Education Commons^™

Latina/O Adolescents' Funds Of Knowledge Related To Engineering, Amy Wilson-Lopez, Joel Alejandro Mejia, Indhira María Hasbún, G. Sue Kasun

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

According to a growing body of research, many Latinas/os experience dissonance between their everyday cultural practices and the cultural practices prevalent in engineering. This dissonance contributes to many Latinas/os' sense that engineering is "not for me."

A Social Semiotic Analysis Of Instructional Images Across Academic Disciplines, Amy Wilson-Lopez, Melanie Landon-Hays

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

Framed in theories of social semiotics, this descriptive multiple case study examined the images used by six middle-school teachers during one school year as they each taught two different subject areas: earth science, language arts, mathematics, and/or social studies. Using Kress and Van Leeuwen’s visual grammar to analyze these images, this study identified discipline-specific patterns in how 1,132 images realized assumptions in regards to the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions of communication. A content analysis suggested discipline-specific differences in the presumed social distance between the content of the images and the students, as well as discipline-specific differences in assumptions about the …

Variations In The Intensity Of Specialized Science, Technology, Engineering, And Mathematics (Stem) High Schools, Colby Tofel-Grehl, Carolyn M. Callahan

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

Educators and policymakers in the United States advocate the development of specialized STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) schools, but little is known about the unique features and practices of these schools. Because no meaningful differences have been found attributable to model type (Tofel-Grehl & Callahan, 2014), the current study purposefully sampled 6 specialized STEM schools in the United States that provided different levels of STEM experiences for students related to highly varied goals and missions using a grounded theory approach. Schools were found to fall into two categories, high and low STEM intensity, based on five major traits. Schools …

How Affordances And Constraints Of Physical And Virtual Manipulatives Support The Development Of Procedural Fluency And Algorithmic Thinking In Mathematics, Jennifer Such, Patricia S. Moyer-Packenham

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study was to examine how the affordances and constraints of physical and virtual manipulatives influence the development of students’ algorithmic thinking when learning algebra and rational number concepts. Thirty-six third-grade students participated in two weeks of instruction using physical and virtual manipulatives as instructional tools. The primary design of the study was a teaching experiment in which quantitative and qualitative data were collected to provide a holistic examination. Pre- and post-test items were used in the quantitative analysis following a within-subjects crossover repeated measures design. Students’ written work, a user survey, student interviews, field notes, and …

Using An Iceberg Intervention Model To Understand Equivalent Fraction Learning When Students With Mathematical Learning Difficulties Use Different Manipulatives, Arla Westenskow, Patricia S. Moyer-Packenham

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

This study examined variations in 43 fifth-grade Tier II students' learning of equivalent fractions using physical and virtual manipulatives during intervention instruction. The overarching research question focused on how different manipulatives types support learning fraction sub-concepts during mathematics intervention instruction for students with mathematical learning difficulties. Over a three-week period, students participated in ten small group sessions using different manipulatives during instruction (physical, virtual, and combination). Data were collected from pre/post testing and daily monitoring assessments. An Iceberg Intervention Model was used to document student learning for five equivalent fraction sub-concepts and nine general fraction sub-concepts. Results showed that physical …

Examining Patterns In Second Graders’ Use Of Virtual Manipulative Mathematics Apps Through Heatmap Analysis, Patricia S. Moyer-Packenham, Stephen Isaac Tucker, Arla Westenskow, Jurgen Symanzik

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

This study examined 32 second-grade children’s interactions with six virtual manipulative mathematics apps on the iPad using a novel analysis approach called heatmap analysis. Mathematical topics of the six apps focused on understanding skip counting and place value concepts. Children interacted individually with the apps under the guidance of an interviewer during 30-40 minute clinical interviews. The heatmap analysis revealed patterns in children’s performance on the tasks and suggested individual cases for further analysis. For example, clusters of children showed high or low performance during the skip counting sequence. In the high-performing cluster, one child still struggled to monitor the …

Integrating Literacy And Engineering Instruction For Young Learners, Amy Wilson-Lopez, Stacie Gregory

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

According to recently published national standards, elementary students should engage in engineering design activities. This article outlines ways that teachers can use literacy instruction to support young students’ engineering design activity, such as by selecting texts in which characters face problems that can be solved through engineering, providing students with opportunities to practice comprehension strategies while reading those texts, and modeling for them how to write a variety of texts that are relevant to engineers’ practices. The authors describe how they integrated this type of literacy instruction into engineering units in third- and fifth-grade classrooms.

Are We Preparing The Next Generation? K-12 Teacher Knowledge And Engagement In Teaching Core Stem Practices, Louis S. Nadelson, Anne Seifert, J. Kade Hendricks

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

Background: Several of the recent reform efforts in K-12 STEM education (e.g. Next Generation Science Standards [NGSS and Common Core State Standards-Mathematics [CCSS-M]) have included significant emphasis on the practices of STEM. We argue that K-12 teachers' ability to effectively engage their students in these core STEM practices is fundamental to the success of potential and current engineering students and their subsequent careers as engineers. Practices such as identifying problems, modeling using mathematics, and arguing from evidence are fundamental processes in engineering. Helping students develop their capacity to engage in these practices early in their education will increase the likelihood …

Undergraduate Latina/O Students: A Systematic Review Of Research Identifying Factors Contributing To Academic Success Outcomes, Gloria Crisp, Amanda Taggart, Amaury Nora

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

A systematic review was conducted to produce an up-to-date and comprehensive summary of qualitative and quantitative evidence specific to the factors related to undergraduate Latina/o student academic success outcomes during college. The purpose of the study was to make sense of and provide critique to this rapidly growing body of research, as well as to direct future research efforts. Findings indicate that a combination of (a) sociocultural characteristics; (b) academic self-confidence; (c) beliefs, ethnic/racial identity, and coping styles; (d) precollege academic experiences; (e) college experiences; (f) internal motivation and commitment; (g) interactions with supportive individuals; (h) perceptions of the campus …

Using Virtual Manipulatives To Generalize And Justify Through Discourse, Katie Anderson-Pence, Patricia S. Moyer-Packenham

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

This study examined the influence of different virtual manipulative types on the nature of students’ discourse related to generalizing and justifying mathematical concepts. During 27 episodes, students worked on mathematics tasks using three different virtual manipulative types: linked, pictorial, and tutorial. The level of students’ discourse in generalization and justification was coded and analyzed for each episode and compared across virtual manipulative types. A one-way ANOVA indicated statistically significant differences in the quality of generalizations and justifications among the different virtual manipulative types. Other patterns indicate that certain virtual manipulative types may be more suited than others for encouraging meaningful …

Using Virtual Manipulatives To Enchance Collaborative Discourse In Mathematics Instruction, Katie Anderson-Pence, Patricia S. Moyer-Packenham

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

This study examined the influence of different virtual manipulative (VM) types on the nature of students’ collaborative mathematical discourse. During 27 episodes, students’ worked on mathematics tasks using three different VM types: linked, pictorial, and tutorial. The level of students’ collaborative discourse was coded and analyzed for each episode and compared across VM types. A one-way ANOVA indicated statistically significant differences in the quality of collaborative discourse among the different VM types. Other patterns indicate that certain VM types may be more suited than others for encouraging meaningful collaborative discourse. The patterns and trends identified in this study contribute to …

Dual Language Instruction And Achievement: A Need And A Void In The Midwest, Tammy Oberg De La Garza, Erin Mackinney, Alyson Leah Lavigne

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

In recent years, the benefits of bilingualism through dual language (DL) education models have been well documented. Despite evidence of bilinguals' heightened cognition and achievement, Midwestern English language learners (ELLs) are relegated to language programs that do nothing to enhance or maintain students' native language. This descriptive study employed a survey to collect data on existing DL programs across the state of Illinois (the largest population of ELLs in the Midwest), to better understand the challenges facing DL educators and administrators in the nation's middle. Data suggests the predominant obstacle encountered by school administrators is a lack of qualified DL …

Trust In Science And Scientists And The Acceptance Of Evolution, Louis S. Nadelson

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

Background: Accepting the concept of evolution is important for the advancement of biological science and has many implications for daily life. However, a large portion of the general public does not currently accept biological evolution. Therefore, it is important to understand what factors are associated with a decline in the acceptance of evolution. Of particular interest for us is the relationship of individuals’ sense of trust in science in relationship to evolution acceptance.

Methods: Using the Trust in Science and Scientists and Inventory of Student Evolution Acceptance we surveyed 159 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory psychology course. Additionally, we …

Changes In Latino/A Adolescents' Engineering Self-Efficacy And Perceptions Of Engineering After Addressing Authentic Engineering Design Challenges, J. A. Mejia, D. Drake, Amy Wilson-Lopez

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

Community-based engineering design activities were used to provide Latino/a adolescents with authentic engineering experiences with the intention of increasing their engineering self-efficacy and changing their perceptions of engineering. Twenty five Latino/a adolescents (ages 14 to 17)- most of whom were either immigrants or English learners - were purposefully selected to work on different community-based engineering design activities, which are engineering experiences where the adolescents had the opportunity to research, analyze, and/or design solutions to problems affecting their community. The adolescents worked in teams of three or four members over the course of one school year to develop a solution to …

Successes And Struggles Of Teaching: Perspectives Of Beginning, Mid-Career, And Veteran Teachers, Alyson Leah Lavigne, Amanda Rabidue Bozack

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

Wages that are not commensurate with level of education (National Association of Colleges and Employers [NACE], 2013), demanding responsibilities, and pressures leveraged by high-stakes testing and evaluation, have led to soaring rates of attrition and a disproportionate number of beginning teachers in U.S. classrooms. Teacher experience has decreased from a mode of 15 years in 1978–1988 to five in 2011–2012 (Ingersoll, Merrill, & Stuckey, 2014). And, nearly half of all teachers leave within five years costing U.S. public schools 2.6 billion dollars annually (Alliance for Excellent Education [AEE], 2004). These trends in the teaching workforce have important implications for school …

Reading Together: A Successful Reading Fluency Internvetion, Chase Young, Kathleen A. J. Mohr, Timothy Rasinkski

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

The article describes a reading fluency intervention called Reading Together that combines the method of repeated readings (Samuels, 1979) and the Neurological Impress Method (Heckelman, 1969). Sixteen volunteers from various backgrounds were recruited and trained to deliver the Reading Together intervention to struggling readers in third through fifth grade. The differences on the outcome measures between the treatment (n = 29) and comparison (n = 23) were statistically significant. Thus, students in the treatment demonstrated increased reading expression, reading rate, and overall reading scores. Results suggest that Reading Together is a feasible method of increasing students’ reading proficiency and can …

Reading Together: A Successful Reading Fluency Internvetion, Chase Young, Kathleen A. J. Mohr, Timothy Rasinkski

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

The article describes a reading fluency intervention called Reading Together that combines the method of repeated readings (Samuels, 1979) and the Neurological Impress Method (Heckelman, 1969). Sixteen volunteers from various backgrounds were recruited and trained to deliver the Reading Together intervention to struggling readers in third through fifth grade. The differences on the outcome measures between the treatment (n = 29) and comparison (n = 23) were statistically significant. Thus, students in the treatment demonstrated increased reading expression, reading rate, and overall reading scores. Results suggest that Reading Together is a feasible method of increasing students’ reading proficiency and can …

Service Learning At Community Colleges: Synthesis, Critique, And Recommendations For Future Research, Amanda Taggart, Gloria Crisp

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

The purpose of this paper is to review and critique empirical work done, to date, specific to service learning experiences at the community college level. A review of the literature was conducted in order to examine the empirical work that has been developed regarding service learning, a form of experiential learning, at community colleges. The narrative defines service learning, describes types of service learning taking place on community college campuses, and synthesizes and critiques the service learning empirical work done to date. The review closes with specific recommendations for both researchers and practitioners regarding future research.

Middle School Teachers’ Discipline-Specific Use Of Gestures And Implications For Disciplinary Literacy Instruction, Amy Wilson-Lopez

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

Framed in theories of social semiotics, this descriptive multiple case study examined six middle school teachers’ use of gestures during one school year as they each taught two different subject areas: earth science, language arts, mathematics, and/or social studies. The data, which included field notes and photographs from 354 lessons and 151 video-recordings of lesson segments, were analyzed using constant comparative methods and multimodal concordance charts. The analyses indicated discipline-specific differences in types of gestures, frequency of gestures, and centrality of gestures to the teachers’ messages. Earth science depended on a variety of iconic and deictic gestures, the latter of …

Using Disciplinary Literacies To Enhance Adolescents' Engineering Design Activity, Amy Wilson-Lopez, Emma Smith, Daniel L. Householder

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

This comparative case study describes the literacy practices of two groups of adolescents as they sought to solve authentic problems through engineering design processes. Three types of data were collected as the groups addressed these problems: video- and audio-recordings of their conversations; adolescent-generated products; and pre- and post-challenge interviews. The authors used existing coding schemes of engineering design activity to identify when the adolescents enacted different stages of engineering design, as well as a modified form of constant comparative analysis to identify the literacy practices that corresponded with each stage. The analysis indicates that applications of literacy practices at each …

Best Practices In Researching Service-Learning At Community Colleges, Amanda Taggart, Gloria Crisp

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

In recent years, an increasing number of community colleges have integrated some form of service-learning into their programs or courses with the idea that it will promote civic engagement, increase student satisfaction with their courses and college experience as a whole, and improve learning outcomes. There is a good amount of research published on service-learning programs and outcomes conducted at four-year institutions, though there is a dearth of studies available on service-learning at community colleges. Because community colleges serve a purpose unique from that of four-year colleges and universities, both in their mission and often in the students they serve, …

Funds Of Knowledge And Literacies In Latino/A Youths' Community-Based Engineering Design Work, Amy Wilson-Lopez, Joel Alejandro Mejia, Indhira María Hasbún, Daniel L. Householder, Chris Hailey

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

STEM fields in the US continue to be dominated by people whose cultural backgrounds are White, English-speaking, and middle class (National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council, 2009). Many reasons have been offered to explain this phenomenon: Students’ backgrounds may include worldviews, beliefs, and communicative practices that do not cohere with those practiced in STEM classrooms (Aikenhead & Jegede, 1999; Lee, 1999); instructional materials may present STEM fields as a-cultural, decontextualized practices with no evident connection to students’ lives and communities, such as the routine completion of numerical exercises (O’Halloran, 2005); students’ identities—shaped in part by their desired life …

Actional-Operational Modes In Earth Science And Implications For Fundamental Science Literacy Instruction, Amy Wilson-Lopez

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

Framed in theories of social semiotics, this multiple case study describes and categorizes the actional-operational modes used by three middle school earth science teachers throughout the course of one school year. Data included fieldnotes, photographs, and video recordings of classroom instructions as well as periodic interviews with the teachers. A constant comparative analysis of the data resulted in the creation of a typology of actional-operation modes were identified: gesture, embodied representation, moving objects on flat surfaces, moving objects through three-dimensional space, material representations, and observed phenomena. Multimodal concordance charts were used to identify the affordances and productive constraints of each …

A Typology Of Actional-Operational Modes In Earth Science And Implications For Science Literacy Instruction, Amy Wilson-Lopez

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

Framed in theories of social semiotics, this multiple case study describes and categorizes the actional-operational modes used by three middle school earth science teachers throughout the course of one school year. Data included field notes, photographs, and video-recordings of classroom instruction, as well as periodic interviews with the teachers. A constant comparative analysis of the data resulted in the creation of a typology of actional-operational modes according to how they fulfilled the ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions of communication. Six categories of actional-operational modes were identified: gesture, embodied representation, moving objects on flat surfaces, moving objects through three-dimensional space,material representations, …

Attracting Diverse Students To A Magnet School: Risking Aspirations Or Swallowing One’S Beliefs, Amanda Taggart, Alan R. Shoho

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

This case study focuses on the ethics of advocating for a social justice perspective versus jeopardizing one’s career aspirations. There are numerous subplots to this case involving the start-up of a new magnet school, including its leaders’ concerns for meeting accountability measures and representing racially diverse, limited English proficient, and economically disadvantaged students. Through this case, we illustrate the conflicting choices school leaders may face when trying to balance their own career aspirations with their advocacy of social justice issues for underrepresented groups of students. By using Starratt’s ethical framework along with Strike, Haller, and Soltis’s and Shapiro and Stefkovich’s …

Becoming-Belieber: Girls' Passionate Encounters With Bieber Culture, Kortney Sherbine

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

In this article, I draw on French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1987) notion of becoming to consider the ways in which these encounters with people, materials, and technologies are productive, creating space for Beliebers to come into relationship with one another and with popular culture in ways that are new and that I never could have anticipated during my more carefully organized and school-curriculum-driven interactions with girls during my six years as an elementary school teacher. Through my current research into young girls’ after-school fanaticism, I have been able to come to know girls differently than I knew …

Using Text Structures Of Information Books To Teach Writing In The Primary Grades, Sarah K. Clark, Cindy D'On Jones, D. Ray Reutzel

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

Teaching children in the primary grades the text structures and features used by authors of information text has been shown to improve comprehension of information texts and provide the scaffolding and support these children need in order to write their own information texts. As teachers implement the English Language Arts Common Core State Standards (CCSS), they will need support and training on how to meet these increased curricular demands. In this article, we describe how children’s information books can be used as exemplars of well-structured text models to teach young students how to write selected discourse patterns required in the …

A Study Comparing Virtual Manipulatives With Other Instructional Treatments In Third- And Fourth-Grade Classrooms, P. Moyer-Packenham, J. Baker, A. Westenskow, K. Anderson, Jessica F. Shumway, K. Rodzon, Kerry Jordan, The Virtual Manipulatives Research Group At Utah State University

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

The study reported here examined virtual manipulatives as an instructional treatment in 17 third- and fourth-grade classrooms. Students were randomly assigned to two treatment groups: texts and physical manipulatives (PM), and virtual manipulatives (VM). Results revealed no significant differences in achievement between the treatments. Additional results showed that objective ability predicted fraction achievement; virtual manipulative use can be modulated by test question type (e.g., symbolic vs. pictorial); percentage of class time using representations differed between VM and PM classrooms; and percentage of class time spent using representation types differed, potentially providing differential opportunities to learn.

Synthesizing Multicultural, Global, And Civic Perspectives In The Elementary School Curriculum And Educational Research, Steve P. Camicia, Juanjuan Zhu

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

Social networks and communities are rapidly expanding and changing due to the accelerating pace of globalization. In this article, we examine new possibilities for the reform of curriculum and educational research in a way that is responsive to increasingly multicultural and global communities. Drawing on literatures in the areas of multicultural, global, and civic education, we conducted a critical qualitative case study of four elementary school teachers. The teachers, two in the United States and two in the United Kingdom, are known to be exemplary at synthesizing multicultural, global, and civic education. We, the two authors, one a female from …

Community College Student Success Programs: A Synthesis, Critique, And Research Agenda, Gloria Crisp, Amanda Taggart

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

A narrative review was developed to add to the discussion and dissemination of research on community colleges. The review adds to existing work by synthesizing and critiquing the empirical research to date specific to three of the most prevalent programmatic efforts presently seen on community college campuses: (a) learning communities, (b) student success courses, and (c) supplemental instruction. Empirical investigations or evaluations of student success programs from academic journals, conference presentations, dissertations, unpublished policy reports, and book chapters were identified, summarized, and critiqued. The review concludes with a proposed research agenda to advance research on program effectiveness at community colleges …