Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2009. / Principal faculty advisor: Sharon Walpole, School of Education. Includes bibliographical references.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of using graphic organizers during prereading, reading, and postreading positions of the comprehension and retention of Chinese sixth-grade students who were identified as below-average or above-average readers. Chinese sixth graders from one school were first administered The Michigan Chinese Reading Test to identify reading level. Subjects were then assigned to one of the four treatment groups: traditional Chinese social studies method, graphic preorganizers, graphic organizers as a reading guide, and graphic post organizers.Two practice passages were first used to familiarize the subjects with how graphic organizers were utilized in instruction before reading on experimental passage. The dependent measure, 45 multiple-choice questions based on the experimental passage, was administered twice: the next day after the instructional sessions were concluded and again seven days later.The principal analysis to test the three null hypotheses was a 2 x 4 x 2 ANOVA with repeated measures on the last factor corresponding to the two administrations of the test. Two follow-up analyses of variance (ANOVAs) were used to test for differences in treatment condition sepa-rately for above-average readers and below-average readers, using the average of the immediate and the seven-day delayed tests. One Scheffe test was applied to find the location of significant differences among the four treatment conditions for above-average readers. Finally, four follow-up t-tests were used to test for differences in reading level at each of the four treatment levels.Three conclusions were drawn from the statistical analyses of the data: 1) graphic organizers had a significant effect on comprehension and retention only when above-average readers were required to process the organizers during reading; 2) graphic organizers did not produce significantly better comprehension and recall performance of below-average readers; and 3) the effect of graphic organizers was equal to that of the traditional Chinese social studies method in maintaining comprehension and recall for both above-average readers and below-average readers over a one-week delay. / Department of Elementary Education

Thesis (M.Ed.)--Bowling Green State University, 2009. / Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 118 p. Includes bibliographical references.

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2008. / Directed by Barbara Levin; submitted to the Dept. of Curriculum and Instruction. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Apr. 13, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 206-211).

The goals of this project include developing a way to efficiently teach the many required subjects in the overloaded elementary school day and incorporating litrature into content area curriculum.

This study was designed to investigate the types of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) integrated into the content area classrooms of two local high schools, and whether the use of these ICTs motivated adolescent students to read and write in the content areas. The investigator created a student survey, student, teacher, and other support faculty interview protocols, and a classroom observation protocol to collect data for the study. The investigator faced several challenges which prevented her from spending adequate time in the schools. Due to these challenges, sufficient data was not obtained to form conclusions about the research questions. This thesis will present the review of literature, methodology, and plan for completing the study in the future.

Classroom teachers deal with numerous pressures in their classrooms including students’ difficulty with reading at the middle and high school levels. Often, teachers can identify the problems, but are often unable to rectify them because of a lack of understanding and support in incorporating reading as part of their content area instruction. This research was conducted to investigate the impact of a sustained, online reading professional development on the teaching practice of middle school and high school science teachers who took the 14-week course. This grounded theory research used the reflective assignment, a comprehensive, 10-week, job-embedded assignment of 62 science teachers, to generate categories and themes about the reading challenges they perceived in their own classrooms, what strategies and tools they chose to remedy those challenges, and the perceived changes they saw in their students and themselves. The theory that was derived from the data speaks to how effective, job-embedded reading professional development can impact the knowledge, motivation, and instructional practice of science teachers in the classroom

No description available.

This quantitative study investigated the relationship between high school social studies teachers' reading professional development through Project CRISS: Creating Independence through Student-Owned Strategies (CRISS) and the implementation of active reading strategies in the classroom. Quantitative data were collected through an online survey in order to provide a comprehensive picture of high school social studies teachers' self-reported classroom practices relating to the use of active prereading, during-reading, and postreading strategies. Additionally, the survey asked teachers to self-report their observations of student independent implementation of the same active reading strategies. These data were used to provide an in-depth look that expanded on high school social studies teachers' self-reported classroom practices relating to reading. The results of this study indicated that there was no significant relationship between teachers' reading professional development through CRISS and their self-reported classroom practices in the implementation of active pre-, during, and postreading strategies. Further findings indicated no significant relationship between teachers' reading professional development through CRISS and their self-reported observations of student independent implementation of the same active reading strategies. Lastly, there were no correlations that indicated that years teaching in the classroom moderated these relationships. Implications and suggestions for future research were offered for future reading professional development for secondary teachers and educational researchers who intend to utilize survey instruments. / by Carmen L. Newstreet. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

<p>During a few hours of a school day, a student might read textbook texts which are highly diversified in terms of abstraction. Abstraction is a central feature of specialized language and the transition from everyday language to specialized language is one of the most important things formal education can offer students. That transition is the focus of this thesis.</p><p>This study introduces a new three-graded classification of abstraction including the levels of specificity, generalization and abstraction, based on a discussion of the concept of abstraction. The investigations performed, based on this classification, show that texts from different subject areas display distinct patterns of abstraction. The Swedish literary texts had the lowest degree of abstraction, the social science texts had an intermediate degree and the natural science texts were the most generalized and abstract. The results also show that the degree of abstraction in the textbook texts increases in later grade levels.</p><p>The thesis presents a new way of analyzing shifts between levels of abstraction and their functions. Interestingly, the texts with a medium degree of abstraction, the social science texts, are the ones with the greatest variety in shifts. The functions of the shifts differ with respect to cultural domains. The shifts in the Swedish literary texts in general belong to the everyday domain while the shifts in the natural science texts belong to a specialized domain. The shifts in the social science texts had features of both domains.</p><p>A secondary aim of the thesis is to develop the understanding of the relationship between author and reader in the texts. The results from my investigation of modality in the Swedish textbook texts confirm the earlier findings from English and Spanish textbooks. In comparison to other text types, textbook texts present knowledge in a more authoritative and less modalized way.</p><p>From time to time, abstraction is described as a feature that hinders students accessing texts. Some researchers even suggest a removal of features of specialized language in textbook texts, in order to increase students’ understanding. However, in a society where specialized knowledge is necessary, the access to specialized texts is important. A democratic view of education and school mandates that children and adolescents have the opportunity to encounter and learn to encounter specialized language in school. In analyzing the texts special attention is paid to the relationship between the texts, the contexts of use and the student readers.</p>