Digital Commons Network^™

The Effect Of Instructional Coaching On Third-Grade Reading Achievement, Jane Ann Schmidt

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Instructional coaching has been implemented in schools to improve student achievement; however, literature shows a lack of evidence of the efficacy of improving student reading achievement. The problem addressed in this study was that school districts have implemented instructional coaching to improve student reading achievement, but the effectiveness was unknown. The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine the effect of instructional coaching on third-grade reading achievement. Guided by Walberg’s theory of achievement, the overall research question investigated the effect of instructional coaching on third-grade reading achievement. In this quantitative, comparative study, ratio-scale data from students who received instructional …

Elementary Teacher Perceptions Of Blended Learning In The Digital Classroom, Sarah Cummings

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Blended learning is an instructional model in which instruction is delivered using a combination of traditional teaching methods and online learning materials such as digital textbooks, virtual textbooks, and teacher-made videos. The problem was that elementary teachers in local schools were not implementing blended learning as intended by the school’s improvement plan. The purpose of this study was to examine the perspectives of elementary teachers in Grades 3-5 who have experience using blended learning. The framework for the study is the complex adaptive blended learning system (CABLS) because it helps examine the blended learning elements and the changes that result …

Charter School, Kindergarten–6, Homeschool Parents’ Perceptions, Experiences, And Strategies For Mathematics Instruction, Wendy How Fayard

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The research problem for this study was the lack of understanding regarding parents’ perceptions of and experiences with mathematics and instructional strategies for kindergarten through sixth-grade (K–6) students in a charter school, homeschool setting. Dewey’s theory of experience and education was the conceptual framework for the study. In this basic qualitative study, charter school homeschool parents’ perceptions about providing mathematic instruction for K–6 students, experiences with instructing K–6 students in mathematics, and choices and adjustments concerning mathematics teaching strategies were examined. Twelve participants took part in semistructured interviews on the Zoom platform. Their interview responses were analyzed qualitatively using coding …

Reconceptualizing Mathematical Word Problems To Reflect Social Justice Principles And Culturally Relevant Teaching, Michelle Aryam Jackson

Theses and Dissertations

As currently developed and written, mathematical word problems lack cultural relevance for an increasingly culturally diverse population in elementary schools in the United States. The design and context of mathematical word problems promote the norms, values, and beliefs of the dominant culture while potentially negatively influencing students from non-dominant culture engagement and achievement in mathematics.

The purpose of this sequential, explanatory mixed-methods study was threefold: to (a)examine in-service teachers’ preexisting beliefs about the relevance of social justice and culturally relevant teaching related to their mathematics instructional practices before receiving a synchronous online professional development program; (b) assess the impact of …

Teacher Perceptions On The Impact Of Changes In Educational Practices And Student Learning For A Covid-19 Post-Pandemic Classroom: A Mixed Methods Study, Laine Smith

Doctor of Education Dissertations

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted educational practices around the world, changed the instructional interface of the classroom and impacted student learning. The purpose of this research study was to identify teacher perceptions of this change, understand how teachers addressed those changes in the classroom, and determine what teachers saw as the next best steps to address student learning disparities going forward.

A mixed methods approach was used to conduct this research. Participants who completed the survey and/or mini focus groups were teachers in County X during the 2019-2022 school years. A thematic analysis was conducted for each mini focus group, quantitative …

Creating Community Of Young Readers During Covid-19 Lockdown: A Comprehensive Study Of A Digital Reading Platform: Storyweaver, Shaveta Azad, Rupak Chakravarty Prof.

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Reading stories to children when they are young is the most effective way to keep them creatively engaged. Children in multilingual countries require free access to story repositories for leisure reading. In India, a country with hundreds of mother tongues, books are largely published in English and Hindi, owing to market economics. Various studies have shown that learning and reading become more important in one's mother tongue and that when a child reads in two or more languages during early years, gains a deeper understanding of language and its effective use.

In this paper, the researchers have tried to discover; …

Online Speech & Debate: Should We Zoom Into The Future?, Parker E. Hopkins

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This study uses quantitative analysis of survey responses to identify and explain individuals’ motivations for or against online Speech & Debate competition. This study used a 51-question survey to generate multiple variables to explore the issue of online participation from a variety of angles including: financial costs, feelings of community, cultural experiences, sub-community, age, familial status, role in the community, feelings of work/life balance, technology, access, and tournament or season structure. This study found that there are few single determinants for online participation, rather all the factors listed above were motivating factors, for various individuals, for various reasons, and at …

2022-2023 Graduate Catalog, Morehead State University.

Morehead State Catalog Archive

2022-2023 graduate catalog for Morehead State University.

Designing Effective Online Courses: Exploring The Relationships Amongst Online Teaching Self-Efficacy, Professional Development, Online Teaching Experience, And Reported Implementation Of Effective Higher Education Online Course Design Practices, Elizabeth Mcmahon

The Interactive Journal of Global Leadership and Learning

How best to prepare and support higher education faculty to design and teach effective online courses is a topic of great significance to higher education institutional leaders and faculty developers. This study explored how hours of professional development along with online teaching and learning experiences were related to online teaching self-efficacy and the extent to which participants reported implementation of effective online course design practices. Using a non-experimental quantitative correlational explanatory research study design, data were collected using a questionnaire. Participants included 104 online faculty from a large public higher education system located in the upper Midwest that includes both …

Self-Evaluation Of Educational Leadership Practices During Covid-19, Mike Coquyt

The Interactive Journal of Global Leadership and Learning

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, school districts, and specifically, superintendents, are under increased pressure to lead. Irregularity and ambiguity are now the mantras of those tasked with leading in our schools. Many current research studies aim to evaluate the possible effects of COVID-19 on the system of education (Azorín, 2020; Hargreaves & Fullan, 2020), and advice on how to lead during a crisis (Harris & Jones, 2020; Leithwood et al., 2020, Netolicky, 2020). There are no standards or benchmarks to follow that could potentially aid school leaders as they navigate, lead, and make important decisions that affect how quality instruction …

Book Review: Media Education In Latin America, Helen J. Dewaard

Journal of Media Literacy Education

No abstract provided.

Viral Hangouts: The Media Literacy Lifeline I Didn’T Realize I Needed, Scott Spicer

Journal of Media Literacy Education

This article describes my experience as an academic media librarian initially seeking guidance on best support practices for the virtual world from other media literacy educators at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. What I found through the Virtual Viral Hangouts community turned out to be so much more! In addition to sharing tips on media literacy education (my contribution emphasized commercial media resources and student created media projects in virtual contexts), I also developed dear friendships with participants from all walks of life. The one hour a day spent away from my daily work served as a lifeline, …

Connect The Dots, Edward Mcdonough

Journal of Media Literacy Education

During the dawn of the Covid Pandemic our isolation was a depressant. As teachers we were struggling with how to teach, as the popular saying explains, in an environment “that was like building an airplane as we were learning how to fly it.” As a teacher in practice, Virtually Viral Hangouts became my antidepressant. This daily online community of educators gave me the skills to teach more effectively during the pandemic and beyond. The experience taught me how to seek and forge connections with students and cyber colleagues; how to carve out a cyber environment of psychological safety to …

Seeding Change: What Vvh Can Teach Us About Teaching And Learning In Digital Spaces, Michelle Ciccone

Journal of Media Literacy Education

In this essay, I reflect on a central question: “why did I experience something so profoundly different in Virtually Viral Hangouts (VVH) than I was able to help seed in my own district during the COVID-19 crisis?” I identify three key components of the VVH ethos that inspired new ways of thinking, namely: digital technologies free us from constraints to build something different, digital technologies are most effective when we use them to build community, and digital collaboration enables us to tap into the wisdom of the group. As we build better and more humane educational spaces, it is important …

Virtually Viral Hangouts: Reflections On The Role Of Community During Crisis, Lauren G. Mcclanahan

Journal of Media Literacy Education

In this essay, I reflect on two key aspects of my membership in the online community known as Virtually Viral Hangouts (VVH). First, I reflect on how membership in this group helped me professionally, providing important, in-time instruction as I learned to make the switch from in-person to remote learning in the early days of Covid-19. Next, I reflect on how membership in this group helped me personally, as I struggled to find my identity as a teacher through a computer screen. I conclude by reflecting upon what it means to be a member of a community and why such …

The Secret Sauce Of Online Community Of Practice During Covid-19 Pandemic: Nonviolent Communication, Yonty Friesem, Elizaveta Friesem

Journal of Media Literacy Education

The challenges of work-family balance while being asked to move to remote instruction and engage students creatively have affected us all globally on multiple levels - from our professional identity, to our own health, mortality and purpose in life. The idea behind Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is that as Rosenberg (2015/1999) put it, it is a language that celebrates life. Applying these practices in a community building initiative of the Media Education Lab during the COVID-19 pandemic supported our community not only for their professional needs, but also and most importantly in their social and emotional resiliency to keep positive their …

Hope Matters: How An Online Learning Community Advanced Emotional Self-Awareness And Caring During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Renee Hobbs

Journal of Media Literacy Education

For many educators with interests in digital and media literacy, the COVID-19 pandemic was an inadvertent opportunity to explore digital and media literacy through online learning and professional development. This paper describes how a diverse and multidisciplinary group of educators gathered each weekday in a Zoom video conference meeting for fellowship, emotional support, and sharing, building relationships which evolved over time to support emotional growth, technology skill development, learning, and reflection. Survey data shows that program participants had higher levels of optimism and emotional self-awareness as compared with a control group. Participants who had more exposure to the program were …

A Qualitative Study Of Early Adolescents’ Critical Thinking About The Content And Consequences Of Media Violence, Erica Scharrer, Yuxi Zhou

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Research shows that young people are likely to encounter considerable amounts of violence in the media they use. Some of those depictions trivialize the severity of violence. Past studies show that media literacy education can spur critical thinking regarding violent portrayals in media texts. But rarely do prior studies employ qualitative methods to understand how young media audience members reason through the key question of whether media violence is either surprising or concerning. In the current study, an in-school media literacy program is offered to 48 6th graders who provide data in the form of written responses to a number …

Higher Education Students’ Social Media Literacy In Ethiopia: A Case Of Bahir Dar University., Atinafu Behailu

Journal of Media Literacy Education

This study investigates the status of Bahir Dar University students’ social media literacy and how associated factors affect developing core competencies. A combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods have been employed in the study. Both descriptive and inferential statistics of means core, standard deviation, one sample t-test, independent sample t-test, correlation and multiple regressions were used to analyze data gathered from the quantitative design. Data gathered from FGD were analyzed qualitatively. Accordingly, the students’ overall social media level was found to be low. Female students perform slightly lower than their counterpart male students. Among the five skills of social …

A Local Lens On Global Media Literacy: Teaching Media And The Arab World, Katharina Schmoll

Journal of Media Literacy Education

The globalization and transnationalization of media use have facilitated access to voices from the Arab world. Students and teachers in Western higher education can make use of these voices within and outside the classroom to enhance students’ knowledge of the region and challenge Eurocentric imaginations of the ‘Other’. Yet to ensure students engage with these Arab sources in a meaningful way, media literacy is key. Drawing on and challenging a framework of global critical media literacy, this article argues that media literacy is grounded in time and space, meaning an effective teaching of global media literacy skills supposes an awareness …

An Approach To Creative Media Literacy For World Issues, Abduljalil Nasr Hazaea

Journal of Media Literacy Education

This article introduces an approach to creative media literacy for world issues (WIs) such as Covid-19. In so doing, the article integrates four positions on discourse and media as terrible facets of globalization in the context of critical discourse analysis (CDA). The objectivist position deals with WIs as neutral discourse shared among humanity and distributed through English as an international language and educational media. The ideologist position treats creative media literacy as relations of power between global and local identities in the form of competing discourses associated with WIs. The rhetorical position reveals the hidden strategies used in global media …

Seeking Truth About Muslims: Critical Media Literacies In An Era Of Islamophobia, Matthew Deroo

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Across various forms of media, Muslims are often portrayed as a homogenous group prone to violence, yet scholars have increasingly called upon schools and teachers to transcend stereotypes and prepare students to understand Muslims in more thoughtful and nuanced ways. This qualitative case study recounts how students and a teacher in a high school multicultural studies class investigated problematic media materials about Islam sent by an organization called the Christian Seniors Association. Drawing upon Mihailidis’s (2014) 5A’s of Media Literacy heuristic, I analyzed field notes from classroom observations, interviews, and student produced artifacts. Findings revealed how a teacher’s use of …

“Draw The Internet”: A Visual Exploration Of How Children Imagine An Everyday Technology, Luca A. Botturi

Journal of Media Literacy Education

The internet is today a significant part of children’s daily lives, and digital competences have been included as basic learning goals in many school systems worldwide. In order to develop sound and effective early-age internet education programs, information about how children use the internet should be integrated with insights in how they understand it. This study investigates 8-to-10-year-old children’s understanding of the internet through the qualitative analysis of 51 drawings collected in three primary school classes in Switzerland. The results confirm that children’s conceptions of the internet are rich but often inaccurate or uncomplete. The conceptions collected in this study …

Media, Obesity Discourse, And Participatory Politics: Exploring Digital Engagement Among University Students, Tao Papaioannou

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Situated within research on youth, participatory politics, and media framing of obesity, this study examined how undergraduate students in a media literacy course engaged with obesity discourse as a nexus of civic participation. Twenty-nine students enrolled on the course identified frames of obesity in plus-size model Tess Holliday’s Instagram posts surrounding her controversial Cosmopolitan cover in 2018. Analysis of these frames – self-validation, injustice of fat-shaming and stigmatization, influences of Instagram celebrities on fat embodiment, and health stereotypes of obese people – enabled the students to critique activist responses to accepted body norms and moral values facilitating weight bias. In …

Teacher Candidates' Perspectives On Self-Care: Lessons From The Covid-19 Pandemic, Mary S. Thomas, Penny B. Howell

Kentucky Teacher Education Journal: The Journal of the Teacher Education Division of the Kentucky Council for Exceptional Children

How are teacher candidates conceptualizing self-care during the COVID 19 pandemic?

We initiated focused attention on educator self-care for teacher candidates after identifying this content as a missing yet necessary component of trauma-informed teaching (Authors, 2019). In the fall of 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic affecting every element of candidates’ lives including our now remotely-delivered course, we reconsidered how that content needed to fit into the realities of learning to teach during a pandemic. Following these revisions, we explored the research question, how are candidates conceptualizing self-care during the COVID-19 pandemic? We describe findings and provide recommendations and resources for …

A Culturally Responsive Literacy Approach To Develop Scientific Conceptual Knowledge Through Creative Narratives, Alma D. Stevenson, Lacey D. Huffling

Journal of Educational Research and Practice

Our study examined the effects of culturally responsive literacy pedagogical approaches in the development of scientific vocabulary and conceptual knowledge among minoritized middle-grade students during a summer program. We describe the design and implementation of a literacy-enriched STEM instructional unit of study built upon the background experiences of Latina/Latino migrant farmworkers’ children to expand their STEM literacy skills and knowledge. Our aim with this unit was to increase the students’ science knowledge and skills; strengthen their mathematical abilities; enhance their ability to use technology for research; and improve their academic vocabulary, language, and writing skills. This program also had as …

Computational Thinking For Teachers, Susan Imberman

Open Educational Resources

This is a syllabus for a course in computational thinking. The course described introduces preservice and inservice teachers to the fundamental concepts of computer science, including web design, coding, ethics, computational thinking, course resources, etc.

Research On The Effect Of Using Online Interactive Learning Resources On The Learning Outcomes Of Chinese L2 Adult Learners In An Intermediate Class, Qiao Yu Cai

Chinese Language Teaching Methodology and Technology

As digital technology improves each passing day, knowledge transmission and learning methods are changing too. Gone are the days of using pen and paper as the main means for teaching and learning, and it is common to teach a target language using online learning resources, especially during the breakout of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (CTML) and whole-brain learning, using online learning resources assisted instruction can produce better learning outcomes, so it is appropriate for teachers of teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages (TCSOL) to use such resources. However, one question remains to …

Cyclical And Intentional Activity Selection In Inquiry-Based Learning Improved By 5e Learning, Mitchell Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Projects

The researcher investigated the attitudes toward inquiry-based learning and grades of students in middle school science as well as the significance of rubric based classroom discussion. The literature showed the researcher inquiry-based learning has been shown to increase engagement and understanding. The literature also showed classroom discussions were made more meaningful by implementation of expectations and a rubric. The researcher provided evidence of a significant improvement of classroom discussion, attitudes toward inquiry-based learning, and grades due to implementation of the actions taken by the researcher. The researcher used Kristine Bruss’s discussion rubric and expectations. The researcher also used Paul Anderson’s …

Improving Fluency Rates Through Repeated Reading, Sara Van Erp

Dissertations, Theses, and Projects

Learning how to read fluently was a goal the researcher had which led to the research question; How does the intervention of repeated reading impact oral reading fluency rates in students who are reading below a 2^nd grade level? The purpose of the action research was to implement the intervention of repeating reading to see if the oral reading fluency rates in struggling students increased. Struggling readers were identified through the Dynamic Indicators Of Basic Early Literacy Skills assessment (DIBELS). Struggling readers were considered to be reading below 52 words per minute, which was the 2^nd grade benchmark …