Digital Commons Network^™

Literacy Portfolios: Considering Issues Of Purpose, Power, And Potential, Carol A. Wilcox

Doctoral Dissertations

In this study, I examine the complexities of incorporating literacy portfolios into an elementary school classroom: the purposes for using portfolios, issues of ownership and audience, the nature of children's evaluative decisions, adults' responsibilities in children's development as evaluators, and the institutional pressures impacting adults' abilities to incorporate children's voices into existing evaluative practices.

The study was conducted in a third grade classroom where children read and wrote in a variety of genres for authentic purposes and audiences every day. Although the study cannot be described as an ethnography in the strictest sense, research methodology is drawn from that discipline. …

Autobiographical Understandings: The Evolution Of A Teaching Self, Joann Portalupi

Doctoral Dissertations

In this study the author uses autobiographical method to explore specific questions about teacher development: How is a teacher identity constructed; What constitutes the teaching self? In addition this study seeks to consider the potential uses of autobiography as a tool in teacher education.

Part One, "A Quiver of Truths," is an autobiographical text in which the author explores issues of her own development as a teacher to reveal its broad roots in a wide expanse of life experiences, specifically the familial, cultural, and historical influences as well as broader issues of human development. Any attempt to make meaning out …

Extending The National Council Of Teachers Of Mathematics' "Recognizing And Recording Reform In Mathematics Education" Documentation Project Through Cross-Case Analyses, Loren Phaffle Johnson

Doctoral Dissertations

The primary emphasis of this study was to broaden the understanding of data collected in the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' (NCTM) Recognizing and Recording Reform in Mathematics Education (R$\sp3$M) project in order to more fully clarify the processes by which reform in mathematics education was occurring across five high school sites. A secondary emphasis was to develop a model of doing cross-case analyses and identifying those methodological elements and linkages that could be applied generally in large-scale studies of this sort.

R$\sp3$M documenters obtained data that resulted from interviews of mathematics teachers, administrators, and students; classroom observations; and …

Professionalization Of Occupational Therapists: A Study Of Emergent Identities, Lou Ann Sooy Griswold

Doctoral Dissertations

The unprecedented demand for occupational therapists and resulting growth in student numbers necessitates the need to understand how students acquire professional ideology, learn expected role behavior, and identify themselves as occupational therapists. This ethnographic study includes interview data from a series of three interviews with 37 trainees, from freshmen to the first year of employment, who had been or were in the occupational therapy program at Worcester State College, in central Massachusetts. Students included women and men who were preparing for either a first or second career. Interviews with six academic faculty and seven fieldwork supervisors in three areas of …

Beyond Note Cards: Rethinking The Freshman Research Paper, Bruce Ballenger

Doctoral Dissertations

Ever since its introduction as an assignment in composition textbooks in the 1920s, the freshman research paper has confounded students and discouraged their instructors. Yet the research paper remains a largely static fixture in most first-year writing courses. What accounts for assignment's persistence, despite the long history of complaint? What are the aims of the freshman research paper, and how well do students understand its purpose? Why do they struggle with the genre? How might it be reconceived?

Using extensive interviews with students and a close examination of student papers, I argue here that the conventional freshman research paper is …

The Availability Of Spatial Information In A Situation Model, Christopher Mark Hakala

Doctoral Dissertations

Four experiments were conducted to determine the availability of spatial information from a situation model. In Experiment 1, participants were told to either focus on spatial information while reading the texts or to read for comprehension. At the end of each text, participants were presented with a probe word to name. The probe word was either spatially associated or dissociated with the final spatial location of the main character. Participants named the spatial probe more quickly only when told to focus on spatial information. Experiment 2 used reading time as a dependent measure to determine ease of integration of spatially …

Making A Place For Poetry: Response In An Adult Writing Group, Andrea Luna

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines how writers respond to other writer's work in the context of a community poetry group. A qualitative study of the poetry group, including participant-observation and tape recording of group meetings, analysis of conversation during meetings, collection of documents, and open-ended interviewing of participants, was undertaken over a period of ten months. Through narrative analysis of the data, one of the primary units of which is the single poem plus the group's response to that poem, the author attempted to create a credible interpretation of the activities and conversations of the group which addresses the question of what …

Emerging From The Chrysalis: Isolation And Publication In Nineteenth-Century Literacy Narratives, Lisa Ann Sisco

Doctoral Dissertations

"Emerging From the Chrysalis" begins with the words of Frederick Douglass, who explains in his 1845 slave narrative that learning to read was a conflicted experience, simultaneously enabling and painful. Douglass writes, "I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing." These powerful words reveal a paradoxical "double-consciousness" inherent in nineteenth-century narratives about literacy: literacy's capacity to simultaneously imprison and empower. Douglass's relationship to literacy, both as a character within his narrative and as an author in a historical context, exemplifies the focus of this dissertation.

I borrow my central metaphor from …

Education, Class And Gender In George Eliot And Thomas Hardy, Keith Ronald Jones

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the relationship between education, class and gender in The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Daniel Deronda (1876) by George Eliot; and in The Woodlanders (1887) and Jude the Obscure (1896) by Thomas Hardy. The Introduction discusses how, in nineteenth-century Britain, education was intended to "improve" individuals and society. The Introduction establishes the Marxist and feminist critical background of the study, and briefly surveys the nineteenth-century debates on "The Education Question," and on education for women.

The novels examined show education failing to 'improve.' Maggie Tulliver, in The Mill on the Floss, and Jude Fawley in Jude …

An Investigation Into Students' Conceptual Understandings Of The Graphical Representation Of Polynomial Functions, Judith Ellen Curran

Doctoral Dissertations

Mathematics educators are realizing the impact that technology is having on the way mathematical functions can be represented and manipulated. The increased use of graphing technology in the classroom is paralleled by an increased emphasis on the role of the graphical representation of a function to solve problems. These changes together with a recognition of the significance and complexity of developing a rich understanding of the graphical representations of polynomial functions are the motivation behind this research.

The study was designed to explore students' conceptual understandings of the graphs of polynomial functions. Guided by a constructivist approach to conceptual change, …