Education Commons^™

After The Final Bell: The Self-Directed Learning Practices Of Elementary Teachers, Susan Renee Wagner

Doctoral Dissertations

Are elementary teachers self-directed learners? If so, do their learning activities outside their classrooms translate into their classrooms? The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship, if any, between elementary teachers’ self-directed learning and activities in their classrooms. A two phase, mixed methods design first utilized a quantitative study from which the results were used to denote the type of data collected in the second, qualitative phase. The quantitative Phase I of this study involved using a survey instrument in order to identify self-directed learners and identify categories of teacher learners. These quantitative data were gathered through the …

Balancing Student Participation In Large College Courses Via Randomized Credit For Participation, Daniel Fox Mccleary

Doctoral Dissertations

The current study was an extension of research reported by Krohn (2010), which showed that daily credit for self-reported participation in designated credit units tended to balance participation across students (i.e., fewer non-participants, more credit-level participants, and fewer dominant participants). The purpose of the current study was to determine if similar results would be achieved by randomly selecting half of the discussion days in designated credit units for participation credit.

The study was done in 3 large sections of an undergraduate class (approximately 54 students per class). Students self-recorded their in-class comments each day on specially designed record cards. At …

Decolonial Multiculturalism And Local-Global Contexts: A Postcritical Feminist Bricolage For Developing New Praxes In Education, Katharine Matthaei Sprecher

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation presents a conceptual bricolage that explores complex, reflexive, and interrelated dimensions of educational praxes. My work is grounded in the assertion that the ever-changing, local-global nature of contemporary societies requires new approaches to curricula, pedagogies, policies, and practices in U.S. schools to meet the challenges and opportunities of a global era. Presenting my research and findings as four articles, I begin with a dialectical analysis of theoretical and pedagogical literatures to develop an adaptable framework for decolonial multicultural education. In Article 1, I demonstrate how this framework synergizes aspects of social reconstructionist and critical multicultural, global, and …

Assessing Effectiveness Of Multicultural Readings In Increasing Ethnocultural Empathy For Undergraduate Students, Tripti Bhaskar

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examined how multicultural readings included in the introduction to psychology curriculum were linked to an increase in students’ multicultural interest and sensitivity. Specifically, this study investigated the impact of reading and discussing multicultural articles on students’ ethnocultural empathy, universality-diverse orientation, and openness to diversity. Second purpose of the study was to examine possible individual differences associated with response to the intervention. Participants in the current study were undergraduate students enrolled in five sections of the introduction to psychology class, which were randomly assigned as control and experimental groups. The multicultural readings are four original research articles that examine …

Examining The Relationship Between Fact Learning And Higher Order Learning Via Retrieval Practice, Pooja Kay Agarwal '01

Doctoral Dissertations

The development of higher order skills is a desired outcome of education. Some believe that higher order learning can be improved directly, whereas others argue that higher order learning can be improved via the enhancement of factual or conceptual knowledge. The relationship between fact and higher order learning is often speculated, but empirically unknown.

This project examines whether retrieval practice via quizzing, a strategy typically used to enhance fact learning, can be used as a strategy to improve higher order skills in both laboratory and applied settings. In the current study, higher order skills were considered to comprise the understand, …

Personality Traits And Career Decidedness: An Empirical Study Of University Students, Ryan M. Smith

Doctoral Dissertations

Research on vocational behavior has made progress in identifying broad personality traits associated with career indecision; however, important questions remain unanswered about the temporal stability of relationships between broad personality traits and Career Decidedness (CD), and about the role of narrow personality traits as predictors of CD, both of which were addressed in this longitudinal field study. A total of 2,046 undergraduate students completed an online personality inventory and CD questionnaire. A sub-group (N=267) responded to a follow-up questionnaire seven months later. Results indicated, as hypothesized, that CD correlated positively with the broad (Big Five) personality traits, openness, conscientiousness, and …