Education Commons^™

Currere As A Method For Critical Reflection In The Profession Of Academic Librarianship, Richard A. Stoddart

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Academic librarianship has an intimate association with narratives and stories from their traditional role in curating, caring for, and making collections accessible. Librarians also experience the intricacies and challenges of narrative inquiry through the qualitative research they undertake, oral histories they gather, reflective teaching practices they facilitate, and oral-traditions they interact with. Despite these intersections with reflection and narratives, academic librarianship, and library sciences as a whole, have not fully incorporated their own narratives within their practices. Academic librarianship has the ability but not the spaces to critically reflect in a holistic manner. Shadiow (2013) encourages us all to “recall, …

Grit, Biography, And Dedicated Teachers Who Struggled Academically As Students, Sara Winstead Fry

Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Dedicated teachers who had and overcame academic challenges in their youth offer valuable insights into how to support students who struggle. This article presents a qualitative study of 46 teachers from across the United Stated [sic] who faced academic challenges as elementary, middle, and/or secondary students. Their memories of academic struggles lead them to use teaching practices that are grounded in the professional disposition that all children can learn. The findings suggest a positive interrelationship between a biography (Knowles, 1992) that includes academic struggles, the theoretical constructs of grit (Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, & Kelly, 2007) and self-efficacy (Bandura, 1977), and …

Problems Without Ceilings: How Mentors And Novices Frame And Work On Problems-Of-Practice, Jessica Thompson, Sara Hagenah, Karin Lohwasser, Kat Laxton

Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Support for new forms of teaching expertise with rigorous and equitable outcomes for student learning is a particular challenge when communities of actors working together do not share a similar language or vision of teaching practice. For this project we coordinated activities in and outside of secondary science classrooms for Cooperating Teachers (CTs) and their Pre-Service Teachers (PSTs) to inquire into a set of research-based teaching practices and tools. Using frame analysis we contrast three problems of practice addressed by 23 dyads: problems of developing novice teachers, problems of improving teaching, and problems of improving student learning. The last frame, …

Cultivating A Justice Orientation Toward Citizenship In Preservice Elementary Teachers, Sara W. Fry, Jason O'Brien

Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Teacher educators have an obligation to prepare preservice teachers with the skills and dispositions necessary to promote a socially just world. Yet the results of this study uncovered that the majority of elementary preservice teachers in a national sample (N = 846) have a simplistic perception of good citizenship consistent with what Westheimer and Kahne called a “personally responsible” model of citizenship. Follow-up interviews with 21 participants revealed a problematic trend among 14 participants: inadequate content knowledge and minimal support or even resistance to socially just action. As this trend is antithetical to a democratic government and the very …

Developing Multiplication Fact Fluency, Jonathan Brendefur, S. Strother, K. Thiede, S. Appleton

Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Using specific components of three broad learning theories—cognitive, social-interactional, and behavioral—students in 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th grade classrooms were given multiplication fact fluency instruction over a period of five weeks for 10-15 minutes each day. Two different approaches were utilized with two distinct groups of students for the purpose of comparing different approaches to fluency development. Results indicate that students using a strategy-based approach for fluency development by means of instructional tasks emphasizing social-interactional and cognitive theories (particularly Bruner’s theory of Modes of Representation) increased multiplication fact fluency, with a greater degree of consistency, than students …

Can Teachers Accurately Predict Student Performance?, Keith W. Thiede, Jonathan L. Brendefur, Richard D. Osguthorpe, Michele B. Carney, Amanda Bremner, Sam Strother, Steven Oswalt, Jennifer L. Snow

Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

In two studies, we examined the effect of professional development to improve mathematics instruction on the accuracy of teachers' monitoring of student learning. Study 1 was conducted with 36 teachers participating in three years of professional development. Judgment accuracy was influenced by the fidelity with which what was learned in the professional development. Study 2 was conducted with 64 teachers from 8 schools, which were randomly assigned to receive professional development or serve as a control. Judgment accuracy was greater for teachers receiving professional development than for teachers who did not and teachers were better to predict students' computational skills.

Student Understanding Of Function And Success In Calculus, Daniel I. Drlik

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine if there is a relationship between student success in calculus and student understanding of function. Student understanding of function was measured using two questionnaires, one of which is a modification of an existing measure based on APOS theory. The other I developed with items from the concept image literature. The participants of this study were 116 high school students who were enrolled in a first-year calculus course. The results of the questionnaires were aligned to course exam scores to determine connections between function understanding and rate of success in calculus.

A major …

Recruiting For The Collegiate Marching Band: A Study Of Student Perceptions Of Recruitment And College Choice Factors In Kansas And Missouri, Alan Douglas Whitten

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The marching band is an important and iconic part of the game day atmosphere at athletic events and community functions at colleges and universities throughout the United States. At many institutions, the band is a great source of pride and considerable resources are committed in an effort to have the best band possible. A key component to having the best band possible is having effective recruiting practices.

There is a large body of research on recruiting general student populations and many other sub categories of students, including music majors. However, research regarding recruitment of students that participate in marching band …

The Relationship Between Elementary Teachers' Self-Efficacy For Teaching Mathematics And Their Mathematical Knowledge For Teaching, Meagan Mckinney

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This study examined the relationship between elementary teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT) and their self-efficacy for teaching mathematics. Self-efficacy and MKT are of high importance with implications in regards to quality of instruction and the Common Core State Standards for mathematics. Using the Content Knowledge for Teaching Mathematics (CKT-M) instrument, data for this study were collected from thirty-five elementary school teachers participating in the Improving Teachers’ Monitoring of Learning Grant at the time. The data were concerned with these teachers’ self-efficacy with the pedagogy and content of mathematics using the Self-Efficacy for Teaching Mathematics Instrument (SETMI). Qualitative data were …

“We Do More Than Discuss Good Ideas”: A Close Look At The Development Of Professional Capital In An Elementary Education Liaison Group, Jennifer L. Snow, Susan D. Martin, Sherry Dismuke

Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

In an era when many news media, policy makers, and professionals in the field may consider teacher education "under attack," teacher education programs are being held accountable for increased rigor (Council of Chief of State School Officers, 2012). Teacher educators are in a unique position to examine more closely specific practices and teacher education as a profession to enhance program quality and candidate outcomes. Toward that end, we focused on work within a community of practice (Wenger, 1998) for this inquiry. Faculty who work in elementary school settings at least one day per week, serving as liaisons to partner schools …

Expect The Unexpected When Teaching Probability, Karen Koellner, Mary Pittman, Jonathan L. Brendefur

Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Probability has recently made its way into many textbook series and standards documents (NCTM, 2000; NGA, 2010). When students engage in probability problem solving many unexpected situations can arise due to the counterintuitive nature of probability concepts. These situations can be difficult for students and challenging for teachers to analyse during teaching. Recently, as facilitators of a Mathematics Science Partnership grant workshop on probability, we had the opportunity to engage middle school teachers in professional development workshops as well as in their classrooms. In this article, we discuss a rich probability task used with these teachers along with two scenarios …

A Glimpse Into Secondary Students’ Understanding Of Functions, Jonathan L. Brendefur, Gwyneth Hughes, Robert Ely

Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this article we examine how secondary school students think about functional relationships. More specifically, we examined seven students’ intuitive knowledge in regards to representing two real-world situations with functions. We found students do not tend to represent functional relationships with coordinate graphs even though they are able to do so. Instead, these students tend to represent the physical characteristics of the situation. In addition, we discovered that middleschool students had sophisticated ideas of dependency and covariance. All the students were able to use their models of the situation to generalize and make predictions. These findings suggest that secondary students …

Analysis Of Students’ Proportional Reasoning Strategies, Michele Carney, Ev Smith, Gwyneth Hughes, Jonathan Brendefur, Angela Crawford, Tatia Totorica

Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Proportional reasoning is key to students’ acquisition and application of complex mathematics and science topics. Research is needed regarding how students’ progress towards and come to demonstrate key developmental understandings within proportional reasoning. To this end we created and administered assessment items to 297 middle grades students. We categorized student solution processes qualitatively, followed by Rasch analysis to examine item difficulty and strategy use in relation to an anticipated trajectory. Our findings indicate that different strategies manifest themselves in a hierarchical manner, providing initial confirmation of categories based on strategy efficiency and emphasizing the importance of teacher (and researcher) analysis …

Influences Of Intensive Professional Development In Writing Instruction On Teachers' Dispositions And Self-Efficacy: It's A Matter Of Practice, Sherry Dismuke

Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

After 20 years of nation-wide literacy reforms only one third of America's students perform at or above grade level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment. Policies such as NCLB (2002) that focused on reading achievement have done little to raise scores on this national assessment of students writing progress (National Center for Educational Statistics, 1999, 2011). With 90% of American jobs now requiring higher level literacy skills (Darling-Hammond, Barron, Pearson, & Schoenfeld, 2008), most states have adopted new standards that are designed to ratchet up rigor in order to put American students on a trajectory to …