What are characteristics of exceptional teaching in terms of academic, social and emotional growth as determined by middle school teachers and students? An effective middle grades teacher transmits a core of common knowledge to his or her students. An effective middle grade teacher makes his or her students feel they are a part of a community, and provides a meaningful and challenging educational experience. The effective middle grades teacher takes the time to talk with his or her students about academic matters and personal problems, and makes the student see that he or she has value and is a success, with a promising future. (Turning Points, 1989). Are pre-service teachers prepared to teach at the middle level? The purpose of this study was to determine if effective middle school teachers share certain characteristics, and if so, how could they become integrated into a teacher education program. Teachers of middle school students, pre-service teachers, middle school students, and middle school administrators participated in this study about effective middle school teachers. Surveys, interviews, and questionnaires were administered to participants in order to determine what is exceptional about them. The data was then used to identify characteristics or methods which effective middle level teachers have in common. The results were grounded in adolescent development theory. The research may help determine teacher characteristics or methods that are most suited in terms of academic, social, and emotional growth for a middle level student.

This study examined elementary students' perceptions of portfolios and identified instructional strategies that supported students' higher order thinking about portfolios. The participants were 22 students and their teachers from two third grade classrooms during the 1998–1999 school year. Data collection included: student and teacher interviews, classroom and parent/teacher conference observations, portfolio artifacts, teacher logs, and consultations with teachers. Student interviews were coded and scored according to each student's depth of insight. Data were analyzed using the constant comparison method for qualitative analysis. Student interviews were coded using The Ethnograph software program. Two themes were derived from the data: portfolios contribute to third grade students' ability to self-reflect and to the development of students' sense of ownership in the classroom. Results of this study indicated that students used portfolios to monitor their progress, students made judgments based on physical features, choice was a factor in the portfolio process and, instructional strategies supported higher order thinking.

This study was designed to: (a) describe the degree to which introductory science programs at two colleges engaged students in the process of scientific inquiry, and (b) describe changes in students' maturity with regard to epistemology, methods of justifying decisions, and agency in science. Course descriptions drew from classroom observations, interviews with faculty about their goals and methods, and interviews with students about their experiences in the courses. Student development was analyzed from pre- and post-semester interviews, pre-, post-semester Likert-scale surveys on students' attitudes and beliefs about science, and post-semester Likert-scale student self-assessments. Both the inquiry and traditional programs allowed opportunities for students to be engaged in answering ill-structured questions. Overall, the inquiry-based courses had more intensive engagement of students in the processes scientists use in authentic research. Students in inquiry-based courses made significantly greater gains in epistemology and methods of justifying decisions as measured by coding interviews and performing t-tests on survey items. What is more, students in inquiry courses reported producing work of their own design. Students in both programs, however, were more confident of their abilities to participate in science after one semester in college. Courses whose goals were primarily content related taught students content and studenting skills; courses whose goals were explicitly process related taught students about the nature and methods of science. The results indicate that if college students are to better understand the nature of scientific knowledge and be better able to justify decisions about complex scientific issues, they should be engaged in more inquiry-based course work.

The “Computers for KlutzesSM” computer literacy course developed by this author and successfully used for teaching more than 500 older and many impaired adults during the past five years is the basis for this dissertation. Educational literature about how best to teach the returning adult and several prominent theories such as constructivism and Vygotskyism are examined for helpful ideas. Because this literature and these theories were formulated for students much younger than those to be taught during the research newer theories were clearly needed. The literature research revealed that the educational community's returning adult's average age seemed to be in the 30 to 40 year range. People in this age range are well below the chronological age for the subjects of this dissertation. A wealth of research has been performed at the behest of the National Institute on Aging (NIA) on individual traits e.g. dynamic and static memory, motor skills, and type face preference. Only since the early 1990s has in-depth research on our aging population been performed. This research was used as a guide on how best to teach the aging adult. This writer prepared special texts and materials that closely follow the NIA findings, more recent educational papers, and news articles. The results of this research prove the value of applying both the psychological research as performed for NIA and the educational research done by the educational community. Student and instructor evaluations of these special learning materials, special teaching methods, and learning environment reveal the usefulness of this wealth of information. In all cases, the students, when motivated to accept the instructions became capable of working with a computer. Tables of characteristics help one to classify the placement of individuals into one of the three levels of literacy needs.

The focus of this study is to understand how students in one second-grade class utilized the social justice principle that they had been taught, to help them negotiate social tensions during Writing Workshop time. I studied the interactions and the writings of children while they composed and they shared their writing with their peers. Although there may be many types of tension present within an elementary classroom, I studied issues related to gender, culture, and friendship and trust. Theoretical constructs supporting this study were derived from grounded theory and sociolinguistic theory. Data collected during daily writing times throughout the school year included: personal student profiles; participant observer field notes; video and audio taped student conversations and student interviews; photographs of student interactions; and photocopies of students' writing. There were three principal findings about students' writings and social interactions during Writing Workshop times. First, students demonstrated within their writing the inclusion of a social justice principle that they were taught, but not in respect to culture. Although there were no negative cases of cultural stereotyping within the students' writing, there were also no cases of positive cultural images displayed. Second, students did not utilize the social justice principle in their conversations to help them negotiate tensions. Third, students' social status among peers influenced their behaviors and their decisions when they were faced with tensions during Writing Workshop. Norms associated with student social status had a stronger effect on their behavior than those from the social justice principle which they were taught. This study suggests the importance of including a social justice component within the Writing Workshop model. It further suggests that objectives be included that bring to the attention of all members of the community the presence of children's social status. It was the influence of student status within this classroom that affected the ways that children have access to learning and that limited participation for some of the students. Direct teacher instruction in social justice may insure that the Writing Workshop is positive and productive for all members of the classroom.

The Linguistic Interdependence Hypothesis as developed by Cummins (1978) argues that certain first language (L1) knowledge can be positively transferred during the process of second language (L2) acquisition. The L1 linguistic knowledge and skills that a child possesses can be extremely instrumental to the development of corresponding abilities in the L2. An integral component of these facilitative aspects of language influence is that the L1 be sufficiently developed prior to the extensive exposure to the L2 as would be found, for example, in an educational environment. An additional theoretical framework that has motivated this study incorporates principles of Universal Grammar, namely, that there are innate properties of language shared by the human species, and that language acquisition is the result of the interaction between these biologically determined aspects of language with the learner's linguistic environment. The principal goal of this dissertation is to examine children's knowledge of one area of Yucatec Maya L1 syntax, specifically, the word order of simple transitive sentences. By means of an experiment conducted with 28 Mayan children of 4 and 5 years of age, data were gathered and analyzed. Overall, the findings suggest that the subjects of the study are still in the process of acquiring the syntactic structure under investigation, that their L1 is still developing. Very few of the subjects demonstrated mastery of the structure under investigation. With regards to pedagogical concerns within the context of minority language education, the potentiality for these findings to enhance or inhibit the subsequent acquisition of Spanish as an L2 is examined.

Utilizing the tension inherent in conceptualizations of identity as both a fixed and a transient phenomenon, this dissertation explores perceptions of cultural identity as held by the various members of one Armenian day school in the United States, and by the school itself. In the process, it also considers the emerging question that arises out of its participants' perceptions of the school's own identities. While cultural identity is defined as a sense of belonging to national and ethnic cultures in the context of the nation state, the question of the school and considerations of its identities, on the other hand, raises issues within the context of pedagogy, specifically germane to the complexities of ethnic schooling in the United States. The dissertation's methodology is qualitative. It uses a descriptive cultural studies strategy and an instrumental/intrinsic case study genre to discover aspects of the phenomenon it sets out to study, cultural identity, as well as the context that bounds this phenomenon, the school. The findings reveal as well as imply (a) a range of "identity positions"---participants negotiating the boundaries that separate and unite the domains of their Armenianness and Americanness; (b) several shifting roles of enculturation and acculturation enacted by the school, which is perceived to mediate between the family and the mainstream of American society; (c) an array of multifarious perceptions of the school's identities; (d) a preponderance of hyphenated expressions of cultural identity, reflected in the identity positions as well as in samples of the school's literature, characterized by asymmetries of form and content; (e) an intricate mix of conceptualizations of the school's curriculum, particularly of its Armenian Studies component; and (f) a challenge to the traditionally perceived roles of the ethnic family and the ethnic school as providers, respectively, of "natural" and formal knowledge of ethnicity. This dissertation cautions against apriori interpretations of Armenian-Americanness as a symmetrical construct. It recommends careful consideration of the irregularities inherent in the relationship between this construct's form and content, as signified by the members of the school's community, in order to design a curriculum that is appropriate both pedagogically and culturally.

Although the wealth of research on beginning teachers indicates that teachers' transitions from preservice to inservice are often fraught with complexity, the prevalent “sink-or-swim” approach to their entries into teaching does not usually recognize the developmental complexities of each individual teacher's experience. The developmental blindness that some educational stakeholders have developed in regard to beginning teachers is, in fact, vastly different from the way our society views “newness” or “beginnings” in other venues and forms. If stakeholders in education were to take new teachers seriously as learners, we would not expect the same from them as from veteran teachers, and we would, as a matter of regular practice, provide new teachers with adequate support that is rooted in the legitimate learning and developmental demands of each beginning teacher. Using a phenomenological framework and an in-depth interviewing methodology, I interviewed ten (10) first-year English teachers in order to illuminate the nature of the experience of the first year of teaching English. I explored what it is about the nature of the first-year of teaching that has made it such an infamously trying time emotionally, intellectually, and socially. How does the culture of teaching “induct” its newest teachers? How do new English teachers experience their own learning and development in their first year in the classroom? What does the first year of teaching mean to those who experience it? I interviewed each participant on three separate occasions, with each interview lasting approximately 90 minutes. I audiotaped the interviews and transcribed them verbatim. I open-coded salient themes in the interview transcripts and arrived at 12 themes that cut across my participants' age, gender, and school context. Significant issues in my participants' experiences revealed several elements of the nature of the first-year of teaching English. I discuss how the constitutive elements of my participants' experiences in their first year can be incorporated into the development and implementation of more effective and more developmentally appropriate induction and support programs.

The purpose of this study was to examine elementary students' perspectives of a constructivist approach to enhance their knowledge about stress. Participants were fifth grade students in an elementary school in the northeast. Data collection included a pretest-posttest, teacher reflective journal and student interviews. A multiple choice pre-test was administered to students to obtain information about students' knowledge of stress. The pre-test was followed by a four day unit that focused on the concept of stress employing a constructivist approach. The four day unit was monitored in two ways. First, a daily reflective journal was recorded by the teacher about each lesson. Second, students were interviewed at the end of the unit regarding their perceptions of learning through a constructivist approach. A post-test was administered to evaluate students' knowledge. Data analysis for the pre-test consisted of descriptive statistics. The teaching reflective journal and students' interviews were analyzed using constant-comparison. An overview of the results of the study indicates that students reported increased self awareness, appreciation, and understanding of the feelings of others, and enhanced appreciation of human relations from the unit. Other findings indicate that the females scored higher on the pre and post test than the males. Both the individual groups of males and females improved as a result of the unit. The implications of this study may provide educators with insights into the possible effectiveness of a constructivist approach to teaching various health concepts.

Currently, students in Massachusetts are under pressure to pass Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) testing in order to advance to the next grade or to receive a graduation diploma. The major purpose of this research is to determine upper elementary teachers' perceptions regarding the usefulness of Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) testing for improving the learning of third, fourth, and fifth grade public school students. Specifically, the research questions that guide this study are: (1) To what extent do upper elementary teachers perceive the WAS test inclusive of important learning being taught in their classroom? (2) To what extent do upper elementary teachers think WAS testing contributes to improvements in student learning? (3) What do upper elementary teachers report to be the positive and negative impacts of WAS testing on curriculum and instruction? (4) Why do upper elementary teachers prefer to continue or eliminate MCAS testing as a means for improving student learning? The schools participating in this study came from 254 randomly selected elementary schools in Massachusetts. A total of 310 third, fourth, and fifth grade teachers were selected from 41 diverse public schools that represented 12 of all 14 counties within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The Teacher Perception Survey, which included 66 Likert scale items and the Teacher Perception Interview, which consisted of four interview questions were used to gather data for answering the four research questions. Data for research question one suggest that teachers did not consider MCAS testing to be inclusive of important learning being taught in the their classroom. Data for research question two reveal that teachers do not consider MCAS testing as a major reason for improvements in student learning. Data for research question three imply that teachers' view MCAS testing as having more negative than positive impacts on curriculum and instruction. Data for research question four suggest that teachers' preference for eliminating MCAS testing is more extreme than their desire to keep MCAS testing as a means for improving student learning. Seventy-seven percent of participating teachers indicate a preference for eliminating MCAS testing.