Education Commons^™

A Grounded Theory Approach To Faculty’S Perspective And Patterns Of Online Social Presence, Rebecca A. Cox-Davenport

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The purpose of this research study was to generate a grounded theory regarding the patterns and perceptions of nursing faculty in the formation of social processes in an online course. Employing a grounded theory approach, this researcher built upon the theoretical concepts of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000). The CoI model illustrates the inner workings of the educational experience. The model consists of three main components: social presence, teaching presence, and cognitive presence. These three elements overlap to demonstrate how each factor influences the other forms of presence. This study sought to better understand …

Assessing The Effect Of Simulation Models On Systems Learning In An Introductory Environmental Science Course, Heather J. Skaza

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

While there is plenty of anecdotal evidence within the systems dynamics community supporting the use of systems simulations in the classroom to improve student understanding, there is little published, controlled, experimental research. This paper describes the results of a paired experiment testing the effect of using system dynamics simulations to increase systems understanding in an introductory environmental science course. We believed that the students using the systems simulations would demonstrate a greater systemic understanding of environmental issues than those who did not.

We conducted an experiment during the fall semester of 2009, with 304 students enrolled in four sections of …