Education Commons^™

Elements: Elementary Teachers Of Science – Building Collaborations Between Content And Pedagogy Communities, Krista Adams, Jenny Melander

DBER Speaker Series

The current UNL elementary teaching program does not include a science methods practicum in which pre‐service elementary teachers could observe and teach reformed based science lessons in the classroom setting. The science methods course was modified during Spring 2013 to address this missing component. The exploratory course engages pre‐service teachers in designing and implementing a science unit (a series of lessons) to be taught as a science club in an after school program for K – 5th grade students. In Fall 2013, the course experiences expanded to include collaborating with biomedical engineering students in connecting real‐world applications to teaching science. …

Educating Highly‐Qualified Science Teachers, Elizabeth Lewis, Aaron A. Musson, Jia Lu

DBER Speaker Series

Understanding what makes a highly‐qualified science teacher requires careful research on teacher education programs. Existing research pertaining to secondary science preservice teachers (PSTs) is limited in the areas of: (a) mastery of subject matter knowledge; (b) evolving teaching selfefficacy, and (c) inquiry‐based enacted curricular practices. We studied each issue over the course of an intensive, 14‐month, graduate teacher certification program for practicing scientists and recent science graduates. First, we asked if there was a relationship between amount of content area undergraduate coursework and performance (GPA in core content courses) and found an expected, yet preliminary, connection between higher undergraduate GPA …

Insects As Educational Tools: An Online Course Teaching The Use Of Insects As Instructional Tools, Douglas A. Golick, Tiffany M. Heng-Moss

Department of Entomology: Faculty Publications

Publication of the 1996 National Science Education Standards (NSES) initiated a push to transform science education by engaging K-12 students in active learning through inquiry-based teaching (National Research Council, 1996). Students need opportunities to construct knowledge by asking questions, developing hypotheses, collecting and analyzing data, and interpreting and communicating results. Inquiry teaching has been shown to improve students’ attitudes toward science, enhance their performance, and promote scientific literacy (Haury, 1993; Lindberg, 1990: Mattheis and Nakayama, 1988; Rakow, 1986).

Providing both pre- and in-service teachers with courses and professional development programs that promote inquiry teaching are vital to teacher education (National …

Question Order Effects On A General Chemistry Concept Inventory, Travis Lund

DBER Speaker Series

During the development of a general chemistry concept survey, interviews demonstrated that students used distinctly different problem‐solving strategies to answer two survey questions, one verbally‐based and one pictorially‐based, despite the fact that the questions were both designed to test the same concept of strong versus weak acids. Alternate versions of the concept survey were administered, with the order of the pictorial and verbal questions reversed. A significant ordering effect was observed in the questions of interest, and the incorrect answer choices that became better or worse distractors were identified. Current findings, future directions, and practical implications for instructors and researchers …

Journal Of The National Collegiate Honors Council, Volume 14, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2013 (Complete Issue)

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Forum on Admissions and Retention in Honors

Forum Articles

Jerry Herron

Sean K. Kelly

Michael K. Cundall, Jr.

Scott Carnicom

Annmarie Guzy

Jeffrey A. Portnoy

Research Essays

Patricia Joanne Smith and John Thomas Vitus Zagurski

Robert R. Keller and Michael G. Lacy

Lynne Goodstein and Patricia Szarek

Timothy J. Nichols and Kuo-Liang “Matt” Chang

Emily Stark

Creating Interdisciplinary Collaborations To Support And Understand Mathematics Teaching And Learning, Ruth Heaton, Wendy M. Smith, Traci Kutaka

DBER Speaker Series

Teaching mathematics is a complex endeavor and requires a deep understanding of content and pedagogy. Helping teachers learn what they need to know requires the expertise of disciplinary area faculty as well as those with pedagogical expertise. Similarly, understanding the learning of teachers or their students requires complex analyses of messy data by teams of researchers representing differing but complementary perspectives. Cases describing the nature and process of interdisciplinary teaching and research collaborations in mathematics education will be presented and analyzed for lessons learned.

Temperament In Early Childhood And Peer Interactions In Third Grade: The Role Of Teacher–Child Relationships In Early Elementary Grades, Kathleen Moritz Rudasill, Kate Niehaus, Eric S. Buhs, Jamie M. White

Department of Educational Psychology: Faculty Publications

Children’s interactions with peers in early childhood have been consistently linked to their academic and social outcomes. Although both child and classroom characteristics have been implicated as contributors to children’s success, there has been scant research linking child temperament, teacher–child relationship quality, and peer interactions in the same study. The purpose of this study is to examine children’s early temperament, rated at preschool age, as a predictor of interactions with peers (i.e., aggression, relational aggression, victimization, and prosociality) in third grade while considering teacher–child relationship quality in kindergarten through second grades as a moderator and mediator of this association. The …

Process Drama: A Medium For Creating A Hospitable Space For Learning Through Reverent Listening, Kim Anne Anthony

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis explores how Process Drama, as pedagogy, can invite into educational discourse a conversation about the roles of hospitality and reverence in the classroom through reverent listening to self, others and context. It can become a medium for holistic learning in the drama classroom and in learning situations of all kinds. Process Drama, as an enactment of reverent listening, creates a space for theater to facilitate the engagement of all participants, creating a learningful experience that can transcend barriers of race and social economic status brought by the invited and uninvited learner. Reverent listening and hospitality become the catalyst …

Culturally Proficient Teachers, Lori R. Piowlski

Department of Educational Administration: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Action needs to be taken by teacher preparation programs to prepare culturally proficient educators who are able to deliver equitable instruction and inspire all students to strive for greatness if the achievement gap is to be closed. Existing literature mainly describes the importance and urgency to prepare future teachers for the changing demographics with classrooms across the United States. There is not significant literature on how it is being done. Therefore the purpose of this qualitative study was to discover how university teacher education programs are preparing teachers to be culturally proficient. A cross-reference of data collected from Adequate Yearly …

A Distance Education Classroom Designed To Facilitate Synchronous Learner And Instructor Interactions, Stuart P. Bernstein

Department of Educational Administration: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The purpose of this study was to determine whether a live, synchronous distance delivery technology would facilitate interaction, immediacy, and presence between an instructor and his contiguous and remote classrooms, and whether it would facilitate interaction between the two groups of students. This study researched the opinions of students on whether they felt the platform facilitated interaction between the two groups of learners, both groups of learners and the instructor, and both groups of learners and the content.

This research followed the development and testing of a synchronous delivery platform that would replicate a traditional, interactive, classroom in a remote …

Journal Of The National Collegiate Honors Council, Volume 14, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2013 (Complete Issue)

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Forum on “Nontraditional Honors Students”

Forum Articles

Janice Rye Kinghorn and Whitney Womack Smith

Nancy Reichert

Angela M. Salas

Mimi Killinger, Rachel Binder-Hathaway, Paige Mitchell, and Emily Patrick

Kimberly Aramburo and Suketu Bhavsar

2012 NCHC Portz Scholar’s Essay

Jeffrey Cisneros

Research Essays

Melissa L. Johnson

John S. MacLean and Brian J. White

Theory Guided Professional Development In Early Childhood Science Education, Soo-Young Hong, Julia C. Torquati, Victoria J. Molfese

Nebraska Center for Research on Children, Youth, Families, and Schools: Faculty Publications

The importance of early and developmentally appropriate science education is increasingly recognized. Consequently, creation of common guidelines and standards in early childhood science education has begun (National Research Council (NRC), 2012), and researchers, practitioners, and policy makers have shown great interest in aligning professional development with the new guidelines and standard. There are some important issues that need to be addressed in order to successfully implement guidelines and make progress toward accomplishing standards. Early childhood teachers have expressed a lack of confidence in teaching science and nature (Torquati, Cutler, Gilkerson, & Sarver, in press) and have limited science and pedagogical …

Using A Cohort Approach To Convert Edd Students Into Critical Friends, Edmund T. Hamann, Susan Wunder

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Exploring the role of critical collegiality and a cohort approach to doctoral education, this chapter considers the higher education design issues that have supported education doctorate candidates' pursuit of learning and degrees buoyed by the support—emotional, logistic, and content-based—of their graduate student colleagues.

A steadfast but not previously examined feature of our department’s six-year (and counting) experience with a Carnegie Project for the Education Doctorate (CPED)-influenced Doctor of Education (EdD) program is the successful implementation of a cohort model and, in turn, the utilization of practitioners’ sense of belonging and familiarity to become each other’s Critical Friends. Looking across the …

Fostering Climate Change Education In The Central Great Plains: A Public Engagement Approach, Lisa M. Pytlikzillig, Timonthy Steffensmeier, Amber Campbell Hibbs, Ben Champion, Eric Hunt, John Harrington Jr, Jacqueline D. Spears, Natalie Umphlett, Tarik Abdel-Monem, Roger Bruning, Daniel W. Kahl

University of Nebraska Public Policy Center: Publications

Despite its increasing importance for sustainability, building widespread competency in the basic principles of climate literacy among the United States general public is a great challenge. This article describes the methods and results of a public engagement approach to planning climate change education in the Central Great Plains of the United States. Our approach incorporated contextual and lay expertise approaches to public engagement with a focus on supporting the self-determination of the specific stakeholder groups–rural producers, educators, and community members. An integration of results from the focus groups reveal that our approach was received positively and elicited a number of …