY ON THE QUALITY OF LIFE OF STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES IN MONROVIA, LIBERIA(2014) Podzimek, Kimberly; Lin, Jing; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)People with disabilities are often the last group to be included in development agendas. For children with disabilities, this translates into exclusion in the educational setting with piecemeal agendas created by various governments. In Liberia, children with disabilities are not only excluded from the classroom, but the government's most recent education law singles children with disabilities out as individuals that may be excluded from the classroom. It is difficult to find research on people with disabilities in low-income countries that have experienced recent conflict. In an attempt to better understand the lives of children with disabilities in Liberia, I developed and implemented a case study the examines the lives of families with children with disabilities at an educational center in Monrovia, Liberia called The Alliance Center for Children with Disabilities , hereafter referred to as the Center. I used Schalock and Keith's (2000) Quality of Life (QOL) Framework to gauge the influence the Center has over the lives of the families and Critical Disability Theory as a base for a discussion on societal norms and people with disabilities. Through intense analysis of interview transcripts, documents and observations, this study concludes that the families associated with the Center currently have a better quality of life based on the domains in Schalock and Keith's (2000) Quality of Life framework than those with children with disabilities not attending the Center.