acase@tulane.edu / 1 / Megan C. Saybe

The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to examine the relationship between student perceptions of classroom climate and student growth in high-poverty schools. More specifically, this study analyzed the relationship between Tripod Student Perception Survey classroom favorability ratings and Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) gain scores for students in grades 3 through 8 in a medium-sized school district in Northeast Tennessee during the 2012-2013 academic year. The data were gathered from approximately 1,500 fourth and fifth grade students from 6 elementary schools and 2 K-8 schools as well as approximately 1,300 sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students from 3 middle schools and 2 K-8 schools. The analysis of data found statistically significant relationships between student perceptions of caring and reading TVAAS gain scores among students in grades 4 and 5, student perceptions of conferring and math TVAAS gain scores among students in grades 4 and 5, as well as student perceptions of captivating and math TVAAS gain scores among students in grades 4 through 8. The study did not reveal statistically significant relationships between student perceptions of challenging, clarifying, consolidating, or controlling and reading or math TVAAS gain scores.

In recent years, Blended Learning becomes more and more popular in business and educational fields. It is regarded as an important research topic in e-Learning because it¡¦s potential to enhance and improve students¡¦ learning effectiveness. Though the concept of blended learning has been existing in traditional learning for several years; with the development of information technology, it drives a new emerging blended learning model. By combining cyber-asynchronous and cyber-asynchronous becomes the new Emerging Blended Learning (EBL) in contrast to the physical-synchronous and cyber-asynchronous that is considered as the Traditional Blended Learning (TBL). Besides, interaction is a vital factor in blended learning and learning effectiveness is an urge question that all researchers want to study in e-Learning. And the classroom climate, which comes from the interaction among all members and the environment in the class, has a vital influence on students learning outcome in traditional learning. According to our survey, the conclusion of the relationship between classroom climate and learning effectiveness in e-Learning is not yet confirmed from the literature. By analyzing these two different blended learning models (EBL and TBL), the aims of our study are to explore if the learning effects of EBL is the same as that of TBL and to investigate the relationship between classroom climate and learning effectiveness in e-Learning. The methods combine questionnaire, interview and LMS system logs for applying data triangulation validation. The procedure are collecting the questionnaire data at midterm and final examinations and then interviewing some students to get their thoughts and finally analyzing the system logs to help explanation of the quantity results. The results show that the learning effect of EBL is the same as that of TBL and the changes of classroom climate and learning effectiveness in EBL are more significant than in TBL. The results also show that the correlation of classroom climate and learning satisfactory is significant. Finally, we provide some suggestions and future research directions for educators and researchers.

In this dissertation, the focus was on the classroom climate of engineering students in the context of either their community college or their four-year university. Previous research on the classroom climate for STEM majors suggests that women and minorities may experience a "chilly climate" and find the classroom unwelcoming; this negative climate may in turn have an impact on a student's success or persistence in attaining a degree. The purpose of this study was to examine engineering students' perceptions of their classroom climate and how these perceptions are related to fundamental skills in engineering. Data from a 2009 National Science Foundation sponsored project, Prototype to Production: Processes and Conditions for Preparing the Engineer of 2020 (P2P), which contains information from students in 31 four-year colleges and 15 pre-engineering community college programs, were examined. After establishing measures for classroom climate and fundamental skills related to engineering through an exploratory factor analysis, results indicated that university students had higher perceptions of their fundamental engineering skills as compared to community college students. Community college engineering students, on the other hand, perceived their classroom climates as warmer than university engineering students. In order to explore differences in student perceptions by individual characteristics and by institution, hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was used. Results indicated that for both community college and university engineering students, a warmer perception of classroom climate was associated with a higher perception of fundamental engineering skills. For the community college data, there was significant but low variation between schools, suggesting that student level characteristics may explain more of the variation. At the individual level, the interaction terms for gender and race were significant, indicating that the association between gender and perceptions of fundamental engineering skills depends on race. For the university students, only gender was significant, with male students reporting higher perceptions of their fundamental engineering skills. Almost all of the engineering disciplines were significant, which led to an additional HLM analysis with engineering program as the highest nested unit. Results from this model indicated that the highest percentage of variation in fundamental skills in engineering was at the program level. / Ph. D.

College professors face many pressing challenges: staying current in their disciplines, becoming familiar with new technology, responding to national accountability issues, publishing scholarly research in their fields, and facilitating student learning in their classes. Teaching and learning are complex processes. Humor is a powerful instructional resource. The purpose of this study is to understand how and why college professors intentionally use humor in the classroom and what influence humor has on their teaching. This qualitative study focuses on ten college professors who have a reputation for using humor in their classrooms. I conducted semi-structured interviews with these faculty and made four classroom observations. The interview transcripts were coded and analyzed using the constant comparative method. Three major findings emerged from the research. First, humor, for these professors, is a constitutive part of their identities as teachers. The professors articulated the belief that their sense of humor and the ways they used humor in the classroom made them better teachers. Their teaching identities were created as they learned from their own teaching mentors, developed their personal teaching philosophies, and became confident enough to show their own personalities in their classrooms. The second finding was that these professors have constructed very student-centered, positive classroom climates. All of them recognized the benefits of humor for their students and were aware of the advantages of humor for the learning process and to foster bonds between students and teacher. They also said humor made their jobs as teachers more satisfying. They were also cognizant of appropriate and inappropriate uses of humor and were careful exactly how they used humor in their teaching. The final finding refers to how a professor may be viewed as a performer. These professors have constructed teaching identities that allow them to go into the classroom and present information often in a dramatic, striking manner. The teachers in this study have developed teaching methods that capture the students? attention, and the techniques often reflect theatrical styles or approaches that make them feel like performers.

The Relationship Among Thematic Integrated Instruction, Classroom Climate, Grade, Parental Socioeconomic Status and Pupil¡¦s Technological Creativity Yi-shuan Wu Abstract The main objectives of this study were to explore (a) the effects of grade and parental socioeconomic status (SES) on pupil¡¦s technological creativity; and (b) the relationships among thematic integrated instruction, classroom climate, and pupil¡¦s technological creativity. The participants included 635 third and fourth graders from four elementary schools in Taipei and Kaohsiung City. The employed instruments were The Test of Technological Creativity, The Questionnaire of Thematic Integrated instruction, two subscales from The Inventory of School Factors to the Development of Technological Creativity, and Two-factor Index of Socioeconomic Status. The employed analysis methods were Descriptives, MANOVA, Canonical Correlation, and Multiple Stepwise Regression. The main findings in this study were as follows: 1. The fourth graders outperformed the third graders on the test of technological creativity. 2. Parental socioeconomic status had positive influences on their children¡¦s performance of technological creativity. 3. The degree of teachers¡¦ implement of thematic integrated instruction had significant effects on their pupils¡¦ technological creativity. 4. A constructive classroom climate pertaining to the improvement of creativity had significant effects on pupils¡¦ technological creativity. 5. The degree of implementing thematic integrated instruction did not have significant effects on the building of constructive classroom climate pertaining to pupils¡¦ improvement of technological creativity. 6. Grade, parental SES, thematic integrated instruction, and constructive classroom climate could effectively predict pupils¡¦ technological creativity. Finally, the author proposed some suggestions for educational authorities, teachers, and future research.

With the increasing popularity of and demand for online learning in higher education (Konetes, 2011) comes a need to examine students’ perceptions about classroom climate in these environments. Using the Instructional Beliefs Model (IBM) as a theoretical framework, this dissertation proposes the online learning climate (OLCS) scale for doing so. Informed by both organizational and instructional communication, as well as education, the scale consists of several variables related to instructor role(s) and behaviors, student characteristics, and course-specific structural issues to explain how students perceive climate within a computer-mediated classroom. Ultimately, this three-phase study consisted of: (a) constructing the OLCS, (b) establishing factor structure, as well as concurrent and convergent validity, and (c) establishing the scale’s discriminant validity, confirming its factorial structure, and testing three theoretical models.

I återkommande skolenkäter (Skolenkäten,2020) framkommer att många elever saknar studiero i klassrummet. Studien syftar därför till att undersöka elevernas uppfattningar kring studiero. För att undersöka detta har en fenomenografisk ansats (Marton & Booth, 2000) tillämpats. Tio elever från två klasser i årskurs fem har intervjuats. Elevernas uttalanden ligger till grund för två beskrivningskategorier i studiens utfallsrum. Resultatet tolkades och analyserades utifrån en fenomenografisk analysmetod (Marton & Booth, 2000). I resultatet framgick det att eleverna anser att lärare behöver ha goda ledar- och didaktiska kompetenser för att skapa studiero. Eleverna upplevde en stress när de inte hann med och förstod sina lektionsuppgifter och resultatet visar att elever upplever att de inte får den hjälp som de behöver vilket påverkar studieron i klassrummet.

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The nurturing of critical thinking skills is one of the cornerstones of Outcomes Based Education (OBE). This study investigated to what extent teachers create classroom climates that nurture the development of critical thinking abilities. A literature study was undertaken to highlight the importance and nature of the development of critical thinking skills, and to establish the relationship between classroom climate and the development of critical thinking abilities. The use of teaching methods and strategies, learning activities, questioning techniques, the role of the teacher and the role of the learner during teaching and learning in the classroom were explored. The literature review provided the conceptual framework for the study, as well as the framework for designing a questionnaire that was utilized to obtain the perceptions of teachers and learners regarding the opportunities provided by teachers for the development of critical thinking abilities in the classroom. By means of quantitative, non-experimental descriptive survey research, a self-constructed questionnaire was administrated to a convenient sample of a purposively selected group of Grade 9 and Grade 11 teachers (n=241) and learners (n=403) in the Sedibeng West District of the Gauteng Department of Education. The triangulation of learner and teacher data revealed differences and similarities in opinion related to the classroom climates that teachers create for nurturing critical thinking. In essence, the data revealed that teachers are, to some extent, creating classroom climates that nurture critical thinking through their choice of teaching methods and strategies, questioning techniques and the learning activities that they choose. However, the responses did not convincingly indicate to the researcher that the nurturing of critical thinking skills takes place on a regular and frequent basis. According to the learner responses, it appeared that teaching and learning methods and strategies that promote interactive learning, are underutilized by the teachers. This study is concluded with recommendations to teachers on how to create classroom climates that promote the development of critical thinking skills. Key words: cognition, cognitive development, critical thinking, classroom climate, teaching methods and strategies, learning activities, questioning techniques. / M.Ed., North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2010