Education Commons^™

A Case Study Into Middle School Students' Conceptualizations Of Motion And Interpretations Of Negative Velocities, Peter A. Colesworthy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Student difficulties surrounding motion have been well documented for many years. This work was inspired by the work of former MST students into the instruction of Newton‟s Second Law of Motion at the middle school level. The purpose of this study was to further investigate how middle school students talk and reason about motion. Particular attention was paid to how students defined the term “motion,” how those definitions fit into a larger framework of what encompasses understanding motion at the middle school level, and how students justified negativity of a calculation of a negative velocity.

A tutorial lesson was developed …

How Students Communicate Knowledge: Written Versus Drawn Responses To Formative Assessment Questions In An Introductory Undergraduate Marine Science Course, Christina Siddons

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Undergraduate science education suffers from a lack of concrete instructional strategies that address real-world postgraduate skills such as visual literacy and science communication. Research within marine science education especially lags behind other, more well-researched fields such as physics or mathematics education, both of which have extensive literature addressing specific instructional strategies that instructors can implement in the classroom. Undergraduate marine science programs overlap with content areas from chemistry, physics, and biology, and provide a rich opportunity for examining how to include more authentic educational experiences in an undergraduate classroom. However, the types of assessments that are typically employed tend to …

An Evolutionary Approach To Crowdsourcing Mathematics Education, Spencer Ward

Honors College

By combining ideas from evolutionary biology, epistemology, and philosophy of mind, this thesis attempts to derive a new kind of crowdsourcing that could better leverage people’s collective creativity. Following a theory of knowledge presented by David Deutsch, it is argued that knowledge develops through evolutionary competition that organically emerges from a creative dialogue of trial and error. It is also argued that this model of knowledge satisfies the properties of Douglas Hofstadter’s strange loops, implying that self-reflection is a core feature of knowledge evolution. This mix of theories then is used to analyze several existing strategies of crowdsourcing and knowledge …

Department Of Mathematics And Statistics (University Of Maine) Records, 1959-1974, Special Collections, Raymond H. Fogler Library, University Of Maine

Finding Aids

This material relates mostly to the Mathematics Summer Institute held on the University of Maine, Orono, campus during the summer months from 1958 to 1974. The Institute was supported by grant funds from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Includes: correspondence, memorandums, press releases, clippings, grant applications, reports, brochures, and some group photographs of attendees.

Deciphering Climate-Driven Changes In Planktonic Diatom Communities In Lake Superior, Amy Kireta

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Climate change is affecting lake systems throughout the world, including Lake Superior, the world’s largest lake by surface area. Climate-driven physical changes in Lake Superior are well documented, but there is still substantial uncertainty of how recent biological changes are related to climate change. This research addresses these uncertainties using a variety of approaches to understand the effects of modern climate-driven changes on Lake Superior diatom communities. First, I developed models for environmental variables related to diatom abundance using 10 years of summer monitoring data. Second, I investigated changes in fossilized diatom relative abundances before, during, and after the Medieval …

Contrast Dependent Knowledge Development In Contrast Supported Scientific Observation, Maura B. Foley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Knowledge of contrasts between phenomena can influence how people think and reason about them, so learning contrasts is important in school science. Building knowledge through a process of construction is a common framework through which school science is taught. However, telling phenomena apart through differentiation also plays an important role in learning and may be underused as a teaching framework. An effective way to learn contrasts is to use them to perceptually differentiate similar-looking phenomena presented side-by-side. However, little is known about the persistence/usefulness of knowledge generated during perceptual differentiation over short periods of time and its usage in student …

From The Fair To The Laboratory: The Institutionalization Of Agricultural Science And Education In Maine, Thomas Reznick

Maine History

Up until the mid-nineteenth century, agricultural science and education in Maine were primarily local affairs. Meeting in farm clubs and attending agricultural fairs, the Maine farmer performed most research by trial and error and by meeting on common ground with other farmers to discuss what worked and what did not. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the farm clubs and county fairs waned and succumbed to the growing political influence of the Grange, which supported burgeoning agricultural scientific and educational institutions, such as the College of Agriculture and the Experiment Station. Through the auspices of the Grange, such institutions took the …