Curriculum and Instruction Commons^™

Science Through Art: Motivating Gifted And Talented Students, Ksenia Zhbanova

Journal of STEM Arts, Crafts, and Constructions

Gifted and talented students have unique characteristics and needs. Arts Integration is an effective differentiation strategy that helps meeting these students’ needs. STEM subjects are easily and organically integrated with the Arts because scientific and artistic inquiry are very similar. This practical article describes an arts-integrated project that provided the gifted and talented participants with an increased level of challenge, an opportunity for self-expression and for building social skills, amplified motivation, and a chance to deepen and demonstrate their knowledge of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, social studies and English Language Arts. In this project, identified gifted students completed figural transformations …

Editorial: Arts Integration Allows Students The Opportunity To Be Original, Ksenia S. Zhbanova, Audrey C. Rule

Journal of STEM Arts, Crafts, and Constructions

This editorial explores the other six articles in this issue 2 of volume 3 of the Journal of STEM Arts, Crafts, and Constructions to examine how originality is displayed and supported by art projects. Originality, is a quality or a characteristic of an idea, approach or product. Originality can be defined as newness or novelty. To be classified as original, an idea must be new. It does not have to have a utilitarian value, which is a requirement for an idea to be categorized as creative. Helping students develop originality is important because it allows the freedom to make any …

Teacher Perception And Their Understanding Of Progress Monitoring Throughout A Longitudinal Assessment System, Rena A. Duewel

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the phenomenon of teacher perception and their understanding of progress monitoring throughout a longitudinal assessment system. This monitoring of student progress is to enhance their academic skills in mathematics and provide necessary interventions for growth as measured on a longitudinal assessment system through fidelity of implementation of interventions processed through progress monitoring. Data was collected from participant responses through interviews, a demographic survey, and focus groups. Interview respondents participated in a closed-door, face-to-face interview. The survey was used to collect specific demographic data to provide a concise snapshot of each individual …

Implementing Ngss Engineering Disciplinary Core Ideas In Middle School Science Classrooms: Results From The Field, Jessica Gale, Jayma Koval, Mike Ryan, Marion Usselman, Stefanie Wind

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

With the inclusion of engineering disciplinary core ideas (DCIs), the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) position engineering as a new priority in K–12 science classrooms. This paper reports findings from the implementation of SLIDER, a problem-based learning 8th grade physical science curriculum that integrates engineering and physical science core ideas. As a culminating engineering design challenge, the SLIDER curriculum asks students to apply their understanding of energy, motion, and forces to design an automatic braking system for a robotic truck. The paper describes the curriculum and synthesizes findings from an array of data sources including student design interviews, written design …

Arts-Inclusive Education In Nursing Schools, Michelle Murtaugh

Grace Peterson Nursing Research Colloquium

Arts-Inclusive Education in Nursing Schools: An Integrative Literature Review

Michelle Murtaugh, DePaul University

Category: Research Abstract

Background: Nursing educators have long recognized and championed the value of art within a professional nursing science curriculum, yet many nursing programs exclude the study of the arts. Research suggests that an arts-inclusive nursing curriculum not only enhances student learning, communication, self-efficacy, and clinical confidence, but also positively impacts patient outcomes. To address this gap between what is needed and what is currently offered, some schools are collaborating with art museums to offer arts-based courses in nursing sciences, designed to enhance students’ competency and …

Bringing Joy To Uninspired Teachers Of Math, Hal Melnick

All Faculty and Staff Papers and Presentations

This publication explores how to inspire teachers to find the joy in math so they can help their students do the same. Through a variety of tools, techniques, and helpful hints, the resource illustrates what high quality math instruction looks like and how teachers can reframe their own thinking about math to create deeper learning opportunities for their students.

Experiences Using Inquiry-Oriented Instruction In Differential Equations, Keith Nabb

CODEE Journal

Student-centered instruction can be a challenging endeavor for teachers and students. This article reports on the use of the Inquiry-Oriented Differential Equations (IO-DE) curriculum (Rasmussen, 2002) in an undergraduate differential equations course. Examples of student work are shared with specific reference to research in mathematics education.

Systems Thinking In A Second Grade Curriculum: Students Engaged To Address A Statewide Drought, Margaret Sauceda Curwen, Amy Ardell, Laurie Macgillivray, Rachel Lambert

Education Faculty Articles and Research

Faced with issues, such as drought and climate change, educators around the world acknowledge the need for developing students’ ability to solve problems within and across contexts. A systems thinking pedagogy, which recognizes interdependence and interconnected relationships among concrete elements and abstract concepts (Meadows, 2008; Senge et al., 2012), has potential to transform the classroom into a space of observing, theorizing, discovering, and analyzing, thus linking academic learning to the real world. In a qualitative case study in one school located in a major metropolitan area in California, USA teachers and their 7- and 8-year-old students used systems thinking in …

Book Review: Towards Inclusion Of All Learners Through Science Teacher Education, Greg Stefanich

Journal of Science Education for Students with Disabilities

It is a pleasure to receive an invitation to submit a review for the book titled Towards Inclusion of All Learners through Science Teacher Education. The contributors include four wellknown leaders in inclusive science education complemented by a spectrum of authors American and international, in pre-service and graduate science education, pre-service and graduate special education, science research, special education practitioners, classroom teachers, graduate students, and students through case studies and interviews.

The book presents an excellent overview of current practices in schools, descriptions of individual and team efforts to improve practice, and emerging innovations such as the application of Universal …

Christian High School Science Teachers' Perspective Transformation: The Journey From Evolution To Creation, Paul Leslie Thorpe

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this hermeneutical phenomenology study was to explore and describe the perspective transformations of 11 science instructors teaching at Christian high schools. These science teachers previously believed the evolutionary paradigm of origins. However, they have all experienced a transformation and now hold a young-earth creation perspective and believe the literal six-day creation event in the book of Genesis is accurate and true. Transformation of perspective regarding origins is defined as a phenomenon of transformative faith accompanied by assimilation and accommodation of new knowledge as seen through the lens of Jack Mezirow’s (1991) transformative adult learning theory, and James …

How Songbirds Learn To Sing Provides Suggestions For Designing Team Projects For Computing Courses, Ashwin Satyanarayana, Radhika Natarajan, Lior Baron

Publications and Research

Understanding how our brain works and how we learn is perhaps one of the greatest challenges facing twenty-first computer science. Songbirds are good candidates for trying to unravel some of this mystery. Over the last decade, a large amount of research has been made to better understand how songbirds learn complex songs. The Canary (Serinus canaria) and the Zebra Finch (Taeniopygia guttata) have been widely used bird models to study these brain and behavior relationships. Like songbirds, we humans are vocal and social learners. In such learners, the development of communication is initially steered by social interactions with adult tutors. …

A Cohort-Based Program To Help Students Prepare A Conference Research Presentation, Alanna Lecher

Florida Statewide Symposium: Best Practices in Undergraduate Research

Students move through many first time experiences when navigating their undergraduate and graduate education. Such experiences include the first time students submit an article to a peer-reviewed scientific journal, attend a conference, and conduct fieldwork. The cohort model has been shown to be effective in increasing success in undergraduate education, and it can be adapted to helping students succeed in these novel experiences as well. This presentation will explore one program where the cohort model was implemented to aid undergraduate students preparing their first conference presentation on a scientific research project. Program structure and implementation will be described.

Teaching Science Through Inquiry Based Field Experiences Using Orientation And Mobility, Danene K. Fast, Tiffany A. Wild

Journal of Science Education for Students with Disabilities

Instruction in science can be difficult for students with visual impairments due to the use of visual instruction that is often used for conceptual understanding. Pedagogical approaches to teaching science continue to evolve, with inquiry-based science instruction as a primary instructional method used in current classrooms.

In teaching students with visual impairments, inquiry is a strategy that has been traditionally been used in orientation and mobility (O&M) instruction, in an effort to teach students with vision loss to explore and make conclusions about their environments through the use of all senses.

The purpose of this review is to outline how …

Evolution And Nature Of Science Instruction: A First-Person Account Of Changes In Evolution Instruction Throughout A Career, Lawrence C. Scharmann

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

In this article, I provide an analysis of my work (1985–present) with non-major biology students and science teacher candidates in developing strategies for teaching and enhancing learning with respect to evolutionary science. This first-person account describes changes in evolution instruction over the course of a career based on personal experiences, research-informed practices, and a critical collaboration with colleague Mike U. Smith. I assert four insights concerning the influence and efficacy of teaching nature of science (NOS) prior to the introduction of evolution within college courses for science non-majors and science teacher candidates. These insights are: (a) teach explicit NOS principles …

A Framework For Reflective Practice, Diana L. Moss, Claudia Bertolone-Smith, Teruni D. Lamberg

Journal of Practitioner Research

Teaching involves making constant choices and orchestrating interventions that impact purposeful teaching and learning. Finding time to collect information and develop solutions for a teaching challenge can be problematic. Teachers may feel pressure to shift instructional practices without incorporating purposeful reflection. We developed a reflection framework and tested it in a middle grades classroom over a two-week period, and employed practitioner research to investigate the potential of allowing for deep reflection within the middle school structure. We investigated how the framework impacted the teacher’s ability to reflect and adjust based on student learning in the classroom. We conclude that sophisticated …

Dual Perspectives On Desargues' Theorem, Carl Lienert

Geometry

No abstract provided.

Otto Holder's Formal Christening Of The Quotient Group Concept, Janet Heine Barnett

Abstract Algebra

No abstract provided.

Seeing And Understanding Data, Beverly Wood, Charlotte Bolch

Statistics and Probability

No abstract provided.

The Origin Of The Prime Number Theorem, Dominic Klyve

Number Theory

No abstract provided.

Ua64/2 The Challenge: Magazine For The Center For Gifted Studies (No. 45, Fall 2018), Center For Gifted Studies, Tracy Inman

Gifted Studies Publications

No abstract provided.

The Effects Of Metacognitive Training On Algebra Students’ Calibration Accuracy, Achievement, And Mathematical Literacy, Deana J. Ford

Teaching & Learning Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation describes an empirical study that investigated how metacognitive training influenced lower achieving Algebra students’ calibration accuracy, achievement, and development of mathematics literacy. Multiple methods were used to collect and analyze the data. Close analysis of students’ work and classroom observations revealed that students that were exposed to the metacognitive training had significantly higher prediction accuracy and made gains in their understanding of the mathematics word problems than did students who did not receive the metacognitive training. Overall, however, both the intervention and comparison groups improved in their academic performance and became more mathematically literate and accurate in their …

The Logarithm Of -1, Dominic Klyve

Complex Variables

No abstract provided.

Mathematical Literacy And The Secondary Student, Adam Poyner

Senior Honors Theses

Public education is a continually evolving field, with new research, policies, and practices explored by professionals who are driven to provide America’s youth with high-quality education. Research literature since 2000 has highlighted the importance of disciplinary literacy and its unfortunate neglect in a majority of secondary classrooms (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). Students who are literate in a particular discipline, such as math, view themselves as fluent in the language of mathematics, comfortable with reading, discussing, and practicing complex mathematical concepts while using appropriate vocabulary (Buehl, 2017). As seasoned professionals and novice educators consider the role of disciplinary literacy in their …

A Comparison Of Instructional Strategies: Does How You Teach Mathematics Matter?, Brian Comeaux

Senior Honors Theses

For most of the twentieth and all the twenty-first century, there has been a great debate over educational reform for teaching mathematics. From these debates have come a critical look at how to properly instruct students so they can actively learn in the classroom, yet still retain the information for use in their later life. These questions are rooted in the larger debate between philosophical and psychological dimensions of human growth and development. Some educators, therefore, believe structuring their instruction around some philosophies such as idealism, realism, pragmatism, or existentialism was the key to success for their students. Others took …

Exploring Problem-Based Learning For Middle School Design And Engineering Education In Digital Fabrication Laboratories, Monica M. Chan, Paulo Blikstein

Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning

This is a research study of design and engineering classes that use a problem-based learning (PBL) approach in digital fabrication makerspaces in two middle schools. In these studies, teachers employ a PBL approach and provide an ill-structured problem scenario to facilitate design and engineering lessons in the FabLab (fabrication laboratory). Students in each school tackled different challenges that they defined for themselves in groups. This study provides examples of student-student interactions separated into key themes—defining specifications with teammates, personal exploration, and communication about discoveries. This study also provides examples of teacher-student interactions, and themes include demonstrations with tangible objects, discussing …

Sources Of Students’ Difficulties In Learning Chemistry, David F. Treagust, Reinders Duit, Martina Nieswandt

Administration and Staff Articles and Research

Chemistry is a difficult subject to teach and to learn at both secondary and tertiary levels. Major learning difficulties are due to the particular views of chemistry phenomena that in many ways contradict intuitive and everyday views of the learners. As a result, major misunderstandings occur when students try to comprehend chemical explanations within the framework of their pre-instructional conceptions. This paper describes research findings on students’ pre-instructional conceptions in the domain of chemistry and on attempts to guide students from their conceptions to the core ideas of chemistry. Rather than providing an overview of students’ conceptions in various topics, …

Self-Efficacy Of Early Childhood Teachers In Science, Technology, Engineering, And Mathematics, Ariella Rachel Donnelley Smith

Dissertations

Purpose. The purpose of this study was to identify the self-efficacy of early childhood teachers toward STEM subjects as measured on the Teacher Efficacy and Attitudes toward STEM Survey (T-STEM) and to explore factors that influence this confidence.

Methodology. A quantitative approach with two open-ended items was selected for this study, seeking to elicit both quantitative and qualitative data from participants. This approach allowed for multiple viewpoints to be expressed, with the qualitative data collected simultaneously with the quantitative data, and the former designed to illuminate reasons influencing the latter in a complimentary approach. The population for the study included …

School Shouldn’T End When The Bell Rings: An Exploratory Homeschooling Study, Mackenzie Dukelow

MA Research Paper

Homeschooling has experienced significant growth over the last several decades, yet little to no research has explored the relationship between homeschoolers and the public education system. Being the first to explore this relationship, the current study collected and examined data from 3 semi-structured interviews and 15 online homeschooling blogs in order to understand the growth of homeschooling in Ontario and the relationship between homeschooling and the public education system. The results of this study reveal the relationship between homeschoolers and the public education system varies significantly over time and locale, the challenges within each system and the difficulty of transitioning …

Share Your Expertise: Write For The Colorado Mathematics Teacher, Heather L. Johnson

Colorado Mathematics Teacher

What are you writing today? In this editorial, I invite you to contribute to the community and conversation by submitting an article to the new Colorado Mathematics Teacher.

From Soliciting Answers To Eliciting Reasoning: Questioning Our Questions In Digital Math Tasks, Heather L. Johnson, Gary Olson, Amber Gardner, Amy Smith

Colorado Mathematics Teacher

How can classroom teachers and task designers pose questions to promote students’ reasoning? The authors share a Toy Car task, developed in Desmos, then provide three design principles guiding task questions.