Education Commons^™

How Environmental Education Based Camps Can Create An Inclusive Opportunity To Ensure Children With Autism Have A Positive And Meaningful Experience, Emma Leslie

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

In a world that is becoming increasingly disconnected, environmental education has the ability to reach diverse audiences and create an environmentally literate community capable of making decisions that support sustainable practices. Diversity implies inclusion of all individuals, including those with autism. Autism is one of the most prevalent developmental learning disabilities in the United States and those with the neurobiological disorder experience challenges in areas such as social reasoning, language, cognition, sensory sensitivities and emotional regulation. Environmental education often occurs in informal learning environments, including day camp programs. While day camps provide the ideal setting for addressing deficits in peer …

Using Self-Regulated Strategy Development To Teach Middle School Writing, Julia Breen

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

Being able to write well is a skill critical to students’ success in higher education. Yet standardized test scores reveal that many students are moving into high school and college without these writing skills. Writing is a complex task; in addition to content knowledge, students must use self-regulation skills (including staying focused on the task, working through frustrations) to see success. This capstone project sought to answer the question: How can the teaching of self-regulated skills be integrated into lessons focused on developing the expository writing of middle school students? The result is a series of lesson plans that seek …

The Special Education Referral And Evaluation Process For English Language Learners, Celeste Norlander

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

Research shows that there is a disproportionate number of English Language Learners (ELLs) in special education. The over and under representation of this population in special education can be linked back to issues within the referral and evaluation process. This project looks to answer the question: What accommodations need to be made to the special education process to ensure that English Language Learners are appropriately referred and evaluated? This project resulted

in a flowchart for each step in the special education referral and evaluation process. Research- based practices are presented for each step of the process. The flowchart was created …

Do You Have A Learning Disability?: Exploring The Experiences Of Hmong Students With Special Needs In A Public Hmong Charter School, Vang Xiong

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Theses and Dissertations

Special education has been criticized for the practice of over-representing culturally and linguistically diverse students in special education programs. Asian American students appeared to be immune to this problem. However, when the demographics of the Asian racial group are disaggregated into individual Asian ethnic groups, there is evident of disproportionality. The purpose of the study was to explore how a charter school, serving predominantly Hmong students, addresses the issue of disproportionality pertaining to the Hmong population. Through an ethnographic research approach, the researcher engaged in participant-observation, interviewing three tenth-grade, Hmong male students, and five school staff members. The researcher found …

The Relationship Between The Development Of Math Operation Proficiency And Student Confidence, Douglas Elfstrom

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Theses and Dissertations

The research question of this study was, What is the relationship between math operation fluency and a student’s confidence and perception of math in general? A multi-faceted intervention was developed to address both students’ multiplication fact proficiency and student confidence, with middle school students in Special Education. Pre and post assessment data was analyzed to determine the effect of this intervention on student fact proficiency and confidence. Findings suggest that students that progressed throughout the intervention period by mastering multiplication fact families also generally had an increase in math confidence. Implications for future work include determining how to improve this …

Critical Literacy And Engagement In Special Education, Sara Nelson

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

This Capstone addresses the research question, what is the effect of critical literacy practices on engagement in secondary special education classrooms? Motivated by a desire to provide secondary special educators with tools to meet diverse learner needs in innovative, engaging and challenging ways, the author chronicles the key experiences that led to the topic choice and reviews the literature related to the research question. Additionally, the document includes an overview of educator professional development methodology and an outline for the design of the final Capstone project. The project derived from this research includes a year-long professional development plan for secondary …

Text Sets For Social Justice, Jessica Buck

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

Secondary students diagnosed as having an Emotional/Behavioral Disorder (EBD) are at an increased risk of performing below grade level in reading. The author explored the question of: How can EBD middle school students use social justice themes to develop critical literacy skills? Texts with social justice themes can increase engagement and motivation in reading, which may lead to an increased development of critical literacy skills. This capstone addressed the need, as revealed in the literature review, that secondary EBD classrooms have to be afforded opportunities to engage with multi-modal texts that reflect diverse and multiple perspectives, as well as explore …