Education Commons^™

The Impacts, Implementation, And Sustainability Of Service Learning In The Classroom, Amber Gerrits

Honors Projects

This honors senior project focuses on service-learning in the classroom. Specifically, it uncovers the benefits, harms, and common potential challenges that service learning educators face when implementing community engagement activities in their schools and classrooms. The three areas surrounding this pedagogy research were: (1) impacts of the practice, (2) logistical implementation in the classroom of such projects, and (3) a look into how to suitably sustain this type of involvement for students in a post K-12 education setting.

To ascertain the answers about the impacts of service-learning, literature was compiled into a review, which unpacked terminology and answered the big …

Teaching The Civil War With An Interdisciplinary Approach, Megan Riehle

Honors Projects

When creating a unit for middle school students in Social Studies, getting students to do more than memorize facts and dates is always my number one goal. Students need more than memorization of facts to fully grasp and have a handle on historical content that is vastly multifaceted. The Ohio standards have deemed eighth grade as the point when students intensely study the Civil War. However, how teachers instruct students on the Civil War is entirely up to them. There is an immeasurable amount of ways to go about teaching such a heavy and difficult topic; however, I chose to …

Impact Of Literacy On Student Readiness In Math And Science Classroom, Mackenzie Alexandra Rittner

Honors Projects

Lack of literacy, specifically disciplinary literacy, is an epidemic in education today. Here, I will illustrate how this problem presents itself in our student’s reading every day in every class. Within a literature review, many accounts are detailed about the impact literacy has on a student’s educational career. From the outset, literacy is a key factor in a student’s success in school. A research study was conducted that asked students to give varied definitions of the word ‘volume’ based on prior experience. These results showed that direct instruction in how a word can change based on its context had an …

Inquiry-Based Learning: Effects On Student Engagement, Kimberly Wheatley

Honors Projects

Inquiry-based learning is an approach to science instruction that has been around for over 40 years and has many positive aspects, including: critical thinking, student achievement, positive attitudes towards science, and student engagement. Inquiry-based learning has four different levels and is an instructional method that provides a problem or question which allows students to complete an investigation. This action research project will explore how inquiry-based learning affects student engagement and how student’s feel about inquiry. Students were taught with two days of traditional instruction, two days inquiry-based instruction, and then given a pre-survey and post-survey, and observed using an engagement …

Action Research: Alternative Assessments In Middle School Science Classrooms, Emily Knollman

Honors Projects

The purpose of this study is to see how alternative testing can alter students’ test anxiety levels. A survey will be given to the students before a written assessment, measuring the students’ text anxiety level before a standard test. Then the students will be given multiple options for an assessment of their understanding of the content, rather than a written test. A second survey will be given to the students to measure the students’ anxiety levels before turning in their alternate assessment. The two surveys will be compared to see if providing alternate ways to measure understanding rather than a …