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Full-Text Articles in Education

Implementing The Caspie Coursebased Research Experience At The United States Military Academy: Affective Responses And Effects On Critical Thinking, Anthony Michael Chase Oct 2014

Implementing The Caspie Coursebased Research Experience At The United States Military Academy: Affective Responses And Effects On Critical Thinking, Anthony Michael Chase

Open Access Theses

The Center for Authentic Science Practices in Education (CASPiE) pioneered a course-based research experience approach to teaching chemistry laboratory courses. The method had previously been studied in a variety of institutional settings. Recently, the United States Military Academy at West Point decided to develop CASPiE-style modules for the introductory honors chemistry course. This research setting presents clean experimental-control comparisons and a group of faculty who were completely new to the method. Equipping students with authentic research experiences early in their education is important regardless of the institution. However, cadets at a military academy must make decisions relatively early (the outset …


Student's Objectives And Achievement Strategies For Laborataory Work, Taylor M. Owings Jul 2014

Student's Objectives And Achievement Strategies For Laborataory Work, Taylor M. Owings

Open Access Theses

In this study, we look at students' objectives and strategies for completing their objectives for undergraduate labs. Students across two universities and three levels of chemistry were surveyed at the beginning of the semester in the fall of 2012 using an open ended survey to identify the goals students had for the course. The students responses were coded and used to create a survey that went out to the same courses at the end of the fall semester. Using data from the fall of 2012, the survey was modified and data was collected in the fall of 2013 at one …


Effective Geoscience Pedagogy At The Undergraduate Level, Kelsey Warden Jul 2014

Effective Geoscience Pedagogy At The Undergraduate Level, Kelsey Warden

Open Access Theses

This investigation used constructivist pedagogical methods within the framework of an introductory level undergraduate geoscience course to gauge both the changes in attitude and cognition of students. Pedagogy was modified in the laboratory setting, but maintained in the lecture setting and homework. Curriculum was also maintained in the lecture, but was changed in the laboratory to emphasize the large concepts and systems stressed in Earth Science Literacy Principles. Student understanding of these concepts and systems was strengthened by factual knowledge, but recall and memorization were not the goal of the laboratory instruction. The overall goal of the study was to …


A Web-Based Online Collaboration Platform For Formulating Engineering Design Projects, Sainath Varikuti Jul 2014

A Web-Based Online Collaboration Platform For Formulating Engineering Design Projects, Sainath Varikuti

Open Access Theses

Effective communication and collaboration among students, faculty and industrial sponsors play a vital role while formulating and solving engineering design projects. With the advent in the web technology, online platforms and systems have been proposed to facilitate interactions and collaboration among different stakeholders in the context of senior design projects. However, there are noticeable gaps in the literature with respect to understanding the effects of online collaboration platforms for formulating engineering design projects. Most of the existing literature is focused on exploring the utility of online platforms on activities after the problem is defined and teams are formed. Also, there …


The Impact Of User Centered Design On Student Motivation, Craig T. Locker Jul 2014

The Impact Of User Centered Design On Student Motivation, Craig T. Locker

Open Access Theses

There is a current push for STEM education within the U.S.; however current studies show that students' interest to pursue STEM fields is decreasing as they progress through high school. This lose in interest has shown to have a strong tie to students' perceived levels of motivation towards the subject. The question that this studied set out to answer was if user centered design (UCD) would affect students perceived level of motivation. For this study a treatment of UCD was compared to a traditional high school engineering design curriculum, with the goal to identify if UCD would have a positive …


The Influence Of An Advanced Agriculture & Life Science Course On Students' Views Of The Nature Of Science, Megan N. Anderson Apr 2014

The Influence Of An Advanced Agriculture & Life Science Course On Students' Views Of The Nature Of Science, Megan N. Anderson

Open Access Theses

One of the goals in today's society is to ensure that students exiting school have the ability to understand, develop, and comprehend scientific information. For students to be able to meet these goals, it is imperative that they become scientifically literate and understand the concept of the Nature of Science (NOS). The discipline of Agricultural Education has strong connections with science and today many students are earning science credit and developing science understanding through Agricultural Education courses. If students are continuing to gain science mastery through their Agricultural Education courses, they should also be gaining adequate conceptions of science and …


Eliciting And Characterizing Students’ Mental Models Within The Context Of Engineering Design, Chelsey Ann Dankenbring Apr 2014

Eliciting And Characterizing Students’ Mental Models Within The Context Of Engineering Design, Chelsey Ann Dankenbring

Open Access Theses

Recently, science education reform documents have called for the incorporation of engineering principles and practices into the K-12 science standards and curriculum. One way this has been done is through the use of engineering design tasks as a way for students to apply their scientific understandings to real-world problems. However, minimal studies have documented students' conceptions within the context of engineering design. Thus, the first chapter of this thesis outlines the steps taken to develop a draw-and-explain item that elicited students' mental models regarding the cause of the four seasons after finishing an engineering design task. Students' mental models regarding …