Education Commons^™

The Relationship Of Formative Assessment To The Professional Development And Perspective Transformation Of Teachers, Kimberly K. Snyder

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

This study uses practitioner research to explore teacher perspectives about formative assessment. The researcher engaged in a four-month-long series of professional development sessions with one middle school and two high school English-Language Arts teachers from the Capital View School District. Understanding formative assessment as a process to monitor student learning and then customizing instruction based on the data gathered from the formative assessment is a complex skill in which teachers need practice and even coaching to become adroit. The sessions were intended to help early-career teachers better understand formative assessment and incorporate it as a strategy in their teaching praxis. …

Wilderness Restoration: A Case Study Of Two Place-Based Education Programs, Carolyn Ann Albracht

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

Research regarding outdoor environmental education programs for youth tends to be quantitative in nature, examining cause-and-effect relationships between program content and participants’ behavior and attitudes. Some researchers have suggested that programs that help foster an affective connection with nature in its participants may have more lasting and greater impact on participants’ pro-environmental behavior and attitudes than those that take a more cognitive approach. In other words, appealing to youth’s emotional sensibilities may go further than only teaching facts and skills about how to be better environmental stewards. In order to study these affective connections and how they might be fostered, …

Perceptions Of Eighth Grade State Writing Assessment At A Nationally Recognized Middle School, Jillian M. Quandt

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

This study seeks to understand how one at-risk middle school in Nebraska is consistently beating eighth grade Nebraska State Writing Assessment (NESA-W) averages. The school has significant populations of Hispanic, special education, and low-income students. The study answers the following two research questions. What strategies does the at-risk school utilize to enable its students to exceed the Nebraska average on the NESA-W? What attitudes do the school’s writing teachers, administrators, students, and their parents hold about the NESA-W? Students and their parents answered a multiple-choice survey; teachers and administrators answered a longer, open-ended survey. The researcher used a combination of …

Motivation Of High School Students In A Startalk Chinese Immersion Program: A Mixed Methods Case Study, Fei Yu

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

The focus of this dissertation was the development and dynamics of student learning motivation during and beyond a Chinese immersion program.

The need to conduct this study emerged as a result of the rise in popularity of Chinese language study and the increase in Chinese immersion programs in the United States. However, the number of students who continue their studies remains low. This seeming paradox was investigated by examining high school students’ Chinese learning motivation in a STARTALK Chinese immersion program. The investigation was grounded in Gardner’s socio-educational model (2006, 2010) and Dörnyei and Ottó’s process-oriented model of student motivation …