Education Commons^™

Using Art To Promote Peace In The Lives Of Elementary Aged Students, Megan Mcdonald

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Guernica was Pablo Picasso’s most controversial piece, created as a political statement to show the devastation of war in Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. It is the inspiration for the Kid’s Guernica Peace Mural Project, developed as a way for adolescents to visually express their ideas of peace as a global goal. With the completion of a peace workshop and a 3.5m × 7.8m moveable mural, Kentucky is now a participant in the project. The mural illustrates the creative collaboration of sixty fifth grade students, a local artist and myself. It will travel throughout the state of Kentucky during …

"An Easy Switch": A Descriptive Case Study Exploring The Shift Toward Informational Text Accompanying The Implementation Of Common Core State Standards In Five Primary Classrooms, Heather Denise Kindall

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this descriptive case study was to discover how the newly implemented Common Core State Standards (CCSS) may have changed teachers' practices and philosophies regarding literacy instruction and to determine which teaching strategies were being presented in regard to informational text in the studied Kindergarten through second grade classrooms.

The research was conducted in five classrooms within one elementary school in the mid-Southern United States. The study design involved semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and teacher-reported lesson plans over a fourteen week data collection period. The aim of this research was to portray a vivid description of the implementation …

The Effectiveness Of Manipulatives In The Elementary School Classroom, Holly A. Berkseth

Honors College Theses

What are the best teaching strategies? How can educators help children learn most effectively? Are there strategies that can be used to teach children in meaningful and engaging ways while still keeping up with state standards? Questions like these have been raised by parents and educators for many years and are widely discussed and debated topics in the educational realm. The following paper attempts to answer these questions by investigating the effectiveness of elementary school classroom manipulatives. It outlines a research study that was conducted by Holly Berkseth, an undergraduate student from the College of Education at Wayne State University. …

The Effects Of Summer Reading Programs On The Academic Achievement Of Elementary Students, Renee Deshommes

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Children with weakened academic skills face the possibility of having less access to higher education, or advanced career opportunities later in life. Such disadvantages, if not addressed, may result in a series of diminished opportunities that may affect a child's overall quality of life. Several educational experts suggest that the negative effects of the academic achievement gap are cumulative, and many educational experts also believe that the achievement gap between high and low socioeconomic students continues to be a persistent problem for which few solutions have materialized. The potential for summer reading programs to be implemented as a mechanism to …