Education Commons^™

How Do Middle School Core Content Area Teachers In A Title 1 School Use Cooperative Learning In The Context Of High Accountability For Student Proficiency: A Multiple Case Study, Martha Cunigan-Wells

Dissertations

This action research case study describes how content area teachers in a middle school with low reading achievement levels utilize cooperative learning and curriculum integration (with a focus on the integration of literacy skills and thinking skills) in their content area given the current context of accountability for student mastery of tested core content outcomes. The participants were four urban middle school teachers from the core areas of science, social studies, mathematics, and language arts who had varying levels of training and experience with cooperative learning and curriculum integration. Data sources included audio-recorded pre-conferences, video-taped classroom observations, audio-recorded post-conferences, and …

A Socratic Café For Critical Inquiry, Jody Piro, Gina Anderson

Jody Piro

This presentation will explore the completed research inquiry that developed from our overt attempt to promote critical thinking in an online forum. The implications for advancing critical inquiry in online formats for interdisciplinary university content areas will be addressed. The objectives of this session are twofold: 1) to introduce participants to the nine intellectual standards (Elder & Paul, 2007) used to analyze the critical thinking and Socratic questioning in our research, and 2) to discuss the structuring of critical analysis in participants' own classrooms. Participants can expect to participate in a cooperative learning activity to practice the use of Intellectual …

Genres Of Dialogic Discussion In High School English: A Cross-Case Study Of Two Courses, Wendy Keyser

Doctoral Dissertations

This cross-case ethnographic study examines genres of discussion in two public high school English courses to explore the interplay between dialogism, structure, and critical and collaborative thinking practices. Bakhtin's concepts of dialogism and speech genres as well as Vygotsky's concepts of thinking and language and the zone of proximal development provide the theoretical premise of this research. Data sources included field notes, audio recordings and transcriptions, artifacts of the teacher's handouts and students' written work, informal conversations, and an interview with the teacher. I used discourse analysis and grounded theory to analyze the data, looking at both lively and problematic …

Building-Up Student Success, Maria Babiuc-Hamilton

Maria C. Babiuc-Hamilton

Students' ability to think critically is essential in achieving success not only in college, but also later in their jobs. In order to increase students' long term performance, the general education program at our university was completely restructured to allow the introduction of three required credit hours in critical thinking across curriculum at the freshmen level. The dissemination of the learning outcomes is complicated, because this course is not content driven. The solution is for students to including a meta-cognitive reflection with their assignments, describing their personal academic plan and their experience with the learning process. This proposal presents the …

Enhancing Educators’ Skills For Promoting Critical Thinking In Their Classroom Discourses: A Randomized Control Trial, Raisa Gul, Shehla Khan, Azra Ahmad, Shanaz Hussein Cassum, Tanveer Saeed, Yasmin Parpio, Joanne Profetto- Mcgrath, Donald Schopflocher

School of Nursing & Midwifery

The literature reveals that educators find it challenging to foster critical thinking (CT) in their students if they have not learned how to use CT in their educational system or training. This paper reports findings from a national research project that was undertaken to enhance the educators’ ability to promote CT in their teaching practices. Using a randomized control trial design with a pre- and post-test, 91 educators from 14 of the 17 schools of nursing in Pakistan consented to enroll in the study and 72 completed the study. The intervention included 40 hours of learning experience during two workshops …

Re-Examining The Literature Review: Purposes, Approaches, And Issues, Mary Renck Jalongo, Kelly Heider

Kelly Heider