Education Commons^™

The Influence Of Cross-Linguistic Input And L2 Proficiency On L2 Reading Comprehension Among Spanish-Speaking Adults Learning English As A Second Language, Astrid Sussette Rodríguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Developing literacy and language proficiency in English is essential to thrive in school and in the workforce in American society. Research on cross-linguistic influences on text-level skills is scant, especially studies investigating reading comprehension among language-minority adults. The present study investigated the effects of cross-linguistic input and second language proficiency on second language reading comprehension among Spanish-speaking adults enrolled in English as a Second Language (ESL) classes at a community college in New York City. The main research question was whether language-minority adults would comprehend printed text better if they read it in Spanish (L1) followed by English (L2) than …

Teaching Style: An Investigation Of New York City Public High School Teacher Dress Practices, Anne J. Brownstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent decades there has been increasing interest in regulating teacher appearance in the schools. While there is a great deal of anecdotal data available about what dress standards for teachers should be, to the best of the researcher's knowledge no one has undertaken scholarly research to investigate teacher attitudes towards their constructions of self, self-as-teacher, and educational philosophies as expressed by dress practices.

Predicated upon the theory that the study of self presentation provides a window through which we can gain insight into these constructions, this dissertation investigates how a sample of nine New York City public high school …

Stability And Change In New York State Regents Mathematics Examinations, 1866-2009: A Socio-Historical Analysis, Robert Stephen Watson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation illuminates relationships between micro-level practices of schools and macro-level structures of society through the socio-historical lens of New York State Regents mathematics examinations, which were administered to public school students throughout the State of New York between 1866 and 2009, inclusive. Fundamental research questions involved in this study are: 1) How has the classification, framing, and assessment of Regents level mathematics curricula in the public schools of New York changed since 1866?: and 2) How has popularization influenced the contents, structure and academic rigor of Regents mathematics examinations? Basil Bernstein's theory of educational transmissions provides a theoretical framework …

Identity Development In Pre-Service Teachers Who Are Explainers In A Science Center: Dialectically Developing Theory And Praxis, Preeti Gupta

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates how teaching in a hands-on science center contributes to re/shaping one's teaching identity. Situated at the New York Hall of Science (NYHS) in Queens, New York, my research approach is to conduct a critical ethnography where the focus is on improving the teaching and learning of science for all involved. In particular, Explainers, floor staff at NYHS, who are studying to be science teachers, are invited to become co-researchers with me.

Written as a manuscript style, this dissertation consists of six chapters. Each chapter foregrounds certain events and phenomena, and theory and method are woven in to …

Navigating The Gaze: Young People's Intimate Knowledge With Surveilled Spaces At School, Patricia Krueger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The 1980s introduced numerous state and federal policies that created a similar ideology of discipline and punishment in the educational system and the criminal justice system, a phenomenon known today as the school-to-prison pipeline. Several critical elements are involved in the production and maintenance of the school-to-prison pipeline, such as zero tolerance regulations, surveillance technologies, and strengthened in-school discipline practices. In this dissertation I argue that these elements of the pipeline maintain a strong presence and occupy the physical spaces of public schools. Moreover, surveillance cameras and police officers are most often installed in the cities' most under-resourced public schools, …

Resisting Regulation: Lgbtq Teens And Discourses Of Sexuality And Gender In High Schools, Darla Linville

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation documents a participatory action research project designed to understand discourses of sexuality and gender in New York City high schools. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual high school students participated as co-researchers in documenting discourses in popular culture, news reports, youth development reports, and through writing exercises about their own experiences. Together researchers created a modified Q sort (the Queer Q Sort) and surveyed a snowball sample of 21 lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and questioning (LGBTQ) high school students about the discourses of sexuality and gender they encounter in their schools and the ways that they accept or reject …

Meritocracy: A Socio-Educational Policy Conundrum Transversing Selected Works Of James Bryant Conant, Benjamin Enoma

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the United States, adjacent strands of the meritocratic discourse intercept by accident of history. It occurs either in the Jeffersonian tradition of culling from all sectors of the populace a natural aristocracy of talents as proposed by James Conant through the development of Scholastic Aptitude Tests, or by expanding the structure of opportunity to all individuals and leveling uneven terrains through social policies like desegregation of schools and affirmative action. In other words, it is a case of policies based on the 'laissez-faire' doctrine versus those based on governmental intervention. "This interception to some degree has fused the strands …

The Social Construction Of Authorship: An Investigation Of Subjectivity And Rhetorical Authority In The College Writing Classroom, Johannah Rodgers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although we use the term author on a daily basis to refer to certain individuals, bodies of work, and systems of ideas, as Michel Foucault and other critics have pointed out, attempting to answer the question “What is an Author?” is by no means a simple proposition. And, starting from the position that there is no single, or definitive answer to this complex question, this dissertation seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion of the genealogy of authorship by investigating the ways in which conceptions of the author have informed models of the writing subject in the field of rhetoric …

Relationship Between Parental Physical Discipline And Child Externalizing Problems In The Caribbean Subculture In New York City, Meltem Paker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigated the relationship between parental physical discipline (PD) and child externalizing behaviors (EB) in the Caribbean subculture and examined whether acculturation to the European American and Caribbean cultures, generational status, normativity of PD, and warmth in the parent-child relationship moderated this relationship. Eighty-nine parents of Caribbean origin answered an anonymous survey consisting of various scales and demographic questions.

Descriptive analyses indicated that parents in this study used PD an average of 10 times during the past year. The majority (69%) reported using at least one PD act in the past year. All forms of more severe PD (e.g., …

Literacyscape: The History, Politics And Practice Of Basic Writing, Tim Mccormack

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Perhaps nowhere else in American society is the ideology, theory and politics of language literacy so emphatically revealed than in the hopeful and daunting attempt by Basic Writing students to leap-frog their way over the real socio-cultural, linguistic and/or politically constructed remedial barriers and into the mainstream of college life. This dissertation documents and analyzes a Basic Writing classroom at the City College of the City University of New York in the final year that the college offered Basic Writing to matriculated students. This project details the lived experience of a single Basic Writing course and the lives of the …

The Relationship Between Family-Environmental Processes And Academic Achievement Among Three Hispanic Groups In The United States, Manuel Martinez-Pons

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study was to examine (1) whether differences in academic achievement exist among students of three Hispanic groups in the United States, (2) whether such differences are related to student achievement processes, and (3) whether differences in both student academic achievement and achievement processes are related to their parents' background characteristics.

The three Hispanic groups of students that were studied were Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Central/South American. Two student achievement processes were examined: their time spent on homework and their educational-occupational aspirations. The three parental achievement processes investigated were their press for English, press for independence and …

The Early Development Of Quantitative Cognition: Correspondences And One-Way Functions, Irvin Sam Schonfeld

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This investigation was designed to examine the development of the child's capacity to make numerical and quantitative comparisons. It was hypothesized that the nature of the child's understanding of correspondences and one-way functions informs his capacity to compare arrays of decals and quantities of liquid. The relation of Piagetian operative level to the child's capacity to use crystallized skills, or solution aids (Cattell, 1963; Horn, 1968), in comparing arrays was also investigated.

A total of 171 children who ranged in age from four to seven years were administered numerical and liquid comparison tasks. The numerical tasks included paired arrays of …

The Effect Of Anxiety On Direction Of Attention And Short-Term Memory, Charles B. Kreitzberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this research was to examine the effect of anxiety on rehearsal in short-term memory. It was hypothesized that anxiety arousal would result in attentional alternation between task-relevant rehearsal and task-irrelevant personalized thinking. Because atten­tional focus becomes increasingly unitary at high levels of arousal, it was anticipated that the alternation resulting from anxiety would interfere with rehearsal of task-relevant information in short-term memory.

One hundred-fifty subjects were randomly assigned to a high-stress (testlike) or low-stress (neutral) condition. They were shown to-be- recalled strings consisting of seven consonants of low associability. Following a 1.5 second exposure to a given …

Effects Of Instructions And Stimulus Representation On Selective Learning In Children, Adele E. Gottfried

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Selective learning patterns of children were investigated using incidental learning methodology. Since incidental, in contrast to intentional learning occurs in the absence of instructions which prepare the subject for later retention tests, a subject has relatively more freedom to choose to attend to and learn only a portion of the presented information (thus exercising selectivity). Previous research suggested that selectivity seemed to increase or decrease with development in relation to different incidental learning paradigms. For studies in which incidental stimuli were presented without a concurrent intentional task (Type 1) incidental learning increased with age indicating decreased selectivity. For studies in …