Despite calls by U.S. researchers and policymakers for more teachers of color, supported by research documenting the significant social, emotional, and academic benefits of having same-race and same-ethnicity teachers, teaching remains an overwhelmingly White profession, even in light of demographic shifts rendering children of color the numeric majority in U.S. pre/schools. Relatedly, even as over one-fourth of children in the U.S. are immigrants, immigrant and transmigrant teachers have been marginalized in teacher education. Seeking to address this problem from a political-ideological paradigmatic perspective, this study sought to learn from transmigrant teachers’ negotiations of identities and practices. Rejecting essentialized notions of immigrant teachers/communities and focusing on Chinese transmigrant teachers teaching Chinese immigrants and children of immigrants, it sought to understand how they negotiated their teacher identities and pedagogical practices in light of occupational, geographical, and migrational intersections of identities and experiences. Further, it sought to document how these were enacted in early childhood public school classrooms. Situated in New York City, home to the largest Chinese and Chinese-American population of any city outside Asia, this collective case study centered the voices, identities, and experiences of three Chinese transmigrant early childhood teachers via Thirdspace theory, bridging identity, and transnational funds of knowledge. Doing so accounted for their individuality and collectivity. Analytically, • Thirdspace theory was used to map how they reconciled transnational identities, experiences, and pedagogical practices in the classroom; • bridging identity helped deepen understandings of how they constructed a professional/occupational identity influenced by, but not limited to, past biographical experiences; and • transnational funds of knowledge epitomized their lived experiences resulting from transnational navigations and/or belonging to transnational communities, capturing the complex flow of knowledges that characterized their experiences and pedagogies. Findings shed light onto the power and potential of Chinese transmigrant early childhood teachers in the education of Chinese immigrant children. Implications underscore the need for teacher education to learn from the experiences of international teacher candidates, recognizing how they may serve as role models for all students while improving the outcomes and school experiences of immigrant students, leveraging the simultaneity of experiences, identities, and experiences in the construction of Thirdspace classrooms.

An acquisition criterion, more commonly known as “mastery criterion” is an instructor-established standard of performance that may signal the acquisition of a novel skill or the conclusion of a phase of intervention. When teaching new behaviors, researchers and practitioners in the field of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) apply some type of criterion for the learner to achieve. The purpose of the following studies was to evaluate the effects of acquisition criteria on skill acquisition in addition to other components of mastery such as response maintenance and stimulus generalization. In Experiment I (Wong et al., 2021), I conducted a systematic comparison of two applications of acquisition criteria. I selected four participants to teach 40 novel sight words using learn unit instruction. The participants were between the ages of 5 and 7 years old and diagnosed with developmental disabilities. I equated the target operants and quasi-randomly assigned 20 sight words in one acquisition criterion condition and 20 sight words in another acquisition criterion condition. In one condition, Set Analysis (SA), the acquisition criterion was applied to a set of four operants. The other condition, Operant Analysis (OA), applied acquisition criterion to individual operants. The level of accuracy and the replication of the accuracy remained the same across conditions, and more specifically, a 100% accuracy across one replication session was utilized under OA and SA. The results of skill acquisition showed that all four participants learned a greater number of sight words under the OA condition compared to the SA condition within the same time frame. Response maintenance results suggested that SA produced more durable responses for three out of four participants. In Experiment II, I extended the findings of Experiment I by addressing some limitations and systematically replicating the procedures. I increased the number of replications of the acquisition criterion from 1 replication to two replications. I selected four new participants and taught them sight words under the OA application of acquisition criterion and the SA application of acquisition criterion. Similar to the findings of Experiment 1, the skill acquisition results showed all participants learned a greater number of operants under OA compared to SA. The response maintenance results showed that all four participants responded with 100% accuracy to a similar or higher percentage of operants under the OA condition compared to the SA condition, suggesting that the added replication to the acquisition criterion may have improved the durability of responses during four-week follow-up sessions. The findings of both Experiment I and Experiment II contributed to the small but growing body of literature demonstrating the parametric effects of acquisition criteria. However, small sample sizes in the existing acquisition criteria research limit the external validity of the findings. Thus, I conducted a descriptive analysis of every skill acquisition article published in 2017 to 2019 in three peer-reviewed behavioral journals, in order to address this limitation. I reported the general characteristics of over 200 articles targeting skill acquisition. Additionally, our analysis targeted the effects of acquisition-criterion levels and frequency of replications on response maintenance results and generalization results. Ultimately, the results provide evidence that acquisition criteria play an important role in the mastery of novel behaviors, which have practical implications for ABA clinicians and researchers.

The problem of this study is to determine the relationship of hearing to school achievement. More specifically, the problem is to compare the hard-of-hearing child with the normal hearing child of approximately the same intelligence quotient and similar home background in their academic progress in the elementary school to determine the educational loss due to this specific defect.

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

The purpose of this study was to identify team development activities which occurred in public elementary schools during the implementation year of the Teacher Assistance Team (TAT) and determine if there were any significant differences between highly effective and less effective teams. The sample under study consisted of 42 elementary schools which were implementing the Teacher Assistance Team model during the 1983-84 school year. A questionnaire survey instrument was used to obtain information from the schools regarding team development activities. School staff were asked to respond to eight general areas thought to impact upon the adoption of the Teacher Assistance Team model in the school. These areas were level of service delivered, effectiveness of service delivered, personnel training, team membership, scheduling of meetings, principals' support strategies, technical assistance needs, and teacher reactions to the team process. Statistical analysis revealed the high and low service teams did not differ significantly in school enrollment, personnel trained, scheduling of team meetings, or 26 of the 27 support strategies employed by building principals. However, the analysis indicated significant differences between the high and low service levels. The high service teams operated for a larger proportion of the months possible; served a larger proportion of the student enrollment; and considered more cases per month and per team than did the low service teams. Additionally, the high service teams attempted to resolve a larger proportion of team development problems and actually resolved more problems than the low service teams. Building principals among the high service teams demonstrated more of a commitment to the team process by personally selecting team members and requiring that teachers experiencing learning or behavior problems in the classroom refer to the team for assistance. The results of this study hold implications for teachers and school administrators. Recommendations were developed enabling state and local educational agency personnel and building principals to increase the effectiveness of Teacher Assistance teams during the first year of the team's operation in the school. Future research is directed to address three outcomes of the team process. These are: referral and cost effectiveness; classroom intervention; and teacher satisfaction.

Interactive teaching approaches have been documented as viable and effective methods of comprehension instruction. This study identified the components characteristic of interactive and directive teaching. The language employed by teachers and learning disabled (LD) students engaged in one of three interactive strategies or a directive strategy are described and compared with student performance. A written summary and a multiple choice comprehension test served as dependent measures. Subjects were upper elementary bilingual, LD students and their teachers in eight self contained or resource classrooms. Classes were randomly assigned to one of four instructional conditions: (a) semantic mapping, (b) semantic feature analysis, (c) semantic syntactic feature analysis, or (d) direct instruction. Teacher utterances were coded according to general, directive, and interactive teaching functions. Student utterances were coded according to prior knowledge categories including elaborate, specific, restrictive, and response, and other. Results reported indicate findings regarding classroom interaction, condition effects, and theoretical tenets. Teacher and student interaction patterns revealed (a) no difference in the amount of teacher talk across assigned conditions, (b) "no response" as the most frequent student response to teacher utterances, and (c) the most student to student conversation occurred in the semantic feature analysis and the semantic syntactic feature analysis condition. Condition effect findings reported significant difference on prior knowledge and cohesiveness of written summaries. Student performance on the multiple choice test exhibited no significant difference on vocabulary items. Theoretical divergence was represented by interactive and directive teaching functions that were most differently used. These differences characterize interactive and directive instruction. Findings indicate that learning disabled students are capable of benefiting from interactive instruction; and, teachers engaged in interactive instruction employ teaching functions that encouraged student participation in classroom discussion.

Children from divergent populations are not equitably represented in programs for the gifted. A commonly cited cause is over-reliance on standardized test scores. An equally important cause may be that children, who do not fit the profile of a "typical" gifted child created by Terman (1925), seldom are referred for assessment. Terman's research has been sharply criticized for bias in selection procedures, but his conclusions are still generalized to all gifted children. In traditional identification procedures, nomination is based, consciously or subconsciously, on a definition of giftedness and "typical" characteristics described by Terman. Expanded assessment procedures were implemented in targeted schools in a large southwestern school district to increase representation of children from minority populations. As other schools in the district continued to use traditional procedures, a unique opportunity arose to compare characteristics of families of gifted children from targeted and nontargeted schools. Data were collected from families (N = 150) of children placed in first or second grade classes for the gifted during the past two years. Questions were designed to elicit information in categories similar to those used by Terman in 1921-22 and compatible with statistics reported in the U.S. census. Four groups of variables were investigated and comparisons made (a) between the families of gifted children in Targeted and Nontargeted Groups, (b) between Targeted, Nontargeted, and Terman Groups, and (c) between families in Targeted and Nontargeted Groups and families in the community population. Results show the Targeted Group differs significantly from the Nontargeted Group in economic, ethnic/cultural, and educational experience variables. The groups do not differ in family constellation variables. Clear differences exist between the Targeted and Terman Groups in all variables; the Nontargeted and Terman Groups are similar in economic and educational attainment variables. With the exception of higher minority representation in the Targeted Group, that group and the community population are similar. The Nontargeted Group differs from the community population in all economic variables and educational attainment, a result that supports charges of bias in traditional identification procedures. Expanded assessment procedures are recommended for more equitable representation of children from all populations in programs for the gifted.

Gardner (1985) defines intelligence broadly as the ability to solve problems and create products as well as to find or create new problems. He also suggests that every normal individual has the capacity to develop abilities in seven different areas or types of intelligence. Maker (1992, in press) hypothesizes that gifted individuals competently solve problems of all types, that is, problems ranging from well-defined to ill-defined. In this study of spatial intelligence, the theories of both researchers were tested. The primary purpose of the study was to describe behaviors that could be observed, processes subjects reported using, and characteristics of products subjects created as they solved the series of spatial problems. A secondary purpose of the study was to determine if careful observation of processes subjects employed, combined with the subject's report of processes used and an evaluation of products produced could, indeed, paint a clear picture of the subject's spatial abilities. Six research questions guided the study. The three primary areas of investigation were (a) the similarities and/or differences of behaviors observed, processes reported, and characteristics of products across tasks for individual subjects, (b) the similarities and/or differences of behaviors observed, processes reported, and characteristics of products across subjects for each task, and (c) the similarities and/or differences of behaviors observed, processes reported, and characteristics of products to Gardner's description of spatial intelligence. The researcher delineated eight broad categories of observed behaviors, two broad categories of processes reported, and nine characteristics of finished products. She noted both similarities and differences in behaviors, processes, and products across subjects for tasks and across tasks for subjects. Subjects reported that they used processes similar to those described by Gardner (1985); Gardner does not establish behaviors that can be observed as subjects solve spatial problems, nor does he clearly establish characteristics that might be included in products subjects created. Therefore, the behaviors noted and the characteristics of products created by the subjects in this study allowed the researcher to further define spatial intelligence. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

One hundred and fifteen second and third grade Anglo and Hispanic boys and girls from an isolated rural town in Arizona were tested on two nonverbal measures of cognitive skills to ascertain their predictive validity and ethnic bias. Bias was addressed by regression analysis, a technique that allows for the comparison of slopes and intercepts for two or more groups. The children from both ethnics were roughly equated on SES variables due to the location and nature of the community. The Raven's Coloured Test of Cognitive Skills (NTCS) were employed to predict the state-mandated California Achievement Test (CAT) and the pupils' grade point average (GPA). The results suggested that the Raven's exhibits both slope and intercept bias for three of the four criterion variables whereas the NTCS demonstrated bias only in terms of GPA. Both nonverbal tests correlated highly indicating that they are measuring similar skills. The NTCS generally had higher predictive validity than the Raven's. A combination of the two tests increased prediction by only a small amount. These results indicate that, contrary to previous research, the Raven's may be a biased predictor for Hispanics and that the NTCS appears both less biased and a better predictor. Both nonverbal test validities approached the WISC-R correlation coefficients for Hispanics. Neither test proved to be a potent predictor of Anglo test scores or GPAs. This differential validity infers that the nonverbal tests be employed with caution with native English speakers. The hypothesized reasons for the better performance of the NTCS included its measuring of more than one skill. The two tests were contrasted in terms of psychometric considerations, training time, and testing time. Limitations of the study as well as suggestions for further research with various non-native speakers of English was discussed.

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