Educational Methods Commons^™

Letter From The Editor, Shannon Tovey

Georgia Journal of Literacy

Editorial by Shannon Tovey, Editor-in-Chief

The Happiness Workshop For Middle School Students: The Experience Of Learning Flow Through Photographic Storytelling, Karen Meyer, Karen Michele Meyer

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Abstract

The Happiness Workshop for Middle School Students:

The Experience of Learning Flow through Photographic Storytelling

The aim of this research project is to fill a gap in understanding regarding the benefits of learning flow experiences for adolescents, and in particular, middle school students in educational settings. The workshop model contained in this document uses photographic storytelling as a creative activity for middle school students to experience flow. What has not been covered is an application for learning flow experiences in a content specific subject such as math which has been identified as a topic for future research. The research …

Competency-Based Learning, Mee Young Han

Teacher India

Mee Young Han suggests that an effort to define educational competencies is required in India at each level, and reaching a consensus about these definitions is an important task for the education community in the country.

Continuous Improvement Of Instructional Materials, David Wiley, Ross Strader, Robert Bodily

Entrepreneurship Faculty Research

From time-to-time new technologies provide us with a qualitatively different ability to engage in previously possible activities. For example, 20 years ago it was already possible to publish an essay online. You simply used the command line program Telnet to login to a remote server, navigated into the directory from which your webserver made html files available to the public, launched the pico editor from the command line, wrote your essay, and manually added all the necessary html tags. Today, open-source blogging software like WordPress makes publishing an essay online as easy as using a word processor. Yes, it was …

Measuring Building Height Using Point Cloud Data Derived From Unmanned Aerial System Imagery In An Undergraduate Geospatial Science Course, David L. Kulhavy, I-Kuai Hung, Daniel R. Unger, Reid Viegut, Yanli Zhang

Faculty Publications

The use of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), also known as drones is increasing in geospatial science curricula within the United States. Within the Arthur Temple College of Forestry and Agriculture (ATCOFA) at Stephen F. Austin State University, Texas, seniors in the geospatial science program complete capstone projects to evaluate current geospatial technology to investigate complex ecological, social and environmental issues. Under the umbrella of a student initiated and designed senior project, students designed a study to estimate height of buildings with UAS data incorporating UAS data, LP360 and ArcScene programs, and Pictometry web-based interface. Results from a statistical analysis of …

Attitudes Toward Co-Teaching In Higher Education: An Exploration Of The Circular Model Of Collegiate Co-Teaching, Alyssa Harter, Laura Jacobi

Communication Studies Department Publications

The Circular Model of Collegiate Co-Teaching (Morelock et al., 2017) examines power and authority structures, dynamics of co-teaching relationships, and co-teachers’ perceptions of co-teaching. The model does not include student perceptions, however, and it has not been applied to veteran-novice instructor pairs. The authors conducted a case study to explore the utility of the model with a veteran-novice instructor pair and to consider student perceptions. Twelve undergraduates in a communication course completed surveys, and the instructors kept reflexive journals. Findings confirm the utility of the model. Student perceptions of the benefits and drawbacks of co-teaching suggest that a fourth model …

Reading The Local In The New Now: Mapping Hidden Opportunities For Civic Engagement In The First Virtual City As Text™ Faculty Institute, Season Ellison, Leslie Heaphy, Amaris Ketcham, Toni Lefton, Andrew Martino, Sara Quay

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

In spring 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic in full force, the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) Place as Text (PAT) Committee reimagined its longstanding City as Text™ (CAT) Faculty Institute model as an experimental virtual training titled “Reading the Local in the New Now” (RLNN). With the cancellation of two scheduled CAT Faculty Institutes because of the pandemic, the committee quickly shifted gears to develop and offer a fully online version of the program. Shorter in length, with participants joining from their homes across the country, the Institute was designed with key CAT principles as its foundation (Braid and Long; …

Kindergarten Entry Assessment Practices In Pennsylvania, Anne Katona Linn Ed.D.

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, there is significant variation in kindergarten programs and the entry assessment systems used in school districts. There are no reliable data on the kindergarten entry assessment (KEA) systems used in public kindergarten programs across the Commonwealth. It is well-established that comprehensive KEAs should be part of a broader preschool through third grade (P-3) continuum of early childhood education to assess whole-child skills, include families and community partners, be culturally and linguistically responsive, and developmentally appropriate. This study aimed to understand the KEA practices of kindergarten teachers in Pennsylvania. An online survey was distributed to kindergarten …

Locational Disparity In Rural Education, Carlie A. Hedlund

All Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Location impacts the quality of education a student receives. Specifically in rural areas, the challenges that students face are unique to their location. The purpose of this literature review on locational disparity in rural education was to understand the complex problems facing rural students and educators. Resource inequities, lower population across an expansive area, and high poverty impact the educational achievement, postsecondary attainment, as well as the special education and gifted programs in these schools. These aspects were analyzed as they paint a cumulative picture of the rural educational experience. As a quarter of the United States population lives in …

Standardizing America: Why It Should Be A Method Of The Past, Samantha N. Jackson

OUR Journal: ODU Undergraduate Research Journal

This paper examines, critiques, and suggests improvements on the method of standardized testing in American schools. This paper discusses the history and development of standardized testing and its initial purpose and intentions. Additionally, the effects of standardized testing on students, teachers, and parents are evaluated, with special consideration on how high stakes testing adversely affects disadvantaged student groups such as children in minorities and low-income districts, bilingual students, and children with disabilities. The research suggests that standardized testing is not only damaging to students in these groups, but most likely not the most efficient way of testing student performance in …

Frontier: Discipline-Based Education Research To Advance Authentic Learning In Agricultural And Biological Engineering, Heidi A. Diefes-Dux

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

Discipline-based education research (DBER) is research activity aimed at investigating “learning and teaching in a discipline from a perspective that reflects the discipline’s priorities, worldview, knowledge, and practices” for the purpose of producing research-based evidence to improve education in that discipline. DBER arose out of concerns about the quality of post-secondary science education. Physics, chemistry, engineering, biology, geosciences, and astronomy education each have unique DBER histories in the U.S. that date back to the late 1800s or early 1900s when colleges and university systems were expanding and formalizing. The DBER fields accelerated in the 1950s and 1960s as a result …

2021 Bachelor's Degree Exit Survey, Southwestern Oklahoma State University

Assessment Center Reports

Exit Surveys produced by the SWOSU Assessment Center.

2021 Master's Degree Exit Survey, Southwestern Oklahoma State University

Assessment Center Reports

Exit Surveys produced by the SWOSU Assessment Center.

Place, Self, Community: City As Text™ In The Twenty-First Century, Bernice Braid

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Students and faculty who have designed or participated in City as Text™ (CAT) know well that every place they have explored has organized itself into areas, events, and interactions that either immediately or eventually make sense out of contradictory bits of information. This realization might be more self-evident in urban walkabouts but has bubbled up to consciousness in rural settings, forests, jungles, neighborhoods, and even a shopping mall explored at a National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) conference.

What lies beneath the surface, we tell our explorers, is what we want to expose to our gaze and unmask for our deeper …

Learning From The Land: Creating Authentic Experience-Based Learning That Fosters Sustained Civic Engagement, Ted Martinez, Kevin Gustafson

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Grand Canyon Semester (GCS) presents an excellent test case for exploring the success of Honors Semesters in meeting the goals articulated in this contribution to the NCHC Monograph Series: the transferability of skills and the interrelation of integrated learning, experiential education, and civic engagement. GCS began in 1978 as a partnership of Northern Arizona University (NAU), Grand Canyon National Park (GCNP), and the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) that would offer a place-based, experiential, immersive Honors Semester program. Students came from across the country to live onsite at Grand Canyon and NAU and to take interdisciplinary courses taught by NAU …

Engaging With The World: Integrating Reflections And Agency, Will Daniel

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

And you may find yourself in another part of the world . . . And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?” —Talking Heads,1980

I have been wrestling with that question since I was first asked how a National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) Honors Semester led me into public high school education and how I use that Semester’s experience in my life and work. When I first participated in the NCHC United Nations Semester in the fall of 1984, I did not imagine myself anywhere near a public school classroom. I was focused on changing the world …

Lost In Learning: Mapping The Position Of Teacher In The Classroom And Beyond, Susan M. Cannata, Jesse Peters, Alix Dowling Fink, Edward L. Kinman, Joellen Pederson, Phillip L. Poplin, Jessi B. Znosko

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Over the last thirty years or so, conversations about teaching pedagogy have consistently focused on the benefits of experiential learning and interdisciplinary connections. In order for students to learn in an optimal way, to develop their critical thinking skills while simultaneously mastering content, they must engage with multiple ways of seeing and knowing. They should learn to acknowledge complexity, to evaluate information, and to challenge their own positionality and self-assuredness. Put succinctly, they must become comfortable with being uncomfortable. These practices provide students with the skills they need to be successful in whatever paths they choose: adaptability, creativity, innovation, the …

Reflections On The 1978 United Nations Semester, Dawn Schock

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Over forty years have passed since I attended the National Collegiate Honors Council’s 1978 United Nations Semester (UNS) in New York. I have since served as a resident director of the 1980 UNS, practiced law, and taught as an adjunct law professor. Since 2008, I have spent half of my professional time consulting on international rule of law development projects. I have worked with teams of legal professionals to support the constitutional transition in Tunisia; trained law students and lawyers in the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East and North Africa region; and evaluated the impact of …

Connecting To Place: A City As Text™ Assignment Sequence, Sara Quay

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Educators need to ‘begin again,’ to put aside old assumptions and look at themselves and their world with new eyes. They need to achieve the freedom to redefine civic opportunities and responsibilities. City as Text provides a preparation, format, and philosophy for accomplishing this exciting and formidable task. —Gladys Palma de Schrynemakers, 2014

If, as Gladys Palma de Schrynemakers asserts, City as Text™ (CAT) has the power to “redefine civic opportunities and responsibilities” (99), then the heart of that work lies in CAT pedagogy’s carefully crafted link between site-specific observations and written reflections. Schrynemakers goes on to claim that civic …

Committee As Text, Mimi Killinger

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

I mistakenly joined the Place as Text (PAT) Committee in 2017. Perusing a list of prospective standing committees to join on the NCHC website, I had clicked on “Semesters Committee” (now “Place as Text”), having seen NCHC flyers advertising their adventurous institutes, which sounded fascinating though I had never attended one myself. Shortly thereafter I received an invitation to the committee’s June working meeting in Brooklyn that likewise sounded promising. Had I been well versed in the City as Text™ (CAT) pedagogy that undergirds PAT, I might have then done some reading, finding out more about the group and perhaps …

The Merits Of Applied Learning, Michael Rossi

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

In the fall semester of my senior year in 1998, twenty-two years before the time of this writing, I participated in the National Collegiate Honors Council’s Honors Semester in Thessaloniki, Greece. I still remember this experience as vividly as if it were yesterday: a four-month long study at Aristotle University in which half our time was spent walking through Thessaloniki’s medieval streets and modern boulevards; interacting with the people on a daily basis in the limited (but workable) Greek we knew; and making a number of weekend excursions—beginning on Wednesday evenings for us—to surrounding areas: Athens, Pelion, the beaches of …

Acts Of Interpretation: Pedagogies Of Inquiry, Bernice Braid

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

[T]he world is not given, it is not simply ‘there.’ We constitute it by acts of interpretation. —Jonathan Z. Smith, 1988

In Nadine Gordimer’s 1970 novel A Guest of Honour, the central white figure, diplomat James Bray, is asked by a newly installed Black president to shift from the diplomatic sphere to organize educational structures for a newly minted Black national constituency. Intelligent, sensitive, and empathetic, Bray considers his own sophisticated background in the context of this semi-literate Southern African country and thinks: “What was needed was perhaps someone with a knowledge of the basic techniques of learning. Someone …

Transforming Community-Based Learning Through City As Text™, Jean-Paul Benowitz

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Honors students at Elizabethtown College have used City as Text™ (CAT) strategies to address the racism they experienced in new student orientation programming, to transform volunteerism opportunities into sustained civic engagement experiences, to prepare for study abroad and study away, and to strengthen their applications for prestigious scholarships and fellowships. Their research projects have enabled them to publish scholarship informing federal, state, and local historic preservation public works projects; to improve town and gown relationships; and to partner with local stakeholders in community economic development initiatives. Drawing on City as Text pedagogy, they have introduced new courses and academic programs …

Doubling Back On The City As Text™ Walkabout, Gabrielle Watling

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

I had been hearing about City as Text™ (CAT) for some time from my honors dean, Sara E. Quay, and from faculty members who had participated in CAT programs around the nation and internationally. So when Sara asked if I would like to participate in the Rotterdam City as Text Faculty Institute, I was prepared—in a broadly conceptual sense. Needless to say, Rotterdam was fabulous, the Institute was eye-opening, and I was converted.

Bringing that energy and set of ideas back to my own honors foundations class was a way of preparing the students to look with new eyes, not …

Uproot, Jake Gentry

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

Short story titled Uproot by Jake Gentry in UReCA: The NCHC Undergraduate Journal of Research and Creative Activity, 2021, pages 177-180.

First sentence

My Grams glanced up from her newly planted irises, her blue eyes spotting her 7-8-9-something-year-old grandson across the yard.

What Isn't There: Four Poets And The Art Of Absence, Petra Ellerby

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

A critical essay titled WHAT ISN'T THERE: Four Poets and the Art of Absence by Petra Ellerby in UReCA: The NCHC Undergraduate Journal of Research and Creative Activity, 2021, pages 163-176.

Two (2) Slices Of Baloney, Mercury-Marvin Sunderland

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

A poem titled Two (2) Slices of Baloney by Mercury-Marvin Sunderland in UReCA: The NCHC Undergraduate Journal of Research and Creative Activity, 2021, pages 159-162.

Fried Egg, Mercury-Marvin Sunderland

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

A poem titled Fried Egg by Mercury-Marvin Sunderland in UReCA: The NCHC Undergraduate Journal of Research and Creative Activity, 2021, pages 155-158.

The Maiden Of The Lost, Jeneva Grace Midgett

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

A short story titled Maiden of the Lost by Jeneva Grace Midgett in UReCA: The NCHC Undergraduate Journal of Research and Creative Activity, 2021, pages 152-154.

My Mother's Golem, Amanda Vannierop

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

A poetic short story titled My Mother's Golem with an abstract/artist's statement by Amanda VanNierop in UReCA: The NCHC Undergraduate Journal of Research and Creative Activity, 2021, pages 150-151.

Abstract/artist's statement

This piece was composed for the 2020 Inspired By Showcase, where it received first place for undergraduate written work. The competition asked students to create a piece of art reflective of the themes in Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

Over time, the Golem has taken on varying symbolism both in and out of Jewish culture. To titular character Joe Kavalier, the Golem represents escape. …