Education Commons^™

Grading That Takes Into Account The Need To Learn From Mistakes, Francisco Zapata, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

It is well known that the best way to learn the new material is to try it, to make mistakes, and to learn from these mistakes. However, the current grading scheme, in which the overall grade is a weighted average of the grades for all the assignments, exams, etc., does not encourage mistakes: any mistake decreases the grade on the corresponding assignment and thus, decreases the overall grade for the class. It is therefore desirable to modify the usual grading scheme, so that it will take into account -- and encourage -- learning by mistakes. Such a modification is proposed …

Were High-Poverty Districts In Texas Disproportionally Impacted By State Funding Cuts? School Finance Equity In Texas Following The Great Recession, David S. Knight

Policy Briefs

While almost all states cut education funding following the Great Recession, and few have restored budgets back to pre-recession levels, there is little understanding among policy makers about how state funding cuts were distributed across districts.

When Texas cut K-12 education budgets by $4 billion in 2011, legislators reached a compromise over whether to cut funding evenly for all districts, or whether to protect high-need districts. This policy brief shows that despite state legislators’ efforts, the highest-poverty districts in Texas experienced a disproportionate share of the recessionary budget cuts. Although this trend holds nationally, the funding gap between rich and …

Cost-Effectiveness Of Early Childhood Interventions To Enhance Head Start: Evidence From A Randomized Experiment, David S. Knight, Susan H. Landry, Tricia Zucker, Jeffrey M. Williams, Emily C. Merz, Heather B. Taylor

Working Papers

We evaluated the cost-effectiveness of instructional coaching and parent coaching models in Head Start using a randomized trial. The study design allowed us to compare the individual effects of each coaching model as well as their combined effect on student outcomes. Teachers receiving instructional coaching improved their use of language and literacy instructional practices, while parents receiving family coaching showed increases in numerous responsive parenting behaviors associated with positive child outcomes. Instructional coaching was more cost-effective than parent coaching in promoting these evidence-based practices. However, only the parent coaching model showed significant impacts on student outcomes. Parent coaching alone with …

How To Make Testing And Grading Non-Confrontational: Towards Applying Loving Kindness To Testing And Grading, Francisco Zapata, Olga Kosheleva

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Students and teachers have a common goal: that the students successfully learn all the required material. At first glance, the existence of a common goal should result in a conflict-free environment. However, in practice, the current education process has become very confrontational, especially during testing and grading: students come up with more and more sophisticated ways of cheating, while instructors use more and more complex tools to detect this cheating. Do we need to continue this arms race? Would it not be better to use the ideas of loving kindness and come up with a conflict-free teaching environment? In this …

A Mixed Methods Investigation Of The Faculty Teaching Role: Values, Intention, And Practice, Robin Dankovich

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This research is a mixed methods investigation of the faculty teaching role through the exploration of values, intentions and practice of college professors. To compliment the research questions the literature review explores the forces shaping the professoriate over time, contemporary context of higher education, values, and conceptions of teaching. To frame the discussion Argyris and Schön’s (1974) theory of espoused values and values in use is coupled with the codification of human strengths offered by positive psychology.

The results of the study indicate that all faculty espoused values focused on love of learning, honesty, fairness and judgement. Those interviewed provided …

Educational Use Of Social Media: Exploring Science And Engineering College Students' Perceptions About Utilizing Facebook To Enhance The Learning Of Physics, Angel Salvador Marquez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The aim of this qualitative investigation is to explore a group of science and engineering students' perceptions about utilizing Facebook to enhance the learning of physics. Particularly, a survey composed of multiple choice and open-ended questions was employed as to obtain participantsâ?? reactions on a proposed scenario where Facebook is utilized in an Introductory Classical Mechanics course as the medium to manage the following academic activities throughout the semester: examinations, class preparations, study guides, homework assignments, lab preparations, creating group studies, and class participation dynamics. Out of the 120 potential candidates, 106 of them accepted to voluntarily participate in this …

Secondary Mathematics Teachers' Disposition Toward Challenge And Its Impact On Teaching Practice, Yirah Mariana Valverde

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This two phase, sequential exploratory study focused on mathematics teachers' disposition toward challenge and its impact in their teaching practice and students' performance. This heavily qualitative study employed a mixed methodology to answer the following guiding research question: how do teachersâ?? disposition towards challenge affect teaching practice and what is the nature of that relationship?

During the initial phase (quantitative), two teachers who were enrolled in a graduate mathematics at a University in the southwestern U.S. were selected for the study (N=5). The goal of the class was to increase the participants' mathematical knowledge for teaching. The purposive selection was …

Are High-Poverty School Districts Disproportionately Impacted By State Funding Cuts? School Finance Equity Following The Great Recession, David S. Knight

Working Papers

The Great Recession caused states around the country to make substantial budget cuts to public education. As a result, districts that rely more heavily on state funding – those with greater concentrations of students in poverty – may be disproportionately impacted by the Great Recession funding cuts; however, little prior research examines this issue. This study examines how state school finance systems responded to recessionary funding cuts on average nationally. The study then draws on state specific data to examine local district taxation patterns in response to state spending cuts. The study finds that (a) on average across states, high-poverty …

College And Career Readiness:Texas House Bill 5 Reform Realities In A Far-West Texas School District, Tomas Sigala

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Efforts by the 83rd Texas Legislature (2013), along with decades of state legislative measures to address access and equity for Texas school children, helped create House Bill 5 (HB 5). This policy stipulates that public schools need to more accurately reflect a college and career readiness culture through the expansion of curriculum options for students, the reduction of standardized testing, and the enhancement of school accountability (Texas Education Agency, 2014a). These type of outputs provide the structure and guidance that schools need to streamline a successful student pathway aimed at preparing them for a college and career choice. If students …

Collegiality Among Full-Time Professors In A Mexican University: Perceptions And Challenges, Carlos Alberto Castañon

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Currently, institutions of higher education in Mexico have some changes in their educational and institutional policies on training and updating of the professorate. In this context, reforms of higher education, academics have had to adapt to new forms of academic work in both ways individually and collectively. Today it is possible to identify the diversity of functions that have Mexican academics to achieve a quality education. However, today, collegial work among professors has not been solved efficiently in universities of Mexico. The current study addresses the collegiality among full-time professors in a higher education institution in Northern Mexico. The purpose …

Am I Another Statistic?: A Phenomenological Study Of Border Region At-Risk Latina/O Youth, Virginia Martinez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

As diversity continues to increase in the United States, schools are facing an enormous challenge of educating youth to function effectively in our democracy. With the growing Latina/o population, it is essential that schools accommodate to the needs of what will be the largest ethnic or race minority. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to analyze and study past at-risk students' unique predicament and determine two factors of failure; encouragement by failure and discouragement by failure. The study focused on understanding the role of failure as a main contributor in the decision making of Latina/o at-risk students dropping …

Computer Technology Implementation In A Mexican Elementary School, Griselda Terrazas

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this Thesis is to identify and understand how Computer Technology can be used to strengthen the quality of primary education in Mexico and to explore the influence of CT on students' motivation and success. The study will be focused primarily on the teachers' knowledge, their skill levels in using computers, and in the teachers' interest in integrating CT into the students' curriculum.

The Effect Of A Fluent Signing Narrator On Quality Of Maternal Behavior During E-Book Shared Reading Interactions With Their Children With Hearing Loss, Mar Alejandra Bonilla Yáñez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Purpose: The average high school student with hearing loss graduates reading at a 4th grade level. A factor that may contribute to the literacy development in children with typical hearing is language modeling and support surrounding shared book reading. The shared book reading experiences of children with hearing loss (CHL) and their parents may be different in quantity and quality from their peers with typical hearing. There is evidence reporting parental frustration and feeling of incompetence when reading to their CHL due to a sensory mismatch between the childâ??s and the parentâ??s mode of communication and skills. This study investigated …

Teacher's Sense Of Self Efficacy And Grit And Its Relationship To Student Achievement, Dino M. Coronado

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Darling-Hammond (2006) stated that "one of the most damaging myths prevailing in American education is the notion that good teachers are born and not made" (p. xi). On the other hand, if there is a need to improve the education system in the United States, there must be a conscientious effort to identify, recruit, select, and develop quality people to become teachers-there needs to be an emphasis on "quality people."

The purpose of this quantitative study is to determine the relationship between a high school teacher's grit and sense of self-efficacy and the Houston Independent School District's teacher's Educator Value-Added …

Política Educativa Y Cambio Institucional En México: Un Estudio Interpretativo De Una Iniciativa De Reforma En La Educación Superior, Maria Teresa Esquivel

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This interpretive qualitative study examines the links between education reform in higher education and institutional practices. In particular, it analyzes the Program for Faculty Development (PRODEP) formerly known as the Professorate Improvement Program (PROMEP), contextualizing it within the entire reform process, as it was implemented at a public university in northern Mexico. The study provides information on changes of the administrative functions that the institutional managers found themselves to be forced to make, due to new regulations enforced by federal educational institutions. Moreover it also describes from the perspective of institutional administrators and professors, the interpretation and practice translated into …

Environmental Dynamics: A Compendium Of Rhetorical Application, Annalisa Perez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Technology, albeit exceedingly useful, has exponentially exacerbated the communications dilemma between the technical and the non-technical. Additionally, based on a current new understanding of the term environmental, it can no longer be fully defined by terms such as air, water, waste, or purification. Rather, the meaning of environmental has been globally transformed in several ways. The term environmental is encompassing an expansion of understanding and is further defined with words such as essence, perception, rapport and multi-dimensional spaces. This work, Environmental Dynamics: A Compendium of Rhetorical Application (EDC), provides a framework where communication can be enhanced in areas where communication …

Information Entropy Measures Applied To Hierarchial Complex Technical And Socio-Technical Systems, Satya Aditya Akundi

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A significant increase of Systems-of-Systems (SoS) is currently observed in the social and technical domains. With increasing constituent components, Systems of Systems are becoming larger and more complex. Recent research efforts have highlighted the importance of identifying innovative statistical approaches for analyzing complex systems to better understand how they work. This research is aimed towards developing an Information Entropy based framework to analyze complex technical and social systems. Entropy in terms of information theory can be seen as the expected amount of information observed in an event. A parallel can be drawn between information entropy and system complexity, where, as …

Investigating Math Students' Ability To Conceptualize Fractions As Two Numerals Having A Single Value, William Carroll Fanning

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

It is no secret that math students of all ages have misconceptions about fractions. Multiple studies have shown that math students invariably see fractions as two separate and unrelated numbers, the numerator and the denominator, rather than a single number with specific value. This study is designed to investigate studentsâ?? interpretations of a fraction in terms of having a single value in relation to its two numbers, the numerator and the denominator.

For the purpose of this study, the investigator developed and pilot-tested seven items that have the potential to uncover whether students attend to the value of a fraction …

Analysis Of English Language Learner Student Reasoning About Measures Of Center And Variation: A Triangulation Of Quantitative And Qualitative Data, Lorena Galvan

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The population of Spanish-speaking English Language Learner (ELL) students has been growing rapidly in the past 20 years. It has been estimated that by the year 2018, 1 out of 4 students in grades K-12 will be an ELL. There is a large body of research about assessment of Spanish-speaking ELL students in mathematics; however, there is little that focuses on statistics only. Statistics courses are frequently confused and/or classified under mathematics courses. However, students taking an introductory statistic course are required to know a new set of concepts, words and vocabulary that are not always used in mathematics courses. …

Design And Evaluation Of The Impact Of A Multi-Agent Control System (Framework) Applied To A Social Setting, Perez Antonio Perez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The objective of this research is to design and analyze the performance of a new mechanism to improve the advising of students in a nontraditional environment. This nontraditional environment includes: a minority serving, commuter campus with a high percentage of transfer students. Specifically, these demographics are unable to keep a tightly controlled cohort of students flowing through to the completion of the curriculum. Students in these circumstances usually have varied course loads and competing priorities due to family and financial needs or other societal responsibilities. Therefore, there is a need for an individualized approach to advising.

University administrations face challenges …

The Effect Of A Fluent Signing Narrator On Children's Behavior During Technology-Enhanced Shared Reading With Children With Hearing Loss And Their Parents, Gabriela Itzel Rodriguez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Shared reading plays an essential role in the language and literacy development of children who are at risk of future problems in those areas. Children with hearing loss (CHL) are a group who usually experience limited and poor quality activities that foster literacy development such as shared reading (SR). Researchers examining high quality interactions have rated child behaviors, primarily attention and initiation, during shared reading and play based activities finding positive correlations between these behaviors and the overall development in typically developing children as well as in children with other impairments such as Autism Spectrum Disorder and Down syndrome (Kim …

The Gateway Grade: The Ninth Grade Academy Practice In Terms Of Student Performance, Adam Robert Starke

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine whether the concept of the ninth grade academy structure in Texas high schools affects a variety of variables indicative of student achievement. Data representative of performance by students served in 30 schools with a separately structured ninth grade academy were compared to data representative of performance by students served in ninth grade at 30 schools with a traditional high school setting. A group of six variables in the category of student assessment performance were analyzed, and a group of four variables that are related to college readiness or the risk of not …

The Spanish-English Bilingual: A Cross-Classfication Comparison Of Maze Use In Children, Jessica Valles

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

With the continual increase of bilingual individuals in the United States, there is a critical need for research that can appropriately identify unique characteristics of language production for these individuals. In particular, maze use, or errors in production have been identified as a characteristic of language that typically occurs more in bilinguals' speech production than in monolingual productions. Research comparing bilingual maze use in individuals who are typically developing with bilingual maze use individuals who are language impaired is limited. To compare these bilingual children with language impairment with to their typically developing peers, children were paired by age, grade, …

Entering The World Of University: The Literacies And Indentities Of Latino/A Youth In Their Transitions From High School To College, Luciene Soares Wandermurem

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This year-long ethnographic case study seeks to contribute to the body of literature on minoritized students' transitions from high school to college by drawing on sociocultural theories of literacies and identities to examine seven bilingual Latino/a students' academic trajectories from the spring semester of their senior year in high school through the fall semester of their first year in college. Specifically, this study explores how Latino/a youth's identities and academic aspirations were shaped by literacy practices across spaces - out-of-school, at a high school, and in college classrooms - over the course of a year. The study was conduct in …

Translingual Practice & Identity Performance: A Study Of Mongolian Youth On Facebook, Sara Bartlett Large

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study explores the translingual practices and identity performances of five participants on the social networking site, Facebook. The participants in this study are five young adults from Mongolia who participated in the U.S. State Department sponsored English Access Microscholarship program, an intensive English language program for disadvantaged youth in developing countries, from 2009 - 2011. Using a qualitative methodology based on constructivist grounded theory and relying on interviews, questionnaires, and observations of the participants' Facebook pages, this study considers the participants' use of translingual practices to build and maintain capital - linguistic, cultural, and social - as they develop …

The Flipped Approach: The Use Of Embedded Questions In Math Videos, Ashley Wilson

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study investigates the use of embedded questions in math videos and their effect on students self-paced learning in a hybrid math course. A treatment group watched math videos with embedded questions and a comparison group watched the same videos but without the embedded questions. The two groups are compared in terms of (a) amount of video watched, (b) quality of written work, (c) performance in assessments, (d) course component scores, and (e) opinions about self-paced learning and the flipped classroom method. The pre-to-posttest improvement for the treatment group was higher than the comparison group. The embedded questions might have …

Rewriting, Recapturing, Reenvisioning: Writing Assessment Revisited In The Hermeneutic Sphere, Judith Ann Fourzan

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This Dissertation explores the use of hermeneutics in reconsidering the role of writing assessment in composition. The traditional view of writing assessment is negative. In order to change this traditional view and enable composition faculty to utilize writing assessment and a valuable and necessary tool, a hermeneutic sphere offers the best framework upon which to recast writing assessment as part of composition and writing. A hermeneutic sphere is an interpretive methodology that allows for the investigation of any and all aspects of the subject at hand - in this case, writing assessment. The hermeneutic sphere works much like a heuristic …