Education Commons^™

Exploring And Training Spatial Reasoning Via Eye Movements: Implications On Performance, Victoria A. Roach

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation sought to determine if eye movements could serve as an indicator of success in spatial reasoning, and if eye movements associated with successful completion could be applied to strategically improve spatial reasoning.

Using the line images of Shepard and Metzler, an electronic test of mental rotations ability (EMRT) was designed. Two versions of the test were created, allowing for both a timed (6 seconds per question) and untimed testing environment. Four experiments were designed and completed to relate mental rotation ability (MRA) scores from the EMRT, to patterns in chrononumeric and visual salience data. In each experiment, participants …

Exploring The Role Of Procedural Variations In Surgical Education, Tavis Apramian

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Variations in practice and procedure permeate clinical work. While clinical research routinely investigates the consequences of these variations for clinical outcomes, we have little understanding of their implications for education. The current policy environment in medical education makes developing a new understanding of the role of variations in medical education especially important. Current policy reforms in the assessment of learners draw on the notion of competence to suggest that medical education should focus on the performance of learners in the workplace. The current turn toward workplace-based assessment positions the observations of faculty into key functions in these assessment frameworks; therefore, …

Pearl Harvesting Autism, Mariya Gruntovskaya

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis addresses the difficulties of on-line information searching as it relates to the topic of autism. A review of existing search strategies is presented and their limitations are discussed. A new method for deriving a set of search-terms for comprehensive searching, Pearl Harvesting, was tested here to determine the necessary search terms (i.e., synonym ring) for ERIC and PsycINFO databases. Once discovered and validated, a synonym ring can be copied and pasted directly into the search box of the database, providing a simple, thorough and time saving way of conducting on-line research in the field. This easily used method …