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Across the United States, schools are largely segregated by race and ethnicity, resulting in schools that are densely Latino and teaching staff who are overwhelming monolingual English speakers, as most teachers are white women. This has created difficulty in home communication in these schools. Given the positive impacts of personal and frequent home communication, a greater capacity of teachers to communicate with parents may be an important asset in school improvement efforts. This study looks at ongoing design-based research efforts to engage bilingual students in helping their teachers become more capable of communicating in Spanish. Through online-delivered challenges, teachers and students work together to complete a series of tasks that help teachers learn about communicating across cultures and preparing several communication aids to help them reach out to Latino immigrant parents more frequently. Through a narrative profile analysis, we uncover the influences the five-week intervention had on teachers' home communication efforts, beliefs in their own ability to develop stronger language skills, and relationships with students. The findings inform a set of preliminary procedures for a new method of research into understandings skills they use outside of school. We call this new method Integrating Funds of Knowledge. The findings also inform a set of core conjectures on how this method can help educators partner with their students to work toward solving a problem in their school.

BACKGROUND: Faculty members in higher education participate in a diversity of scholarly activities. Feedback performance and data on these academic contributions must be tracked for multiple formative and summative purposes including faculty development, promotions, and annual reporting requirements. However, this data are frequently not captured, primarily because most teaching institutions have not implemented a system to effectively collect and report this data. PURPOSE: This thesis designed prototypes for an online performance analytics dashboard for Health Sciences faculty members, including researchers, teachers, administrators, leaders, and clinical educators. This project incorporated UCD (user-centered design) to focus on the end-users and seek to understand their needs and wants. METHOD: McMaster University was used as a case study for this Design-Based Research study. Dashboard preferences were gathered from literature reviews, stakeholder interviews, document analysis, focus groups and interviews. These findings informed the build of a dashboard prototype. Multiple iterations of end-user evaluation and prototype revisions were conducted to refine the design. A constructivist grounded theory approach was utilized to analyze qualitative data from focus group and interviews to generate theory. RESULTS: 25 key resources from the literature review were listed in an annotated bibliography. 10 stakeholders were interviewed. Several McMaster policies and forms were reviewed. 18 faculty members reviewed the dashboard and provided feedback. Qualitative data from focus groups and interviews revealed 4 main themes pertaining to dashboard needs. CONCLUSION: By designing prototypes, this study revealed several requirements and considerations for the construction of a faculty performance dashboard. The dashboard must be customizable, dynamic, organized by user groups, and include specific requirements for the relevant faculty roles. The quality, governance and weighting of data in the dashboard must be considered. Notably, the implementation of this solution would enhance faculty learning and assessment, data reporting and faculty development in the Health Sciences. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

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Thesis advisor: G. Michael "Mike" Barnett / Student engagement is a central concept for educational practitioners, researchers, and evaluators, both as its own outcome and as connected with motivation, achievement, attainment, careers, and civic participation. In science and engineering education, young adolescence is a period when many students become disaffected or disengaged, especially when youths’ racial and ethnic, cultural and linguistic, and gender identities are not sustained through educational designs and implementations. Since a reemergence in the 1980’s, scholarship has approached student engagement in either individualistic or collectivist ways, with more hybrid and holistic models only recently emerging. In particular, more work is needed to explore whether social engagement is its own distinct dimension, or whether it intersects with dimensions like affective, behavioral, and cognitive engagement. This three-paper dissertation takes a philosophical lens of dialectical pluralism to interrelate multiple worldviews when examining student engagement, during an in-school-time invention project and an out-of-school-time invention camp. Adopting the methodology of a cultural psychology approach to design-based research, the study first considers the project and camp separately, then culminates in a cross-case comparison of the two. All papers are situated in “Mills City Public Schools”, a semi-urban district in the Northeast US. The first paper considers the second iteration of an insulating-device project with grade seven students. The second paper explores the second annual “Winter Vacation Camp” with grades six-eight campers inventing electronic doors. The third paper compares those two interventions, in a manner targeted towards educational practitioners. In sum, the paper-set provides qualitative, quantitative, and integrated evidence that a six-dimensional model is conceptually warranted and practically useful, through examples at the individual, small-group, and classroom/camp levels. Further, it provides educational design considerations for both in- and out-of-school time learning environments. The new model and design considerations support planning and analysis for more equitable engagement of youth, especially those with identities historically minoritized in science and engineering education. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

The aim of this thesis is to contribute knowledge on conditions for science teaching in preschool. While Swedish preschool practices commonly build on children’s subjective experiences, scientific knowledge production is often associated with objectivity and detachedness. Seen from that perspective, tensions may occur when the knowledge cultures of preschool and science meet, as when science teaching is implemented in preschool. This thesis seeks to explore issues that are crucial for teachers to negotiate when they implement science teaching in preschool. The thesis includes five articles that build on empirical data in the form of teachers’ talk (interviews, focus group discussion, project meetings) and observation data from preschool practice. The data analyses draw on various theoretical perspectives, including communities of practice and feminist critique of science as well as theoretical concepts connected to framing and agential realism. The main result is that it is crucial, to teachers’ implementation of science teaching in preschool, that science content is open to children’s contributions. Further, the results show that teachers integrate several different forms of knowledge production when working with science content in practice. For example, observations and systematic investigations are combined with imagination and children’s bodily experiences. This goes against the presumed tensions between the knowledge cultures of preschool and science. However, tensions between the knowledge cultures are indicated by teachers’ unwillingness to interfere with children’s investigative processes or ideas about science content by relating children’s ideas to scientific explanatory models. Seen from a teacher’s perspective, it appears to be unproblematic to leave children’s ideas about science content unresolved, compared to leaving children’s ideas about social relations and other content unresolved. Drawing on the results, I discuss teaching beyond the limited material and temporal dimensions of the science box, which emerges as a metaphor when teachers describe a way of teaching that they are not comfortable with. Further, I suggest that the concept working theories, which addresses children’s tentative ideas about relations in their surrounding world, be introduced in preschool science teaching, to ease the perceived conflict between children’s ideas about science and scientific explanatory models. / Förskolans praktik i mötet med naturvetenskap / Miljöer för naturvetenskap i förskolan

There has been considerable research into the teaching and learning of argumentation (e.g. Andrews, 2009; Sadler, 2004), focusing on strategies designed to help students to structure their written arguments. My study, however, focuses on the process of argumentation because I want to help sixth form students, aged 16-19 years old, improve the written argument in their A level History essays. The methodological approach followed was an adapted form of Design-based research, which incorporated an exploratory study, teacher trials and three case studies as part of the iterative design process. A classroom intervention was devised underpinned by design principles based in persuasive argumentation (Kuhn, 2005) and dialogic talk (Wegerif, 2012), derived from an extensive literature review, and the findings of the exploratory study. The exploratory study involved interviews with History education academics and examiners as well as classroom observations and semi-structured interviews conducted in collaboration with the teachers and students of four secondary History departments. Observations were taken of the teacher trials of the prototype intervention, whereas the data gathered from the case studies included pre and post intervention essays, audio and video recordings of the developed intervention in action, post intervention student interviews and questionnaires as well. In Case study 1 and 2, AS and A2 students’ post-intervention causation essays, when measured for argumentation, showed improvement but those whose written arguments improved the most were those students who had engaged in interactions rich in dialogic talk (Wegerif, 2012). The findings from Case study 3, which involved the integration of documentary evidence into AS History essays, were unexpected. Students found the integration of source-based evidence difficult not only during the course of the spoken argumentation but also in their written responses. Further development of the intervention is necessary to help students handle source material effectively in both the spoken and written forms of argument.

Cette thèse en éducation aux sciences s'intéresse d'une part à la manière dont des lycéens peuvent comprendre les controverses soulevées par les nanotechnologies et d'autre part à la façon dont ils prennent de la distance face aux discours portés par différents acteurs sur ces développements technoscientifiques. Une analyse des controverses menée en utilisant des méthodologies de sociologie des sciences nous a d'abord permis de mettre en évidence que ce ne sont pas seulement les productions issues des nanotechnologies qui sont questionnées dans les débats sur les nanotechnologies en France. La manière dont ces programmes technoscientifiques existent et sont mis en œuvre dans nos sociétés démocratiques est également interrogée voire remise en cause. Cette analyse épistémologique et sociologique de la controverse a orienté l'élaboration d'une séquence pédagogique, suivant l'approche des recherches “ design-based ”. Les activités qui la compose ont été construites au travers d'un travail mené au lycée avec quatre classes de première S (élèves âgés de 15-17 ans). Elles s'articulent autour d'un jeu de rôle, d'une recherche documentaire et d'une séance de synthèse aboutissant à un document résumant le positionnement de la classe sur les nanotechnologies. L'analyse des productions orales et écrites des élèves a été effectuée d'une part, en utilisant le modèle de scolarisation des controverses socioscientifiques d'Albe (2007) afin de caractériser la compréhension collective que les élèves avaient de la controverse. Nous nous sommes ainsi intéressés aux savoirs qu'ils mobilisaient dans leurs interventions et leurs écrits. D'autre part, nous avons caractérisé leur prise de distance par rapport aux discours qu'ils rencontraient, notamment en identifiant les éventuelles argumentations fallacieuses dans leurs prises de paroles. Nous nous sommes pour cela appuyés sur la théorie pragma-dialectique de l'argumentation de van Eemeren et Grootendorst (1996, 2004). Ces analyses ont montré que les élèves s'étaient emparés d'une diversité d'aspects de la controverse. Ils se sont montrés capables de comprendre des documents directement issus de l'espace social et de questionner certains discours portés sur les nanotechnologies, en particulier les discours qu'ils percevaient comme des discours d'acceptabilité. Au moment de formuler leur avis, les lycéens ont eu cependant tendance à reproduire un discours vague et consensuel stipulant que le développement des nanotechnologies est bénéfique mais qu'il existe des “risques à prendre compte”, et qu'il faut informer le public. / The purpose of this manuscript is to characterize the ways highschool students can grasp nanotechnologies controversies and to identify how they critically consider different discourses held by different actors about these technoscientific developments. As a first step, we completed an analysis of the controversies raised in France by nanotechnologies. It showed that in addition to questions about the products of nanotechnologies and their effects, the ways nanotechnologies' programs are developped and currently exist in our societies constitute a bone of contention. We used this epistemological and sociological analysis of the controversies as a touchstone to progressively design a set of school activities. To elaborate them, we also resorted to a design-based research approach and implemented them with four groups of about 30 15-17 years old students. The final pedagogical sequence consisted of a role play, a webquest and a last activity were students completed a text summarizing their collective stance on nanotechnologies developments. The analysis of students' oral and written productions that we have carried out, is twofold. In order to characterize their collective understanding of the controversies raised by nanotechnology, we analyzed the contents of students' interventions by using Albe's (2007) model on schooling socioscientific controversies. Moreover, attention was paid on how students' critically consider discourses on nanotechnology, in particular by identifying fallacies in their argumentation. This was performed following a pragma-dialectical approach of argumentation (van Eemeren and Grootendorst, 1996, 2004). These analyses showed students grasped many aspects of the controversy. They proved able to understand some documents directly emanating from the social space. They also critically discussed some discourses held on nanotechnologies, in particular the ones they regarded as acceptability discourses. However, when expressing their opinions, students tended to reproduce a common and vague stance asserting that nanotechnologies developments is to breed benefits but also entails some “ risks that have to be taken into account ” and that the public has to be informed about them.

abstract: Virtual Patient Simulations (VPS) are web-based exercises involving simulated patients in virtual environments. This study investigates the utility of VPS for increasing medical student clinical reasoning skills, collaboration, and engagement. Many studies indicate that VPS provide medical students with essential practice in clinical decision making before they encounter real life patients. The utility of a recursive, inductive VPS for increasing clinical decision-making skills, collaboration, or engagement is unknown. Following a design-based methodology, VPS were implemented in two phases with two different cohorts of first year medical students: spring and fall of 2013. Participants were 108 medical students and six of their clinical faculty tutors. Students collaborated in teams of three to complete a series of virtual patient cases, submitting a ballpark diagnosis at the conclusion of each session. Student participants subsequently completed an electronic, 28-item Exit Survey. Finally, students participated in a randomized controlled trial comparing traditional (tutor-led) and VPS case instruction methods. This sequence of activities rendered quantitative and qualitative data that were triangulated during data analysis to increase the validity of findings. After practicing through four VPS cases, student triad teams selected accurate ballpark diagnosis 92 percent of the time. Pre-post test results revealed that PPT was significantly more effective than VPS after 20 minutes of instruction. PPT instruction resulted in significantly higher learning gains, but both modalities supported significant learning gains in clinical reasoning. Students collaborated well and held rich clinical discussions; the central phenomenon that emerged was "synthesizing evidence inductively to make clinical decisions." Using an inductive process, student teams collaborated to analyze patient data, and in nearly all instances successfully solved the case, while remaining cognitively engaged. This is the first design-based study regarding virtual patient simulation, reporting iterative phases of implementation and design improvement, culminating in local theories (petite generalizations) about VPS design. A thick, rich description of environment, process, and findings may benefit other researchers and institutions in designing and implementing effective VPS. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ed.D. Educational Leadership and Policy Studies 2014

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Many teaching and learning practices in higher education, including social work education in South Africa, tend to be characterised by a transmission mode of instruction, whereby knowledge moves from the expert educator to the student. This study investigates the extent to which an authentic learning framework can be used to improve the teaching of meso practice in social work to a class of 80 second-year students at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. A modified version of educational design-based research, was deployed which created a set of guidelines to inform future research and course design. Design-based research includes an iterative process, however, and the four-phased modified version of design-based research used in this study deploys just one roll-out of a redesigned course on meso practice, using the elements of authentic learning (Herrington, Reeves & Oliver, 2010). Phase 1 consisted of a review of the literature on meso practice education and the authentic learning framework. Phase 2 involved an analysis of practical problems identified by six educators and four field instruction supervisors, based on the way they teach and supervise students in the area of meso practice intervention. In Phase 3 the course was implemented and evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively by the student participants and four field instruction supervisors. Phase 4 consisted of a reflection on the entire process, to produce design guidelines using the elements of authentic learning and the inclusion of affect in course design. Mixed-methods research was undertaken, incorporating primarily qualitative data with quantitative data from a survey conducted with the students. Findings from this study have led to an augmented list of authentic learning elements, which includes the use of affect in meso practice and the development of guidelines for educators which have the potential to be relevant and applicable in other courses, contexts and disciplines. / NRF / Pillay, R. (2017). Crafting a meso practice course using elements of authentic learning for undergraduate social work students in South Africa. PhD thesis. University of the Western Cape