Science and Mathematics Education Commons^™

Learning To Teach Mathematics And To Analyze Teaching Effectiveness: Evidence From A Video- And Practice-Based Pre-Service Course, Rossella Santagata, Cathery Yeh

Education Faculty Articles and Research

Although emerging consensus exists that practice-based approaches to teacher preparation assist in closing the distance between university coursework and fieldwork experiences and in assuring that future teachers learn to implement innovative research-based instructional strategies, little empirical research has investigated teacher learning from this approach. This study examines the impact of a video- and practice-based course on prospective teachers’ mathematics classroom practices and analysis of their own teaching. Two groups of elementary prospective teachers participated in the study—one attended the course and one did not. Findings reveal that the course assisted participants in making student thinking visible and in pursuing it …

Comparing Two Different Student Teaching Structures By Analyzing Conversations Between Student Teachers And Their Cooperating Teachers, Niccole Suzette Franc

Theses and Dissertations

Research has shown that preservice teachers participating in traditional student teaching programs tend to focus on classroom management, with very little focus on student mathematical thinking. The student teaching program at BYU has been redesigned in the hopes of shifting the focus of student teachers away from classroom management toward student mathematical thinking. This study compared conversations between student teachers and cooperating teachers before and after the redesign of the program to work towards determining the effectiveness of the refocusing of the new student teaching program. The study found that STs and CTs in the different student teaching structures were …

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Fall 2013, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Part of every UNLV engineering student’s academic experience, the senior design project stimulates engineering innovation and entrepreneurship. Each student in their senior year chooses, plans, designs, and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. A capstone to the student’s educational career, the senior design project encourages the student to use everything learned in the engineering program to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge. The senior design competition helps focus the senior students in increasing the quality and potential for commercial application for their design projects. Judges from local industry evaluate the projects on …

Insights Into The Beliefs And Practices Of Preservice Elementary Mathematics Teacher Educators: A Naturalistic Inquiry, Linda Ann Arnold

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this naturalistic inquiry was to explore and analyze aspects of the reported beliefs and practices of a group of preservice elementary mathematics teacher educators. Until now, researchers have had little understanding of beliefs and practices of teachers in elementary mathematics methods classrooms, despite the fact that teacher educators’ beliefs and practices have profound effects on what happens in thousands of classrooms every day. The qualitative research in this study offered insights with the potential to inform higher educational practice in regard to the preparation of elementary mathematics teachers and mathematics teacher educators. Participants were six professors and …

Factors That Affect The Ability Of Novice Science Teachers To Teach For Nos Understanding, Bennett Alexander Adkinson

Doctoral Dissertations

Novice science teachers face a multitude of instructional, curricular, and institutional constraints that affect their classroom decisions. Emphases from their teacher training programs interact with and compete against the realities of professional teaching. This qualitative comparative case study attempts to look at the interactions of novice science teachers with the reform-based practice of nature of science (NOS) instruction. Teacher training programs teach their pre-service science teachers about NOS and try to emphasize the importance of NOS understanding on student scientific literacy, but little is known about how science teachers view and approach NOS once they are free from the constraints …

Teachers' Perceptions About The Types, Quality, And Impact Of Their Job-Embedded Professional Development Experiences, Delilah Mitchell

Dissertations

This study was designed to determine eighth grade teachers’ perceptions of the impact, quality, and types of job-embedded professional development activities they have participated in and the relationship to student achievement in language arts, math, or science. The researcher identified school districts with 50% or more of their eighth grade students scoring proficient or advanced on all three areas of Mississippi’s Curriculum Test, Second Edition (MCT2). Sixty-four eighth grade language arts, math, or science teachers who had been at their current school at least two years completed a questionnaire created by the researcher. Multiple Linear Regression and Pearson’s Correlation were …

Educational Outcomes From The Openorbiter Small Spacecraft Development Program, Jeremy Straub

Jeremy Straub

The OpenOrbiter program [1] is developing a low-cost framework for the creation of space-craft by researchers and educators worldwide [8]. In addition to the technical objectives, ed-ucational assessment [2, 3] has also been a key focus. Students working on development of the spacecraft [4] were asked what types of benefits they sought from their participation [5]. The assessment of the attainment of these benefits is ongoing, in conjunction with continued development in pursuit of the crea-tion of a set of designs that can be used to build a spacecraft with a cost of under $5,000 [13] .

Increasing National Space Engineering Productivity And Educational Opportunities Via Intrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship And Innovation, Jeremy Straub

Jeremy Straub

Research and educational efforts related to space engineering or requiring access to space face significant startup costs. The cost of developing a 1-U (10 cm × 10 cm × 11 cm) CubeSat from scratch can be approximately $250,000. Those buying a kit must pay amortized vendor development costs on a per-mission basis, creating a lower per-mission barrier. Kit users are also constrained by being unable to make changes to vendor subsystems without incurring substantial redevelopment costs or vendor charges. The Open Prototype for Educational NanoSats (OPEN) is changing this by providing freely available design documents for a 1-U CubeSat class …

Corals On Acid: An Inquiry-Based Activity Leading Students To A Better Understanding Of Ocean Acidification Impacts, Casey L. Boleman, Philip M. Gravinese, Ellen N. Muse, Andrea E. Marston, John G. Windsor

Ocean Engineering and Marine Sciences Faculty Publications

The objective of this inquiry-based lesson is for students to gain an understanding of how increasing ocean acidity can affect the calcification of marine organisms. During this activity, students: (1) design an experiment to quantify the CaCO3 concentration of two invertebrate skeletal samples, one that has been soaked in normal seawater and another in a low pH solution, and (2) use critical thinking and discussion to evaluate possible explanations for the difference in the skeletal CaCO3 compositions. Our lesson focuses on exploring the activity before ocean acidification is introduced to provide a common conceptual framework to engage students.

An Argument And Plan For Promoting The Teaching And Learning Of Neglected Tropical Diseases, Kevin M. Bonney

Publications and Research

Neglected tropical diseases constitute a significant public health burden, affecting over one billion people globally, yet this group of diseases is underrepresented in the appropriation of both monetary and intellectual capital for developing improved therapies and public health campaigns. The topic of neglected tropical diseases has been similarly marginalized in the biology classrooms of our nation’s high schools and colleges, despite offering an opportunity to teach and learn about a diverse area of microbiology with far-reaching public health, social, and economic implications. Discussed herein is an argument for increasing the representation of neglected tropical diseases in microbiology education as a …

Student Conceptions Of Learning And The Approaches To Learning Adopted In An Introductory Science Course: A Q Methodology Study, Kelly Marie Sparks

Dissertations

The conceptions of learning, guiding students’ primary beliefs about their experiences of learning as well as their interpretations of learning itself, have been found to be related to their approaches to learning and learning outcomes. This study examined the subjective beliefs of students about learning science in an undergraduate college setting. Q methodology was used examine student perceptions about learning and the approaches to learning they employed. Thirty six students completed Q-sorts of their perspectives on learning and the approaches they took to achieve that learning in an introductory physical geography course. Centroid factor analysis and varimax rotation of these …

Personality And Science Training As Predictors Of Science Teaching Efficacy Beliefs, Holly Saint

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Various factors have been researched over the past decade related to teaching efficacy under NCLB. Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) guided this correlational study with 13 Alabama and 10 Tennessee public school districts to examine 114 K-4 teachers' personality measured by the Big Five Inventory (BFI) personality factors; science pre-service training and school-district professional development training measured by an unpublished Science Training Survey; and science teaching efficacy beliefs measured by the Science Teacher Efficacy Belief Instrument (STEBI). The BFI's personality factors and science training were examined in combination using a hierarchical linear regression in an eight-step model while controlling for …

Identifying Productive Resources In Secondary School Students' Discourse About Energy, Benedikt Walter Harrer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A growing program of research in science education acknowledges the beginnings of disciplinary reasoning in students’ ideas and seeks to inform instruction that responds productively to these disciplinary progenitors in the moment to foster their development into sophisticated scientific practice. This dissertation examines secondary school students’ ideas about energy for progenitors of disciplinary knowledge and practice. Previously, researchers argued that students’ ideas about energy were constrained by stable and coherent conceptual structures that conflicted with an assumed unified scientific conception and therefore needed to be replaced. These researchers did not attend to the productive elements in students’ ideas about energy. …

Secondary Mathematics Teachers’ Literacy Professional Learning: An Amalgamation Of Adolescent Literacy, Mathematics Teaching, And Adult Learning, Janet L. Larson

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study uses practitioner research to examine secondary mathematics teachers’ learning of literacy integration practices in the context of a district-wide literacy professional development series. The author, a secondary mathematics curriculum and instruction facilitator in a large, Midwestern suburban district, engaged in a two-year partnership with seventeen Mathematics Teacher Facilitators (MTFs) who taught literacy practices to their colleagues via a train-the-trainer model. This study provides an explicit rendering of professional development practices and ongoing, job-embedded learning vignettes of six MTF’s experiences in (a) teaching literacy practices to their colleagues and (b) how they learned and enacted these practices in their …

Nature Of Science Conceptions, Attitudes Towards Evolution And Global Climate Change, And Course Achievement In An Introductory Biology Course, Benjamin Elijah Carter

Theses - ALL

Many researchers have studied student attitudes toward and knowledge of evolutionary science, attitudes towards global climate change (GCC), conceptions about the nature of science (NOS), and course success. However, at the time of this writing, no studies explicitly link these topics.

It is overwhelmingly acknowledged by the scientific community that evolution and global climate change (GCC) are undeniably supported by physical evidence. And yet, both topics remain very politically contentious in the United States. Efforts to mitigate the disconnects between the scientific community and the general public on these issues are imperative to science education. Such undertakings need to examine …

Improvement Of Pedagogical Laboratory Based Learning: Multimedia Enhanced Instructional Methods, Sumbul Khan

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

In engineering technology and other scientific-based education, lab-based courses play a crucial role (Ma & Nickerson, 2006). Even though laboratory experience in student learning is crucial, it faces some problems. Due to insufficient laboratory conditions that lead to overcrowding and inability to view demonstrations, the effectiveness of hands on experience declines (Tiwari & Singh, 2011; Tuysuz, 2010). Considering the limitations that constrain lab experience, investigating and implementing alternatives to enhance pedagogical laboratory based learning becomes inevitable. This study investigates multimedia enhanced pedagogical teaching methods for delivering laboratory instruction to students. The purpose of this study was to improve pedagogical laboratory …

La Diversidad De Los Análisis De Diversidad La Diversidad De Los Analisis De Diversidad [The Diversity Of Diversity Analyses], Victor D. Carmona-Galindo, Tizziana V. Carmona

Biology Faculty Works

There is a lack of consistency with respect to the use of the terms like species richness, diversity and biodiversity, which extends to the analysis of diversity indices and the merit of using diversity indices in the evaluation (comparison and contrast) of biological communities. The purpose of this article is to provide working definitions for these terms and cite examples from the primary literature that demonstrate the utility of estimating richness, evaluating proportional abundance patterns, as well as comparing indices of diversity and similarity to study patterns of biological organization at different ecological scales. Additionally, we provide a manual in …

Extended Book Review: Mathematics In Popular Culture: Essays On Appearances In Film, Fiction, Games, Television And Other Media, Edited By Jessica K. Sklar And Elizabeth S. Sklar; Loving+Hating Mathematics: Challenging The Myths Of Mathematical Life, By Reuben Hersh And Vera John-Steiner; Mathematicians: An Outer View Of The Inner World, By Mariana Cook, Gizem Karaali

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

I was delighted to have the opportunity to review three books on a topic near and dear to my heart. In recent years it has become a passion of mine to think of and speak about the place of mathematics in the real world, in the world of those who are not doing mathematics for a living. I care about the applications and the implications of mathematics, but more than that, I care about the feelings and the impressions attached to it. Often math anxiety or skepticism comes up; the latter may be due to how frequently others (mis)use statistics, …

The Effect Of Dynamic Software On Prospective Mathematics Teachers’ Perceptions Regarding Information And Communication Technology, Enver Tatar

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

The aim of this study was to determine the effect of dynamic software on prospective mathematics teachers’ perception levels regarding information and communication technology (ICT). The study was conducted with senior prospective teachers studying in a department of secondary mathematics education. The data of the study used both quantitative and qualitative research approaches have been obtained using two different tests, namely “Technology Perception Scale” and “Computer Assisted Mathematics Instruction Perception Scale”. Consequently, it has been observed in the study that learning how to use dynamic software positively affects prospective mathematics teachers’ perception levels in a statistically significant way regarding the …

Environmental Literacy Of Sixth Grade Students In Arkansas: Implications For Environmental Education Reform, Lisa Suzanne Wood

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Environmental education must be better integrated into K-12 curriculum to advance environmental literacy. Producing a citizenry that can understand and address the complex environmental issues facing the world today and in the future is essential to sustainable life on this planet.

Using the Middle School Environmental Literacy Survey, 6th grade students across Arkansas were surveyed to obtain a baseline measure of environmental literacy based on the four domains of environmental literacy included in the survey; ecological knowledge, environmental affect, cognitive skills, and behavior. Individual domain scores were combined into a composite environmental literacy score. Results were then compared to the …