Curriculum and Instruction Commons^™

Rethinking Thinking About Thinking: Against A Pedagogical Imperative To Cultivate Metacognitive Skills, Lauren R. Alpert

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In summaries of “best practices” for pedagogy, one typically encounters enthusiastic advocacy for metacognition. Some researchers assert that the body of evidence supplied by decades of education studies indicates a clear pedagogical imperative: that if one wants their students to learn well, one must implement teaching practices that cultivate students’ metacognitive skills.

In this dissertation, I counter that education research does not impose such a mandate upon instructors. We lack sufficient and reliable evidence from studies that use the appropriate research design to validate the efficacy of metacognitive skill-building interventions (not just evaluate their relationship to learning outcomes). I argue …

Components Of Fluency-Based Instruction In The College Classroom, Jennifer Kourassanis Velasquez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The current research regarding the use of fluency-based instruction (FBI) to teach academic skills suggests the addition of FBI to traditional instruction produces better learning outcomes than traditional instruction alone. However, there is a lack of comparative research of the addition of FBI to traditional instruction vs. traditional instruction alone on student performance outcomes with college students. The present study was composed of two experiments to examine the effects of the addition of a component of FBI using a modified SAFMEDS (Say All Fast Minute Every Day Shuffled) strategy to traditional instruction within the course’s existing curriculum on quiz and …

The Narration Of Conflicting Accountabilities In The Era Of High-Stakes Teacher Evaluation, James Christopher Head

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The U.S. Government’s Race to the Top program inspired a wave of education reforms across the nation aimed at holding teachers individually accountable for their students’ “growth” on test scores. These individualized programs implemented new forms of audit technologies aimed at orienting teachers’ priorities toward the calculations produced by students, rather than towards students’ holistic growth and well-being. In so doing, these programs signify an ideological rupture for teachers in that their long-shared sense of interpersonal accountability is institutionally re-directed – and reinforced with consequences – toward calculative accountability. In this dissertation, I investigated teachers’ experiential navigation of the introduction …

Letter To The President: Longitudinal Critical Discourse Analysis Of Academic And Hip Hop Genres In A Rap Narrative Program, Debangshu Roygardner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The objective of this study was to examine an in-school rap narrative workshop through critical discourse theory (Bamberg, 2012; Daiute, 2014). Twelve youth from a public school serving youth in urban Houston, TX were recruited from an in-school and after-school Hip hop/Rap narrative program to participate in a two-year cohort research study. The primary research question guiding the study was “How do young people participating in a school-based Hip hop/Rap program use a wide range of narrative genres for literacy and psycho-social development over two years in the program?”

The data-intensive study involved assessments of literacy and psycho-social development via …

Embodying Rhythm Nation: Multimodal Hip Hop Dance As A Site For Adolescent Social-Emotional And Political Development, Lauren M. Roygardner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This exploratory study employed qualitative methodology, specifically values analysis, to learn more about how being involved within Hip hop dance communities positively relates to adolescent development. Adolescence was defined herein as ages 13-23. The study investigated Hip hop dance communities in terms of cultural expertise (i.e. novice, intermediate and advanced/expert) to look specifically at dance narratives (i.e. peak experience narratives and “I dance because” essays) and hip hop dance performances. The primary purpose of this dissertation was to (1) explore how adolescents use multimodal Hip hop dance discourse for social-emotional development and critical consciousness, and to (2) understand how values …

Do Spellings Of Words And Phonemic Awareness Training Facilitate Vocabulary Learning In Preschoolers?, Robin O'Leary

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study was to examine the contribution of phoneme awareness training and orthography to the learning of new vocabulary words by partial alphabetic phase readers. We hypothesized that four and five year old children taught to segment words with letters would outperform those trained with shape markers and those that received no segmentation training on an invented spelling task. We also hypothesized that students seeing the spellings of new vocabulary words (names) would learn the words in fewer trials, remember the names and features better and would be able to better recognize letter labels when presented alone. …

Thiscollegestory.Com: How Interactive Writing Media Influenced The Way First-Year Students Made Sense Of Their College Transition, Philip Kreniske

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing on insights from Bakhtin (1986) that demonstrated the significance of writing as an interaction, and building on recent developments in narrative analysis that offer insights into narrator’s sense making processes (Daiute, 2014; Lucic, 2013); this research explores how freshmen in an educational opportunity program used interactive writing media to make sense of their transition to college. The exploration involved three main questions and each question concerns students’ development over time:

• First, did college students’ writing in two different media (blogs and word-processed text) differ and did these differences change over time?
• Second, how did the narrators and audience interact …

The Social Construction Of Authorship: An Investigation Of Subjectivity And Rhetorical Authority In The College Writing Classroom, Johannah Rodgers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although we use the term author on a daily basis to refer to certain individuals, bodies of work, and systems of ideas, as Michel Foucault and other critics have pointed out, attempting to answer the question “What is an Author?” is by no means a simple proposition. And, starting from the position that there is no single, or definitive answer to this complex question, this dissertation seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion of the genealogy of authorship by investigating the ways in which conceptions of the author have informed models of the writing subject in the field of rhetoric …