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Storyteller, Story-Teacher: A Portrait Of Three Teachers? Use Of Story In Elementary Classes, James Michael Shirley

Middle-Secondary Education and Instructional Technology Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the use of storytelling as a teaching strategy in the classrooms of three experienced elementary school teachers. Storytelling is defined in this study as the use of a narrative, spoken or written, in prose or in verse, true or fictitious, related so as to inform, entertain, or instruct the listener or reader. This research answers questions concerning; (a) what constitutes storytelling in these teachers’ classrooms, (b) teachers’ purposes for using storytelling, and (c) factors that have encouraged these teachers to employ storytelling in their teaching practices. Framed within constructivist theory, the …

Cognitive Assessment Of School Age Spanish Speaking English Language Learners, Casey Johnson

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

The number of students who speak a language other that English in schools across the U.S. is rapidly increasing. The Spanish speaking student population, in particular, has grown considerably in recent years. One way to examine the extent of this growth is to consider demographic data at the national and state levels.

Factors Affecting The Activation Of Predictive Inferences, Mary E. Harmon

Doctoral Dissertations

Past research has demonstrated that predictive inferences are difficult to detect when distracting material is present (Klin, Guzaman, & Levine, 1999b). The experiments in this dissertation were designed to explore both how and why distracting material influences the availability of predictive inferences.

Participants were presented with passages containing either a neutral introduction or a distractor introduction followed by an inference-evoking sentence or a control sentence. In Experiment 1, activation of predictive inferences was detected with a naming task, but not in the presence of distracting information. In Experiments 2 and 3, there was no evidence of activation of a "distractor" …

Long -Term Episodic Memory In Children With Attention -Deficit /Hyperactivity Disorder, Jeffrey S. Skowronek

Doctoral Dissertations

Research on Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has indicated that diagnosed children show considerable memory deficits. The majority of tasks that have supported such deficits have focused on working memory and school/semantic-related abilities. Although there is a small body of literature related to long-term memory in children with ADHD, no studies appear to focus on long-term episodic memory, including personal-event memory. This is the case despite clinical and anecdotal evidence suggesting that children with ADHD might show enhanced long-term episodic memory abilities in comparison to those without.

Twenty-one children with ADHD (5 females and 16 males) and 31 children without ADHD (14 …

The Effect Of Memory For Serially Presented Causal Information On Judgments Of Contingency, Christopher A. Barnes

Doctoral Dissertations

Four experiments investigated whether memory errors might account for errors in contingency judgments. Participants viewed contingencies one event at a time, later recalled the frequencies of the four event types, and judged the extent that they were related. Contingency judgments were more highly correlated with participants' memory of the contingency than with the actual contingency (Experiments 2 & 4); thus implying that inaccurate mental representations of the contingency contribute to erroneous judgments. Decreasing the time to view each event (i.e., from 3 to 5 s) increased the perceived difficulty of recalling event frequencies (Experiments 1 & 2), decreased the percentage …

Cognitive Heterogeneity In Murderers, Erin Warnick

UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations

It has long been recognized that damage to one or more brain regions can produce antisocial and aggressive behavior. Unfortunately, however, attempts to develop a replicable neurocognitive profile that characterize serious forms of criminality have been relatively unsuccessful. Evidence of cognitive heterogeneity in violent offender populations may indicate different biobehavioral subtypes underling this complex multidetermined behavior. These subtypes may interact with other clinical and environmental vulnerabilities. In the current study, cluster analytic techniques were applied to a sample of 55 homicide offenders. Using select Halstead-Reitan and Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) variables four distinct cognitive clusters were derived and externally …