Education Commons^™

Blogging About Summer Reading, Janice Becker Place

Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview

The purpose of this study was to investigate what happened when grade 11 high school honors students blogged about their summer reading under the monitoring of a teacher during vacation. I proposed that an educational blog might serve as an effective tool during summer vacation to help students retain skills or learning while at a physical distance from their school and teacher. In addition to the blog’s transcripts, a pre-project survey, post-project survey,and post-project interviews provided complementary data to inform my analysis. Qualitative analysis was applied to the blog discussion entries for evidence of peer learning, scaffolding, critical thinking, and …

In Pursuit Of A Balanced System Of Educational Assessment: An Evaluation Of The Pre-Kindergarten Through 8th Grade Math Assessment System In One Massachusetts Regional School District, Rita Joyce Detweiler

Open Access Dissertations

School leaders in the United States live in an educational era characterized by a desire for and expectation that all students attain high levels of academic proficiency. There is an increased reliance on all types of educational assessment as a key component to help school leaders attain that goal. The purpose of this study is to understand how school administrators can foster a balanced system of assessment at the local level to genuinely harness the power of assessment to enhance student learning. The significance of the study rests in the fact that there is a general failure of states and …

Describing Comprehension, Susan Vander Does

Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview

Teachers' observations of student performance in reading are abundant and insightful but often remain internal and unarticulated. As a result, such observations are an underutilized and undervalued source of data. Given the gaps in knowledge about students’ reading comprehension that exist in formal assessments, the frequent calls for teachers’ observational data to fill these gaps, and the paucity of research on teachers as assessment instruments, this study sought to learn more about the knowledge teachers gain about students’ comprehension through embedded observation.

This research was framed by a transactional conception of reading and informed by cognitive and sociocultural studies of …