Much of the service-learning literature in higher education assumes that community service linked to classroom learning is inherently connected to concerns of social justice. While some service-learning practice aims to alleviate oppressive or unfair circumstances and promote "more just relationships," there is little research that examines the effectiveness of service-learning in developing that commitment. The purpose of this qualitative research is to understand how students' experiences in service-learning contribute to their understanding of and commitment to social justice. The program investigated is a four semester critical service-learning experience, named the Citizen Scholars Program, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Written assignments and interview transcripts from 11 women who participated in the program comprise the data for this dissertation research. This secondary data set was analyzed using grounded theory methodology to explore connections between students' participation in service-learning and their understandings of and commitments to social justice. The findings from this research suggest that participants in this study did develop more complex conceptions of social justice. Through the critical service-learning experience provided by the Citizen Scholars Program, students report being able to: develop authentic relationships with community members, question the distribution of power in society, and deepen their commitments to social justice. The study identified six properties of social justice sensemaking that appear to influence students' understanding of and commitment to social justice. Reflection on the self and experience, introduction to new information, contradictory experiences, relationships with peers and community members, and the idea of plausibility were all shown to spur students' social justice meaning construction. The findings of this study were used to develop a conceptual framework that charts how the critical service-learning experience of the Citizen Scholars Program facilitates social justice sensemaking. This framework can guide the work of scholars and practitioners who aim or hope to encourage social justice commitments in students. Students left Citizen Scholars with confidence in their views of social justice and a willingness to take action in alignment with those views. This research demonstrates that critical service-learning can foster a greater sense of agency to act in support of social justice.

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 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.