Educational Methods Commons^™

Integrating Design Thinking Into A Methods Course, Zoe Falls, Brandy C. Judkins

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Theses and Other Student Research

As a part of their methods course in teaching English language learners, Brandy's TEAC 317 and 813M students: visit and learn about the CEHS Research & Design Studio explore and critically analyze a tool that might be in their classroom in small groups or as a whole class, work through the ideation stage of the Stanford d.School model of design thinking identify a problem related to teaching or working with English language learners and brainstorm ways to address they problem, potentially via creation of a technological tool or a new physical one begin plotting what their new tool would do, …

Teac 308: Teaching Mathematics In The Elementary School–A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Amanda Thomas

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

This portfolio outlines four aspects of the peer review of teaching project, which focused on TEAC 308: Teaching Mathematics in the Elementary School. The first aspect was the explicit articulation of student learning objectives drawn from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All (2014). During this project, the nine objectives were aligned with instructional opportunities and assignments with those objectives. In addition to defining these objectives, the portfolio describes analysis of three components: student progress toward developing and demonstrating productive beliefs about aspects of teaching and learning mathematics, student progress across three …

Teac 908e: Critical Conversations In U.S. Teacher Education Policy And Practice—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Lauren Gatti

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

Since compulsory school began in the early 1900s, there have been lively and at times intense debates regarding how teachers ought to be prepared. Current debates are particularly pitched as the achievement gap persists and teacher attrition remains high, made more intense by the level of polarization in the country. Debates in the field of teacher preparation, like the country writ large, are often characterized more by heat than light. Given this reality, I opted to use this peer review of teaching opportunity to think about my graduate course as a place where students could practice perspective-taking and dialogue around …

Honors Program Induction: Fitting Into A Community That Is Born To Stand-Out, Jennifer Drew

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

Watching, waiting, wondering—I knew that in this moment I would either sink or swim in my desire to find my place in this university. I was standing on the sidewalk looking at the open green field; however, this field was not empty. All I had to do was step out onto that grass, but my fear of the unknown held me captive. I really felt like the little freshman I was. Since I had been in college, I had searched for that “home away from home” feeling. I longed to find this feeling, but after searching in the academy . …

Educating The Outsiders: The Importance Of Social Support In The Success Of Latino Undocumented Students, Emily Adkins

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

It takes a village to raise a child. This traditional proverb points to the importance of community and cooperation in ensuring children’s needs are met and exposing them to a wide variety of resources that could provide assistance if necessary. This concept of community support is widely heralded, and for many students in the United States, this saying is vital. Their villages are complete with parents, teachers, and administrators that support them and believe in their potential for success. But who forms the support system for children who are on America’s social fringes? For students who seem to be outsiders, …

Symptoms Of The Virus By Dr. Henry Esquire Iii Md Chronological Order, Emily Haase

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

1. Severe hunger, often voicing their distress.

2. Chronic moodiness, confusion, sullenness.

3. Irritability, otherwise emotionally unstable. Paranoia.

4. Homicidal tendencies – full takeover of the disease. Handle with caution.

I was pondering whether scratching five (zombification?) or perhaps a two-and-a-half (insomnia, only affecting a portion of those affected?) into the dirt was necessary before Travis made my decision. He didn’t mean to do it, of course, but he stomped across the list anyway, destroying it. He didn’t even stop to say sorry, so he must not even have noticed.

Evolutionary Explanation For Invasive Abilities Of Centaurea Stoebe (Spotted Knapweed) In Introduced Areas Invasion And Its Effects On Biodiversity In Native Areas, Erin Koren

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

Exotic species are those which have been dispersed, either by chance or human action, to an environment outside of their native range. Only a small portion of these exotics are able to become well established in the invaded population and even expand beyond it. The ones that can are termed invasive species (Muller-Scharer, Schaffner & Steinger, 2004; Bais et al., 2003). Broz et al. (2007) estimates that 25,000 species of invasive plants are in the U.S. invading 700,000 hectares of United States wildlife habitat per year and tallies the economic burden of invasive plant species to be around $35 billion …

Jargons And Pidgins And Creoles, Oh My!, Emily Gray

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

Linguistics, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, is “the science of studying language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and historical linguistics” (OED.com). Within this field, the study of pidgin and creole languages is the source of much controversy and disagreement. Due to their divergence from typical linguistic features and development patterns, pidgins and creoles have long been ignored by the linguistics community. Considered by many to be “inferior, haphazard, broken” versions of “older, more established languages,” these so-called “bastard tongues” were written off as unworthy of study (Todd 1). Only recently have these forms of language garnered …

Aluminum Analysis Of Water At Columbia College, Dung Golden

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

Water contamination from trace metals can pose severe threats to human and environmental health. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) classifies aluminum as a secondary contaminant, for which it provides non-mandatory secondary maximum contaminant levels (SCML) because such contaminants are not considered to present a risk to the public. The SMCL for aluminum is between 0.05 and 0.2 mg/L or part per million (ppm). Tap water from different sources on the Columbia College campus were analyzed for aluminum content by fluorometry and visible spectrometry. The results from the fluorometry method indicated that samples from two locations on campus were higher than …

Ureca, The Nchc Web Journal Of Undergraduate Research And Creative Activity, Kaycee Anderson, Mikayla Conway, Mackenzie Cope, Caleb Deane, Leah Koch, Ryan Schlom, Rebekah Assid, Olivia George, Josh Freeman, Grace Mcpherson, Kate Mobley, Zeke Starr, Russell Helms, Johnny Maclean, Brian White

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

Our vision is an academic community without borders, a connected network of aspirational students committed to the advancement of knowledge and appreciation of the arts. UReCA fosters the exchange of intellectual and creative work between undergraduate students, providing a platform where students can engage with and contribute to the advancement of their individual fields.

UReCA was first conceived by Johnny MacLean (Southern Utah University) and Brian White (Graceland University) at an annual NCHC conference in Phoenix, Arizona. MacLean and White noticed that while several academic outlets existed for honors faculty and administrators, there was an absence of student-focused publications within …

Mixed Media Collection, Jacob Smith

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

This body of work reflects on the two-dimensionality of visual art, specifically in the realm of illustration, painting, and digital art. The pieces address the increasingly strict guidelines imposed on the artistic community, what it means to be an artist, and how we define art. Furthermore, the body of work questions the temporality of visual art, specifically in a physical form. The work is very important to me as it illustrates much of my world view: people and places exist as different from one another, but have the ability and propensity to blend, interact, and harmonize.

Where Science Intersects Pop Culture: An Informal Science Education Outreach Program, Raychelle Burks, Kiyomi D. Deards, Erica Defrain

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

Attracting a general audience to STEM topics can be a challenge, and developing engaging and interactive instruction is important for educators in all fields. While many chemical educators have successfully used pop-culture themes to introduce their students to scientific concepts, these encounters are largely limited to formal classroom environments. Inspired by the successes of community science programs such as Science Café and Nerd Nite, science educators from two Nebraska campuses sought to broaden the exposure of their pop-culture themed class lectures, and created the SciPop Talks! program. Now entering its fifth year, this informal educational outreach program has become a …

Rhetoric As Inquiry: Personal Writing And Academic Success In The English Classroom, Erica E. Rogers

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Holistic and critical pedagogy, an approach to learning and teaching, integrates the everyday realities students live, with the systemic and institutional objectives of education itself. Working with theories from composition, rhetoric, feminist studies, and cognitive psychology from a teacher-researcher perspective, this dissertation explores and theorizes holistic, critical pedagogy within the composition classroom while outlining the use of personal writing as a means to develop critical consciousness. Student study participants kept “Inquiry Notebooks,” semester-long personal writing projects that served as receptacles for practical and theoretical engagement with a variety of texts and ideas, then interviewed after the course to discuss their …

The Effects Of Active Learning Technology On Instructors’ Practices And Students’ Engagement And Grades: A Mixed Methods Study, Jeremy C. Van Hof

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Theses and Other Student Research

Partly in response to university teachers’ changing pedagogies marked by flipping instruction, lecture capture technologies are evolving into active learning systems. Little published research exists on the effects of active learning technology on either teachers or students. This two-phase sequential explanatory mixed methods study details the effects that active learning systems have on instructor practices and on student grades and engagement. Phase one combined quantitative data collection with instructor interviews. Phase one findings show higher student engagement levels correlate with the use of the active learning system only in the presence of very specific, flipped classroom practices. Phase two, a …

Collegiate Active Learning Calculus Survey (Calcs): Adapting An Instrument And Using Results, Wendy M. Smith

Discipline-Based Education Research Group Speaker Series

When we make changes to a course, we want to know if they "worked." There is often a desire to broaden the definition of success beyond student (passing) grades. We know from research that the further students go in mathematics, their attitudes toward and beliefs about mathematics get more and more negative. Thus, if we slow or even reverse that trend, we might then claim success for our reform efforts. Research teams at the University of Colorado Boulder created the CLASS: Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey; this was originally designed for undergraduate physics, then later adapted for use with …

Benefits Of Using R For Dber, Jordan Harshman

Discipline-Based Education Research Group Speaker Series

When carrying out quantitative discipline based educational research projects, researchers have a variety of choices when it comes to which statistical package s/he chooses to use. In this presentation, I will convey how one programming language, R, has not only provided an abundance of advantages, but has transformed the way I see data analysis. R is a free program with thousands of add-in packages capable of doing a majority of basic and advanced statistical techniques and graphics. By investigating a hypothetical data set through cluster analysis, I will present how 1) defining custom functions efficiently allows for iterative exploratory investigations, …

Clicker Use In Introductory Biology: Impacts On Exam Performance, Joanna K. Hubbard

Discipline-Based Education Research Group Speaker Series

In-class response systems, or clickers, are useful formative assessment tools that support learning by providing real-time feedback that can be used to correct misconceptions through peer discussion and instructor guidance. Previous research has shown that peer discussion improves conceptual understanding within a class period. In this study, we asked whether the benefits of peer discussion could be detected on a longer time scale. We asked exam questions that were isomorphic to in-class clicker questions and found students that participated in peer discussion scored higher than students that were not in class for the discussion. We also examined the effect of …

Teaching And Research In Scil 101: Science And Decision-Making For A Complex World, Jenny Dauer

Discipline-Based Education Research Group Speaker Series

SCIL 101 “Science and decision-making for a complex world” is the new introductory core class for all of the students in CASNR. The learning objectives are targeted toward developing students’ science literacy skills. The course will be described, as well as findings from on-going science literacy research that investigates indicators of formal and informal decision-making in the course.

Journal Of The National Collegiate Honors Council, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2016) [Complete Issue]

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In This Issue

Forum Articles

AP, Dual Enrollment, and the Survival of Honors Education •Annmarie Guzy

Rethinking Honors Curriculum in Light of the AP/IB/Dual Enrollment Challenge: Innovation and Curricular Flexibility •David Coleman and Katie Patton

Using Hybrid Courses to Enhance Honors Offerings in the Disciplines •Karen D. Youmans

A Dual Perspective on AP, Dual Enrollment, and Honors •Heather C. Camp and Giovanna E. Walters

Got AP? •Joan Digby

AP: Not a Replacement for Challenging College Coursework •Margaret Walsh

Research Essays

The ICSS and the Development of Black Collegiate Honors Education …

Front Matter, Vol. 17, No. 2

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Cover

Mast Head

Contents

Call for Papers

Editorial Policy

Submission Guidelines

Dedication - Dail W. Mullins Jr.

Improving Science Student Retention: A Survey Tool To Measure First-Year Students’ Likelihood To Remain At Unl, Mark E. Burbach, Shannon Moncure

Discipline-Based Education Research Group Speaker Series

Purpose

•Develop, test, and share a first-year college student retention instrument that can be used to both assess students’ likeliness to remain enrolled at UNL and the effectiveness of courses and instructional methods on student retention.

•Focus on those working most directly with students (i.e. advisors, instructors, etc.), less institutional focus

Spatial Skills & Introductory Computing, Steve Cooper

Discipline-Based Education Research Group Speaker Series

Our questions

Is there a correlation between a student's spatial abilities and her ability in programming? Spatial abilities are measured through the R-PSVT, and CS programming ability is measured the 2009 AP CS MC questions

If yes, can we increase programming success through the teaching of spatial skills?

Results

Spatial training seemed to be correlated with better CS gains, and in particular helped Hispanic women and students from low SES backgrounds

Caveats

We measured code reading, but taught code writing

Differing student demographics for the 2 sessions

Small n

The Relationship Of Formative Assessment To The Professional Development And Perspective Transformation Of Teachers, Kimberly K. Snyder

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Theses and Other Student Research

This study uses practitioner research to explore teacher perspectives about formative assessment. The researcher engaged in a four-month-long series of professional development sessions with one middle school and two high school English-Language Arts teachers from the Capital View School District. Understanding formative assessment as a process to monitor student learning and then customizing instruction based on the data gathered from the formative assessment is a complex skill in which teachers need practice and even coaching to become adroit. The sessions were intended to help early-career teachers better understand formative assessment and incorporate it as a strategy in their teaching praxis. …

Guidelines For Interpretive Interview Fidelity In Mixed Methods Research Within The Context Of A Randomized Controlled Trial, Amanda L. Garrett

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Interviews fascinate and capture individuals’ attention. Researchers value the data they glean from interviews, while participants enjoy being asked to share their voices and opinions. Some of the most complex, stringent research designs are now being revised to include interviews, such as randomized controlled trials. But, how do we know that the interviews that are conducted are valid? We need to know more about how interviews are developed and delivered within the context of intervention research. Therefore, the aim of this methodological dissertation is to create a set of recommendations for interpretive interviews in a mixed methods randomized controlled trial. …

Front Matter, Vol. 17, No. 1

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Cover

Mast Head

Contents

Call for Papers

Editorial Policy

Submission Guidelines

Dedication - Richard Badenhausen

Linguafolio® Implementation At The Classroom Level: A Collective Case Study Of North Carolina Teachers, Amanda Romjue

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Theses and Other Student Research

LinguaFolio® is a language learning portfolio with a rich history rooted in educational research. This study explores the evolution of LinguaFolio®, a learning and self-assessment tool whose origins can be traced back to the European Language Portfolio (ELP). LinguaFolio® is a learning tool designed to promote self-regulated language learning through goal-setting, task-based language learning, and self-assessment and reflection. This study examined the implementation of LinguaFolio® by five experienced, exemplary teachers in order to better understand how LinguaFolio® can best be integrated into the language classroom.

LinguaFolio® is a highly customizable language learning portfolio that teachers are encouraged to adapt to …

Instructional Framing And Student Learning Of Community Interactions, Nathaniel Niosco

School of Natural Resources: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Ecology is a broad field of science that encompasses many disciplines with large impacts in our society (AAAS, 2011; NRC, 2009). To understand the complex systems and concepts of this discipline requires a foundation of knowledge that students often gain in the classroom (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000). Helping students develop this foundation of knowledge requires an understanding of how they use surface and deep reasoning skills to understand and learn new material. In addition, using methods to teach students to transfer these skills between multiple contexts is key to expanding their ability to broadly apply knowledge. The purpose of …

College-Going Experiences Of Male Foster Youth Alumni Who Have Stopped-Out Of College, Felipe D. Longoria

Department of Educational Administration: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This qualitative research study examined how foster care experiences and masculinities influenced male foster youth alumni’s decision to go to college. The study also sought to understand the in-and-out-of-college factors that led participants to exit college prematurely. Five participants were each interviewed twice for data collection purposes. Findings from data analysis indicated that establishing and maintaining relationships in college were challenging and affected an already vulnerable population in their help-seeking behavior. Recommendations are offered for higher education professionals and areas for future research are noted.

Advisor: Corey Rumann

New Frameworks, New Friends: New Literacies Alliance (Nla), Open Access Information Literacy Instruction & Collaboration, Heather Healy, Julie Hartwell

Nebraska Library Association: Conferences

The New Literacies Alliance (NLA) consortia collaboration creates online, open access lessons that are based on ACRL’s Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. The lessons are designed to teach students the literacies needed for academic success and lifelong learning. Discover how librarians and instructors can freely embed these lessons into their courses and become members of the collaboration to actively participate across institutional borders in the creation of new lessons. Listen to two librarians share how they implemented NLA lessons in an online course and in a flipped classroom environment. The session examines planning for initial lesson use, differing …

Summer Libguide Workshops: Making Our Digital Content More User-Friendly, Eleanor Johnson

Nebraska Library Association: Conferences

In July of 2015, a series of internal library workshops were conducted to improve the quality and accessibility of our LibGuides. The Summer LibGuides Revamp was a four week series, with each week focusing on a different aspect of LibGuides best practices. Each workshop built upon the last one in a scaffolding approach: the profile box/guide homepage, links, appearance, and accessibility. A key component of the workshops was two hours of reserved time each week for participants to work on their LibGuides in a computer lab. Participants had devoted time for implementing ideas from that week’s lesson with others working …