Education Commons^™

Learning To Reason About Code With Assertions: An Exploration With Two Student Populations, Sarah Blankenship

All Theses

Code tracing is fundamental to students’ understanding of a program, and symbolic reasoning that entails learning to use assertions with abstract input and output values, as opposed to concrete values, enhances that understanding. Symbolic reasoning teaches students valuable abstraction and logic skills that will serve them well in all aspects of programming and their software
development careers.
We use lessons integrated into an online educational tool to supplement classroom instruction to help students learn symbolic reasoning. We explore two ways for students to learn about assertions: Writing assertions to capture the behavior of given code and solving Parsons-style problems in …

Evaluating The Impact Of Intersecting Research And Outreach Marine Science Programs On Elementary And Undergraduate Students, Randi J. Sims

All Theses

Climate change is one of the most destructive forces our ocean is currently experiencing. Despite this, many students are not taught the basics of climate change science and ocean literacy in public school systems. My work seeks to combat these deficits through educational experiences in marine science for undergraduate and local elementary students through three studies incorporating marine-science based research and outreach. (1) Through undergraduate marine science research and outreach, students enrolled for long durations or with positive mentorship increased their conceptual understanding of marine science concepts, altered their attitudes towards climate change and science, and were more likely to …

Framing The Needs Of School-Based Agricultural Education Teachers To Meet Twenty-First Century Programs Demands, Kayla Marsh

All Theses

Teacher attrition is a historic problem that globally is considered to be an educational crisis. SBAE is not exempt from this crisis with teacher shortages dating back to the passing of the Smith-Hughes Act in 1917. For the past three decades, researchers have studied this phenomenon to better understand the needs of SBAE teachers in order to increase recruitment and retention as well as improve work-life balance.

While several needs are recurring current efforts are not resulting in actionable change for SBAE teachers. To gain perspectives on the problem, qualitative interviews were conducted with SBAE teachers as well as an …

Age-Specific Effects Of An Early Grade Literacy Intervention In Asia And Africa, Doris Suzuki Esmerio

All Theses

Education has been widely recognized in the economic literature as a fundamental element in the economic development of nations and individuals. In this study, I focus on literacy acquisition for young children in poor communities in South Asia and Sub- saharan Africa. Literature on cognitive skill formation, neurobiology and psychology have found converging evidence that returns to investments in education differ by age. This is explained by the fact that neural circuits are more receptive to environmental influences at sensitive periods of brain development. Using data from a RCT experiment conducted between 2012-2016 in Bangladesh, Burundi, Ethiopia, Eswatini, Ghana, India, …

Inclusive Pedagogy: Connecting Disability And Race In Higher Education, Meredith Persin

All Theses

Higher education was never made for marginalized people. The academy was created based on the privileged white, able-bodied, males who preoccupied higher education for the longest time. While that has certainly changed over the years, the institution itself is still in the past resulting in BIPOC students and disabled students continuing to struggle within higher education. While instructors have begun to take interest in the need for inclusive pedagogy within the last decade, it still has a far way to come in order to help the marginalized students with intersecting identities and students who may not benefit from a one …

Creating A Printed Electronic Tangible User Interface Suitable For Primary Education Settings, Lauren Toler

All Theses

With the growing popularity of interactive learning, an experiment developing a tangible user interface made of paper was performed. Screen printing was utilized to print conductive traces that would connect to a device that has capacitive touch capabilities. A color mixing program was coded to accompany the tangible interface. It was found that a tangible user interface can be successfully made of paper. Further research with development, construction, and testing of this paper tangible interface was proposed.