Teacher Education and Professional Development Commons^™

How Arizona Community College Teachers Go About Learning To Teach, Carolyn J. Hamblin

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

New Arizona community college teachers go through a transformative learning process when they learn to teach. They enter the classroom with preformed ways of thinking about teaching. These habits of mind include what they imagine a community college teacher to be. They expect their knowledge and expertise to translate into teaching ability and they are shocked to learn that this is not the case. Classroom teaching involves basic pedagogical skills such as preventing cheating, creating appropriate tests, planning a course calendar, and pacing a lecture. The discomfort that accompanies this revelation causes the teachers to think critically about what good …

"It Is Not In The Stars To Hold Our Destiny But In Ourselves": Tales Of Saudi Muslim Women Maintaining Their Identities In U.S. Higher Education, Debi Sheridan

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The objective of these oral histories was to examine, explain and reveal the success of a small group of Saudia (female Saudis) whose studies at a mid-Western American university through the medium of English (their second or third language). Four students were randomly selected from a group of volunteers, based on their successful completion of the English as a Second Language (ESL) program, plus a year of other academic classes in the university. One student, who had not completed the ESL program, was admitted to the master of English program having passed the Test of English as a Foreign Language …

Using Virtual Manipulatives To Enchance Collaborative Discourse In Mathematics Instruction, Katie Anderson-Pence, Patricia S. Moyer-Packenham

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

This study examined the influence of different virtual manipulative (VM) types on the nature of students’ collaborative mathematical discourse. During 27 episodes, students’ worked on mathematics tasks using three different VM types: linked, pictorial, and tutorial. The level of students’ collaborative discourse was coded and analyzed for each episode and compared across VM types. A one-way ANOVA indicated statistically significant differences in the quality of collaborative discourse among the different VM types. Other patterns indicate that certain VM types may be more suited than others for encouraging meaningful collaborative discourse. The patterns and trends identified in this study contribute to …

Using Virtual Manipulatives To Generalize And Justify Through Discourse, Katie Anderson-Pence, Patricia S. Moyer-Packenham

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

This study examined the influence of different virtual manipulative types on the nature of students’ discourse related to generalizing and justifying mathematical concepts. During 27 episodes, students worked on mathematics tasks using three different virtual manipulative types: linked, pictorial, and tutorial. The level of students’ discourse in generalization and justification was coded and analyzed for each episode and compared across virtual manipulative types. A one-way ANOVA indicated statistically significant differences in the quality of generalizations and justifications among the different virtual manipulative types. Other patterns indicate that certain virtual manipulative types may be more suited than others for encouraging meaningful …

Second Language Research In Practice: Exploring Foreign Language Teaching, Maria Luisa Spicer-Ecalante, Karin Dejonge-Kannan, Aliza M. Atkin Kroek

Languages, Philosophy, and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Successes And Struggles Of Teaching: Perspectives Of Beginning, Mid-Career, And Veteran Teachers, Alyson Leah Lavigne, Amanda Rabidue Bozack

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

Wages that are not commensurate with level of education (National Association of Colleges and Employers [NACE], 2013), demanding responsibilities, and pressures leveraged by high-stakes testing and evaluation, have led to soaring rates of attrition and a disproportionate number of beginning teachers in U.S. classrooms. Teacher experience has decreased from a mode of 15 years in 1978–1988 to five in 2011–2012 (Ingersoll, Merrill, & Stuckey, 2014). And, nearly half of all teachers leave within five years costing U.S. public schools 2.6 billion dollars annually (Alliance for Excellent Education [AEE], 2004). These trends in the teaching workforce have important implications for school …

Changes In Latino/A Adolescents' Engineering Self-Efficacy And Perceptions Of Engineering After Addressing Authentic Engineering Design Challenges, J. A. Mejia, D. Drake, Amy Wilson-Lopez

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

Community-based engineering design activities were used to provide Latino/a adolescents with authentic engineering experiences with the intention of increasing their engineering self-efficacy and changing their perceptions of engineering. Twenty five Latino/a adolescents (ages 14 to 17)- most of whom were either immigrants or English learners - were purposefully selected to work on different community-based engineering design activities, which are engineering experiences where the adolescents had the opportunity to research, analyze, and/or design solutions to problems affecting their community. The adolescents worked in teams of three or four members over the course of one school year to develop a solution to …

Dual Language Instruction And Achievement: A Need And A Void In The Midwest, Tammy Oberg De La Garza, Erin Mackinney, Alyson Leah Lavigne

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

In recent years, the benefits of bilingualism through dual language (DL) education models have been well documented. Despite evidence of bilinguals' heightened cognition and achievement, Midwestern English language learners (ELLs) are relegated to language programs that do nothing to enhance or maintain students' native language. This descriptive study employed a survey to collect data on existing DL programs across the state of Illinois (the largest population of ELLs in the Midwest), to better understand the challenges facing DL educators and administrators in the nation's middle. Data suggests the predominant obstacle encountered by school administrators is a lack of qualified DL …

Trust In Science And Scientists And The Acceptance Of Evolution, Louis S. Nadelson

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

Background: Accepting the concept of evolution is important for the advancement of biological science and has many implications for daily life. However, a large portion of the general public does not currently accept biological evolution. Therefore, it is important to understand what factors are associated with a decline in the acceptance of evolution. Of particular interest for us is the relationship of individuals’ sense of trust in science in relationship to evolution acceptance.

Methods: Using the Trust in Science and Scientists and Inventory of Student Evolution Acceptance we surveyed 159 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory psychology course. Additionally, we …

Reading Together: A Successful Reading Fluency Internvetion, Chase Young, Kathleen A. J. Mohr, Timothy Rasinkski

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

The article describes a reading fluency intervention called Reading Together that combines the method of repeated readings (Samuels, 1979) and the Neurological Impress Method (Heckelman, 1969). Sixteen volunteers from various backgrounds were recruited and trained to deliver the Reading Together intervention to struggling readers in third through fifth grade. The differences on the outcome measures between the treatment (n = 29) and comparison (n = 23) were statistically significant. Thus, students in the treatment demonstrated increased reading expression, reading rate, and overall reading scores. Results suggest that Reading Together is a feasible method of increasing students’ reading proficiency and can …

Reading Together: A Successful Reading Fluency Internvetion, Chase Young, Kathleen A. J. Mohr, Timothy Rasinkski

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

The article describes a reading fluency intervention called Reading Together that combines the method of repeated readings (Samuels, 1979) and the Neurological Impress Method (Heckelman, 1969). Sixteen volunteers from various backgrounds were recruited and trained to deliver the Reading Together intervention to struggling readers in third through fifth grade. The differences on the outcome measures between the treatment (n = 29) and comparison (n = 23) were statistically significant. Thus, students in the treatment demonstrated increased reading expression, reading rate, and overall reading scores. Results suggest that Reading Together is a feasible method of increasing students’ reading proficiency and can …

Service Learning At Community Colleges: Synthesis, Critique, And Recommendations For Future Research, Amanda Taggart, Gloria Crisp

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

The purpose of this paper is to review and critique empirical work done, to date, specific to service learning experiences at the community college level. A review of the literature was conducted in order to examine the empirical work that has been developed regarding service learning, a form of experiential learning, at community colleges. The narrative defines service learning, describes types of service learning taking place on community college campuses, and synthesizes and critiques the service learning empirical work done to date. The review closes with specific recommendations for both researchers and practitioners regarding future research.

Middle School Teachers’ Discipline-Specific Use Of Gestures And Implications For Disciplinary Literacy Instruction, Amy Wilson-Lopez

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

Framed in theories of social semiotics, this descriptive multiple case study examined six middle school teachers’ use of gestures during one school year as they each taught two different subject areas: earth science, language arts, mathematics, and/or social studies. The data, which included field notes and photographs from 354 lessons and 151 video-recordings of lesson segments, were analyzed using constant comparative methods and multimodal concordance charts. The analyses indicated discipline-specific differences in types of gestures, frequency of gestures, and centrality of gestures to the teachers’ messages. Earth science depended on a variety of iconic and deictic gestures, the latter of …

A Case Study Of Preservice Teachers In An Associate Of Science Degree Early Childhood Teacher Education Program: Perceptions Of Professional Preparation, Tracy E. Sermon

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of preservice students completing their associate’s degree (AS) in early childhood education (ECE). My intent was to discover, from the preservice teacher’s perspective, what skills and knowledge preservice students consider necessary to teach young children. I was also interested in how they viewed their professional preparation at the completion of their AS program.

The methods included participant interviews, documents and assignments completed by students, and program contextual data (faculty focus group and program documents). Seven themes were identified that represented the student’s perceptions of the skills and knowledge needed for …

Using Disciplinary Literacies To Enhance Adolescents' Engineering Design Activity, Amy Wilson-Lopez, Emma Smith, Daniel L. Householder

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

This comparative case study describes the literacy practices of two groups of adolescents as they sought to solve authentic problems through engineering design processes. Three types of data were collected as the groups addressed these problems: video- and audio-recordings of their conversations; adolescent-generated products; and pre- and post-challenge interviews. The authors used existing coding schemes of engineering design activity to identify when the adolescents enacted different stages of engineering design, as well as a modified form of constant comparative analysis to identify the literacy practices that corresponded with each stage. The analysis indicates that applications of literacy practices at each …

Best Practices In Researching Service-Learning At Community Colleges, Amanda Taggart, Gloria Crisp

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

In recent years, an increasing number of community colleges have integrated some form of service-learning into their programs or courses with the idea that it will promote civic engagement, increase student satisfaction with their courses and college experience as a whole, and improve learning outcomes. There is a good amount of research published on service-learning programs and outcomes conducted at four-year institutions, though there is a dearth of studies available on service-learning at community colleges. Because community colleges serve a purpose unique from that of four-year colleges and universities, both in their mission and often in the students they serve, …

Funds Of Knowledge And Literacies In Latino/A Youths' Community-Based Engineering Design Work, Amy Wilson-Lopez, Joel Alejandro Mejia, Indhira María Hasbún, Daniel L. Householder, Chris Hailey

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

STEM fields in the US continue to be dominated by people whose cultural backgrounds are White, English-speaking, and middle class (National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council, 2009). Many reasons have been offered to explain this phenomenon: Students’ backgrounds may include worldviews, beliefs, and communicative practices that do not cohere with those practiced in STEM classrooms (Aikenhead & Jegede, 1999; Lee, 1999); instructional materials may present STEM fields as a-cultural, decontextualized practices with no evident connection to students’ lives and communities, such as the routine completion of numerical exercises (O’Halloran, 2005); students’ identities—shaped in part by their desired life …

A Typology Of Actional-Operational Modes In Earth Science And Implications For Science Literacy Instruction, Amy Wilson-Lopez

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

Framed in theories of social semiotics, this multiple case study describes and categorizes the actional-operational modes used by three middle school earth science teachers throughout the course of one school year. Data included field notes, photographs, and video-recordings of classroom instruction, as well as periodic interviews with the teachers. A constant comparative analysis of the data resulted in the creation of a typology of actional-operational modes according to how they fulfilled the ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions of communication. Six categories of actional-operational modes were identified: gesture, embodied representation, moving objects on flat surfaces, moving objects through three-dimensional space,material representations, …

Attracting Diverse Students To A Magnet School: Risking Aspirations Or Swallowing One’S Beliefs, Amanda Taggart, Alan R. Shoho

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

This case study focuses on the ethics of advocating for a social justice perspective versus jeopardizing one’s career aspirations. There are numerous subplots to this case involving the start-up of a new magnet school, including its leaders’ concerns for meeting accountability measures and representing racially diverse, limited English proficient, and economically disadvantaged students. Through this case, we illustrate the conflicting choices school leaders may face when trying to balance their own career aspirations with their advocacy of social justice issues for underrepresented groups of students. By using Starratt’s ethical framework along with Strike, Haller, and Soltis’s and Shapiro and Stefkovich’s …

Exploring Three Fifth-Grade Teachers' Understanding Of Historical Thinking: A Case Study, Deanne Rigby Murray

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Deanne R. Murray at Utah State University conducted a qualitative case study aimed at examining the understanding and practice of historical thinking of three fifth-grade teachers. These three teachers had each been a participant for 3 years in a federally funded Teach American History (TAH) grant project aimed at increasing teachers' historical knowledge and classroom practices. This TAH project in Utah was particularly focused on teachers learning to use cultural tools in socially mediated settings with the ultimate goal of improving their students' performance in history.

This study sought to understand the development of these three teachers' historical thinking through …

Using Writing To Explore Human-Environment Interactions: An Integrated Approach, Lindsay Prettyman

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

This Honors Thesis includes a literature review on integrated curriculum for a third grade class. It also includes 22 lessons which, along with the literature review, explore the idea of integrating inquiry based social studies with language arts, especially informational narrative writing in the classroom Other subjects are integrated as well, including math and science. The curriculum development was, in part, pilot tested at Edith Bowen Laboratory School. It uses McTighe's Backward Design curriculum model and focuses on the settlement of the pioneers in Cache Valley.

Research Into The Characteristics Of Effective High School Principals: A Case Study Of Leadership Practices Used In The High School Setting, Gregory G. Wilkey

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This study came about largely due to my own personal belief in the centrality of the role the high school principal plays in the life of a young adult. I believe most people think of the school principal solely as an administrator who deals with personnel, discipline, facilities, events, transportation, parents, and so forth. While those are some of the responsibilities of a high school principal, I see the role of a high school principal with a much broader perspective. In addition to being an effective school manager, today’s high school principal must be a strong and visionary leader who …

An Evaluation Of A Computer-Based Training On The Visual Analysis Of Single-Subject Data, Katie Snyder

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Federal education policies, such as No Child Left Behind and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act, mandate the use of scientifically-proven or research-based curricula and interventions. Presumably, interventions that have a large amount of scientific evidence documenting their success are more likely to be effective when implemented with students in school settings.

In special education, single-subject research is the predominant methodology used to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions. In single-subject research, a target behavior is measured under baseline conditions (i.e., before the intervention of interest is implemented) and intervention conditions. The data for each condition are graphed, and analyzed …

A Study Comparing Virtual Manipulatives With Other Instructional Treatments In Third- And Fourth-Grade Classrooms, P. Moyer-Packenham, J. Baker, A. Westenskow, K. Anderson, Jessica F. Shumway, K. Rodzon, Kerry Jordan, The Virtual Manipulatives Research Group At Utah State University

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

The study reported here examined virtual manipulatives as an instructional treatment in 17 third- and fourth-grade classrooms. Students were randomly assigned to two treatment groups: texts and physical manipulatives (PM), and virtual manipulatives (VM). Results revealed no significant differences in achievement between the treatments. Additional results showed that objective ability predicted fraction achievement; virtual manipulative use can be modulated by test question type (e.g., symbolic vs. pictorial); percentage of class time using representations differed between VM and PM classrooms; and percentage of class time spent using representation types differed, potentially providing differential opportunities to learn.

Becoming-Belieber: Girls' Passionate Encounters With Bieber Culture, Kortney Sherbine

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

In this article, I draw on French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1987) notion of becoming to consider the ways in which these encounters with people, materials, and technologies are productive, creating space for Beliebers to come into relationship with one another and with popular culture in ways that are new and that I never could have anticipated during my more carefully organized and school-curriculum-driven interactions with girls during my six years as an elementary school teacher. Through my current research into young girls’ after-school fanaticism, I have been able to come to know girls differently than I knew …

Using Text Structures Of Information Books To Teach Writing In The Primary Grades, Sarah K. Clark, Cindy D'On Jones, D. Ray Reutzel

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

Teaching children in the primary grades the text structures and features used by authors of information text has been shown to improve comprehension of information texts and provide the scaffolding and support these children need in order to write their own information texts. As teachers implement the English Language Arts Common Core State Standards (CCSS), they will need support and training on how to meet these increased curricular demands. In this article, we describe how children’s information books can be used as exemplars of well-structured text models to teach young students how to write selected discourse patterns required in the …

Variable Appropriation Of An Online Resource Discovery And Sharing Tool, Victor R. Lee, Mimi Recker, Tamara Sumner

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

Even when following best practices for participatory design, the appropriation of tools in formal education settings can be hampered by a number of factors. Drawing from a case of a web tool built to help teachers in five school districts find and share free resources in an educational digital library, we describe patterns of tool use and provide some explanations for variability in tool appropriation. We also suggest that future research consider school districts as complex systems of professionals whose interactions and inter-relationships may yield unexpected technology adoption behaviors.

Community College Student Success Programs: A Synthesis, Critique, And Research Agenda, Gloria Crisp, Amanda Taggart

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

A narrative review was developed to add to the discussion and dissemination of research on community colleges. The review adds to existing work by synthesizing and critiquing the empirical research to date specific to three of the most prevalent programmatic efforts presently seen on community college campuses: (a) learning communities, (b) student success courses, and (c) supplemental instruction. Empirical investigations or evaluations of student success programs from academic journals, conference presentations, dissertations, unpublished policy reports, and book chapters were identified, summarized, and critiqued. The review concludes with a proposed research agenda to advance research on program effectiveness at community colleges …

Teaching Accessibility And Design-For-All In The Information And Communication Technology Curriculum: Three Case Studies Of Universities In The United States, England, And Austria, Paul Ryan Bohman

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Digital technologies allow people with disabilities to participate independently in society in ways they never could before. The full realization of these new opportunities remains elusive, though, because working professionals in the information and communication technology (ICT) field rarely receive adequate training in how to make digital ICT accessible to people with disabilities. Adding accessibility to the university ICT curriculum can help create a critical mass of ICT professionals with accessibility awareness and expertise to finally realize the full accessibility potential of digital technologies. This dissertation provides a rich informational context from which ICT curriculum leaders can decide how to …

Research On Distance Programs For Teachers & Administrators, Laura Slack Foley

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

Distance access to quality preparation in university teacher certification programs is crucial to solving teacher shortages. This paper aggregates the data from several gathering sources which were designed to evaluate distance program features for quality, access, and delivery through the perceptions of participating preservice teachers at Utah State University.