College of Education
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1647
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
Browse
10 results
Search Results
Item Can STEM Initiatives Be Social Justice Oriented: An Analysis of Urban School Reform Via Smaller Learning Communities(2010) Mete, Ryan Jared; MacDonald, Victoria-Maria; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)STEM is an acronym that stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. STEM academies are theme-based curricula that have gained considerable attention on the national level. The intended outcome of a STEM curriculum is to raise career awareness and increase college and graduate level enrollment in science and engineering in order to ultimately restore the United States' position as a worldwide leader in technological innovation. In 2008, a group of middle school teachers in Maryland designed a STEM academy to address the achievement gap between African American and white students at their school. The founding teachers used a combination of thematic curriculum and structural redesign via a process called "looping" to create a school-within-a-school model that focused on average-performing and at-risk students. This study explores the process these teachers underwent to implement a differentiated STEM program to a diverse student body in an urban middle school.Item Virtualizing the Teacher: The Lived Experience of Teaching within Technology(2009) Whitesel, Cynthia Hoff; Hultgren, Francine H; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research seeks to heighten pedagogical understanding of the lived experience of teachers who teach online using computer technology. Philosophically based and grounded in hermeneutic phenomenology, it explores the question: What is the lived experience of teaching with/in technology? Using van Manen's Researching Lived Experience (2003) as guide, the researcher seeks to discover existential themes revealed through hermeneutic methodology, a pedagogically grounded research approach to human science research and writing with a focus on lived experience. This research is rendered phenomenological through philosophical texts by Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Emmanuel Levinas, Gaston Bachelard, Edward Casey, and Don Ihde. For a period of eight months in the fall of 2006 and spring of 2007, six teachers from different continents engaged in multiple, in-depth conversations with the researcher about their experiences as online teachers in multiple online programs. The conversations were text-based and took place in an online forum characterized as a discussion board. The conversational text, additional personal reflections, related literature, and philosophic writings intertwine to create a textual interpretation of this experience. Using the metaphor of knots, the researcher explores themes of presence in distance, presence in text, interface presence, teaching identity, the virtual classroom as place, and the role of imagination and flow in unraveling some of the paradoxes of teaching online. The research makes recommendations for preparing teachers for online teaching and for the development of policies relating to course design, interface design, and teaching practices. Pedagogical insights include the effects of teaching with technology on several aspects of online teaching: marginalization of contingent online teachers, technical interests related to virtual curricula, online text, teaching memory, and signature and interface pedagogies. A phenomenological rendering of Moore's (2007) theory of transactional distance explores teacher presence in distance. The researcher offers suggestions for future phenomenological research to explore the meaning of the experiences of contingent teachers, the "best practices" approach to teacher preparation programs, standardized course development models, and media/mediated and non-media/non-mediated teaching identities.Item Community and Educational Opportunity in the US: The Relative Utility of Technology and Digital Literacy in a Transcultural Community(2008-11-21) Pruitt-Mentle, Davina; Finkelstein, Barbara; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This ethnobiographic study explores the ways in which five low income transmigrants living in an urban Mid-Atlantic transcultural community made use of technology and digital literacy. Specifically, the study focuses on the ways in which participants defined the purpose, importance, and utility of technology and digital literacy in their lives. The stories reveal complex and often heroic efforts to become digitally literate and apply technological learning to their obligations as parents, breadwinners, and community participants in widely dispersed social networks that cross family, community, and national boundaries. Their stories reveal: 1) the desire for digital literacy to participate in our modern society; 2) limitations in concepts of access and equity as currently conceived in scholarly literature; 3) trust as a key component of successful programs; and 4) the importance of technology in sustaining transcultural networks. The voices of the participants reveal that immigrants recognize the need for technology training, not only for jobs, but also to aid and enhance their everyday life. They shared the need for training to include: basic classroom skills instruction for children; learning opportunities for adults; programs that include authentic tasks and design features that consider cost, time and day of the week, location, language options, and word of mouth confirmation regarding the quality of content and trust in instructors and training location. Their search for safety extends to protecting their personal information and children by acquiring cyber safety and security knowledge. This study adds to transcultural scholarly work, and also expands both digital divide and digital inequity literature that only rarely focuses on the relationship between participants and transcultural community constructs. Increasingly, computer based forms of communication are taking the place of letters, telephone and travel to maintain and expand ties to family and friends dispersed throughout the globe. Technology becomes a way to support their transmigrant identities and strengthen the networks of friends and family used to identify places to live and work. Rather than creating a homogeneous global society, technology may actually serve to strengthen national identities across borders.Item Learning with hypermedia: Examining cognitive, motivational, and contextual factors(2007-04-17) Moos, Daniel Charles; Azevedo, Roger; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Think-aloud, pretest, posttest, and self-efficacy data collected from 85 undergraduates were used to examine factors related to learning with hypermedia. Participants, randomly assigned to either the No Scaffolding (NS) condition or Conceptual Scaffolding (CS) condition, were given 30 minutes to learn about the circulatory system with hypermedia. Participants in the NS condition received an overall learning goal during the hypermedia learning task, while participants in the CS condition received five guiding questions in addition to the same overall learning goal during the hypermedia learning task. There are four findings from this study. First, results from the pretest and posttest indicated that prior domain knowledge significantly predicted both declarative and conceptual knowledge learning outcomes with hypermedia. Second, results from the self-report self-efficacy questionnaire indicated that while self-efficacy significantly fluctuated during learning, the provision of conceptual scaffolds was not related to this fluctuation. Third, results from a think-aloud protocol indicated that self-efficacy significantly predicted monitoring and planning processes, but not strategy use during the hypermedia learning task. Fourth, results from a think-aloud protocol also indicated that self-regulatory processes (particularly processes related to monitoring) significantly predicted conceptual and declarative learning outcomes. Educational and scientific implications are discussed.Item The Role of Social Presence in Online Communities(2006-07-11) Caples, Robert Kelly; Druin, Allison; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Online learning is emerging as a solution for professional staff development in public school systems that are looking for ways to improve the capacity of their teaching staffs. As teachers begin to take more online courses as a way of improving their skills, we must continue to study the dynamics of teaching and learning in an online environment. To that end, there is a need to examine the various factors that affect online courses and professional staff development for teachers. This dissertation explores the role of social presence in an online professional development course for teachers. It focuses on the threaded discussion of 26 teachers enrolled in an online course and compares their self-reported online behaviors with the written discussion threads. The data were analyzed based on a modified version of Garrison, Anderson, and Archer's (2001) indicators of social presence. In addition, this research focused on the written responses of the online moderators to understand the relationship between their responses and the ones provided by the teachers as online community members. Content analysis of the discussion threads revealed that there was a range of social presence in the textual responses of the community members. The results of the study showed that there are levels of social presence in the written communication of the online community. In this research the levels of social presence appeared to be affected by outside influences such as the governing policy of the community itself and the more expansive district-wide policy of the school system. The results also suggested that moderator behaviors in this research had an effect on the policy governing the members of the online community. These results confirm previous research findings that suggest the purpose of the community and the types of questions used in asynchronous discussions can have an effect on the levels of social presence within the online community.Item The Effects of Asynchronous Peer Review on University Students' Argumentative Writing(2006-05-02) Tsai, Ya-Chin; Slater, Wayne H.; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In contrast to oral response groups, asynchronous peer review (APR) has received relatively little attention in writing research. This study was motivated largely by the question of whether delayed peer commentary relayed by technology could lead writers to revise writing extensively and improve quality. The purpose of this within-subject, quasi-experimental study was to examine the effect of APR on the quality and revision of argumentative writing. A Web-based program, <u>Calibrated Peer Review<sup>TM</sup></u> (CPR), was used to support the peer review process. Two classes, consisting of 22 students and 16 students, volunteered to participate in this study. After taking the pretest, every participant wrote two argumentative essays and completed a survey. For one essay, participants wrote their drafts and revised their essays alone without APR. For the other essay, the participants completed their drafts, participated in the APR activity supported by CPR, and revised their essays. The treatment, i.e., APR, was administered to the two classes in a counter-balanced manner. Repeated-measure MANOVAs were used to gauge changes over time in holistic quality and the primary traits measured by a revised Toulmin model, and revision changes were coded. This study yielded four findings. First, by holistic quality, the final essays post APR were found to outscore the corresponding initial drafts and the revised essays completed without APR. Second, the final essays post APR were found to outscore the corresponding initial drafts in Claim, Data, Opposition, and Refutation and outscored the final essays completed without the treatment in Claim and Opposition. However, Qualifier did not change at all. Third, extensive surface-based and text-based revisions were produced post APR. Without APR, the participants appeared reluctant to revise. Fourth, the guiding questions used to prompt the peer review process and peer commentary were reported to predominate during the revising process. In conclusion, the entire APR process appears to serve as a catalyst for triggering a great number of surface-based and text-based revisions. Accordingly, revision frequency seems to enhance the holistic quality as well as the four primary traits of argumentative writing.Item Transformative Black Teachers and their Use of Computer Related Technologies in Urban Schools(2004-11-02) Frederick, Rona Monique; Price, Jeremy N.; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Over the last decade, the Internet and other computer-related technologies have become ubiquitous to many U.S. schools. However, little is known about the ways Black educators working in urban schools integrate computer technology into their classroom practice. Although studies have been conducted on successful urban schoolteachers and their pedagogical philosophies, few explore how instructional computers are used to meet diverse students' personal and cultural needs. Furthermore, rarely do reports seek to highlight the stories of exemplary Black urban schoolteachers who use technology in spite of limited and out-dated resources. In response, this research, utilizing interpretive case study methodology, examined how four Black teachers integrated the Internet and computer-related technologies into their teaching practices in ways that transformed the thinking and lives of their Black students. Tenets of Critical Race Theory, an analysis of race and racism in the law and in society, was used to examine these Black teachers' classroom practices. This research occurred in two phases. First, I situated the historical, social and political context of Roosevelt City and the emergence of its Black schooling system. This account provided a context for understanding the historical struggle of its Black community to access knowledge within a city based on racial domination and subordination. I analyzed archival data, newspapers and articles, to capture the historical and current atmosphere of Roosevelt City Public Schools. During the second phase, I chose four "transformative" Black teachers to participate in 1) a formal interview about their life story and their teaching philosophies using computer technology; 2) a series of on-going classroom observations in which I examined the classroom dynamics, discourse patterns, activities and the physical setting; and, 3) a series of informal interviews about specific interactions in the classroom. Through the use of ngona, counter-storying, I documented their teaching practice over the course of one thematic unit. Overall, the findings suggest that computers and related technologies 1) assisted teachers in engaging in meaningful instruction about the Black experience, 2) served as an intellectual partner where Black students constructed knowledge; and, 3) became a medium for legitimizing Black student' real life experiences in the "official curriculum."Item Perceived Challenges of High-Stakes Assessments to High School Career and Technology Education Programs in Maryland(2004-08-30) Thomas, David Wayne; Croninger, Robert; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Abstract Title of dissertation: PERCEIVED CHALLENGES OF HIGH-STAKES ASSESSMENTS TO HIGH SCHOOL CAREER AND TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION PROGRAMS IN MARYLAND David W. Thomas, Doctor of Education, 2004 Dissertation directed by: Professor Robert Croninger Department of Education Many states are now requiring students to pass high-stakes assessments to earn a high school diploma. Even though the primary expectation of high-stakes testing is increased academic achievement for students in specific subject areas, many worthwhile high school programs are ignored by this testing initiative. This case study examined the perceived challenges of high-stakes testing to vocational/career and technology education in Maryland and the responses to the challenges of the assessment program by schools representing the three models of delivery of career and technology (CTE) education in Maryland (technical high schools, community high schools with embedded CTE programs and technical centers). The research was conducted through interviews at the Maryland State Department of Education and with local CTE directors, high school principals, and academic and CTE department chairs in four local school districts in Maryland, and discovered challenges to CTE programs in the following areas: scheduling students in CTE classes, redirecting resources away from CTE to tested areas, altering the mission of CTE programs, and also an overall low level of concern due to the newness of the testing program. Strategies to cope with the challenges were identified as: aligning CTE curriculum with tested areas, mirroring tests in CTE courses to the high school assessment tests, modifying school schedules, and taking minimal or no significant actions. The research also revealed a high level of familiarity with the testing program and more significant actions implemented to address the challenges of the assessments at the community high school with the CTE component and at the comprehensive technical high school than at the tech centers. Recommendations include similar research looking at challenges to other untested curriculum areas, tracking trends in CTE course enrollment and follow-up studies conducted after several years of high-stakes assessments to determine actual impact on career and technology education programs.Item A cunning hand and a cultured mind: An examination of high school graduates who completed an integrated technical and academic program(2004-04-27) Cockrum, Kelly; Herschbach, Dennis R; Education Policy, and LeadershipThe problem of this study was to compare selected characteristics of students who completed an integrated curriculum of technical and academic studies with students who completed either an academic, a technical, or a general curriculum. The researcher analyzed changes in participation, select demographics, academic achievement and post-secondary plans of students in the integrated curriculum against the other three curricula. The changes were measured across a seven-year time frame—1993 to 2000. The results were: 1. The integrated curriculum had the greatest percentage increase of students of the four curriculum categories from 1993 to 2000. 2. When considering change across the time, the integrated curriculum had the greatest percentage increase for both genders, in four out of the five ethnic divisions, and for students participating in English Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) programs. For students participating in the Free or Reduced Price Meals (FARMS) program, the integrated curriculum had the second greatest percentage increase. 3. Findings from statistical analysis revealed that when Grade Point Average (GPA), Academic Grade Point Average (AGPA), and SAT scores were used as benchmarks, students in an integrated curriculum were academically competitive with students from the academic curriculum. This holds true across the selected demographic categories. 4. Students in the integrated curriculum are planning to attend post-secondary institutions in increasing numbers and the numbers are comparable to students in the academic curriculum. A summary of recommendations included: (a) efforts should be directed at determining the present attitudes and perceptions held by educators, parents, and students toward technical education; (b) additional research studies should be conducted on the particular type of technical programs completed by students in an integrated program; (c) additional research studies should be conducted to determine why all students, but ESOL or FARMS participants in particular, continue to stay in the general or technical curriculum; and (d) additional research studies should be conducted to determine why high-level students are taking the integrated curriculum.Item A CASE STUDY ANALYSIS OF TECHNOLOGY DECISION MAKING AT A HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTION(2004-03-02) Yaure, Robin Gay; Schmidtlein, Frank A.; Education Policy, and LeadershipHigher education institutions are being called upon to “transform” themselves in response to perceived changes in their environments and technology has been seized upon by many authors as a solution to the need for transformation. To control the direction and rate of change, many have also identified a greater need for technology planning, a type of strategic planning specifically applied to technology issues. There has been a lack of empirical studies to examine whether technology planning are successful. The current study examined a technology decision-making process at a higher education institution, comparing subjects’ descriptions of how they believed technology planning should work and how it did work at their campus to theoretical models of decision-making identified by Schmidtlein (1974, 1983). The results showed that the theoretical framework used for analysis reasonably encompassed the espoused and actual decision making. Technology decision-making processes that fit with the culture and values of an institution and the characteristics of higher education organizations were considered to be more successful than those that conflicted with these aspects of the institution. Recommendations are provided for future technology planning processes and to improve the fit of the theoretical model.