This research examines the digital communication and composing practices of a group of preschoolers with touchscreen tablets. Four year-old children were invited to take on the role of digital composer as they used an open-ended drawing app, Sketches2, and an email program, Mail, on iPads to send emails to parents. Fifteen children in a NAEYC accredited preschool in a large, southern U.S. city took part in the iWrite study in their classroom between August and November. Qualitative analysis of the data allowed for a description of young children as digital composers. Children were found to be quick to adopt the physical skills need to compose messages on the iPads, engaging in activities such as tapping, swiping, drawing, pinching, knuckle dragging, and typing. Typing styles included a two-handed grown-up style and a one-handed hunt-and-peck style. Children relied on the adult for support generating messages and also for specific procedural and technical supports. During the composing process, the adult worked with children as she demonstrated, invited, encouraged, prompted, co-authored, authored, and redirected, commented and asked questions. Children engaged in exploratory, playful and purposeful ways with the iPads, creating products with much variability across modes. When composing messages, children selected typing over writing letters by hand. Children tended to select holiday-specific stamps from the selection of the stock images available in the app. These stamped images did not always correspond with the content of the email message.

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

This dissertation is a grounded theoretical analysis and design study of adults and youth counter-mapping their neighborhoods. Counter-mapping involves residents making claims to resources for the future by leveraging the representations and tools of the state or other powerful entities. The concept of counter-mapping evolved over three phases of research, each phase informing the next. First, counter-mapping was an emerging object of study in a participatory planning process with adults. Second, counter-mapping was a cumulative learning objective for designing an experimental teaching case study with youth participating in an after school bicycle workshop. Third, counter-mapping was a vehicle for (the same) youth to realize spatial justice for their communities in conversations with urban planners and local stakeholders. Data include audio and video recordings of naturally-occurring activity and participation in designed activities, interviews, GPS, and time-diary entries. These data were analyzed using interaction and multi-modal discourse analysis techniques. As a theoretical construct, counter-mapping was as a thirdspace practice where informal and formal ways of knowing and producing space came together. At this interface, productive tensions emerged that facilitated new forms of learning spatial literacies and civic engagement for imagining and planning for a more equitable urban arrangement.

Accumulating evidence from research indicates that input from teachers, measured at the utterance level, may positively impact childrens language and vocabulary growth. To date, few studies have investigated teachers commenting practices during shared book reading. The purpose of the present study is to evaluate the effects of the level of instructional strategies and content of teachers comments on the vocabulary growth of children with differing funds of knowledge. A sample of 52 Head Start preschool teachers who were randomly assigned to one of three different curriculum conditions was video taped during shared book reading sessions. Videos were transcribed and coded for the instructional level of teachers comments, as well as the content. Descriptive analyses reveal the effect of curriculum on teachers commenting practices, as those assigned to the experimental condition produced more comments associated with language growth. Multi-level modeling was used to determine the effects of teachers commenting practices on childrens end of preschool receptive and expressive vocabularies, and general language ability, in relation to childrens initial levels of vocabulary knowledge. Children with differing levels of vocabulary profited differently from teachers instructional comments and content, with typical language children receiving more benefits. Evidence indicates that direct instruction through medium-level strategies linked with content within the childs zone of proximal development was the most influential for producing receptive vocabulary growth. The differences in learning between the two groups of children indicate a need for differentiation of strategies during shared book reading so that all children may receive appropriate instruction. Implications for the practice and future research, and limitations are also addressed.

The level of challenge, or cognitive demand, of the tasks students solve is the foundation for their learning opportunities in mathematics classrooms. Unfortunately, it is difficult for teachers to effectively use cognitively demanding tasks (CDTs). I seek to understand how to support and improve mathematics teachers enactment of CDTs at scale. The purpose of this three-paper dissertation is to address some of the key unresolved questions and to set a direction for future research. <p> In paper 1, based on a comprehensive literature review, I identify 13 potentially relevant factors and elaborate a method for building on results from small-scale studies to better understand the enactment of CDTs across large samples of teachers. <p> Paper 2 investigates how teachers mathematical knowledge for teaching and their beliefs about teaching and learning mathematics are related to their enactment of CDTs. I found that aspects of teachers knowledge and beliefs are interconnected and are significantly related to their enactment of CDTs. <p> Paper 3 investigates changes in teachers enactment of CDTs over time and whether their interactions with colleagues (e.g., work with a math coach, advice-seeking interactions) are related to these changes. I found that the mere occurrence of interactions was generally not sufficient to support teachers development, and expertise available within interactions did not influence the productivity of those interactions. However, advice-seeking interactions were significantly related to teachers development. Further, the lack of expertise within interactions might have contributed to these findings. <p> These three studies suggest that there is much more to be understood about supporting teachers enactment of CDTs. There is, however, evidence that teachers mathematical knowledge for teaching and their beliefs about teaching and learning mathematics are integral to their enactment of CDTs, and that they are interrelated. In addition, it is clear that in designing supports for teachers enactment of CDTs, schools and districts should go beyond policies that provide only opportunities for interaction, and should specifically plan productive activities and enhance the available expertise within those interactions.

This study synthesizes what is known about strategic reading pedagogy through a meta-analysis of research on multiple comprehension strategies instruction (MCSI) for young adolescents in grades 4-8. The average effect of MCSI on reading comprehension was found to be 0.36 (p<0.01) for standardized measures and 0.55 (p<0.01) for non-standardized measures. For measures of students knowledge of strategies and their ability to use strategies while reading, the average effect sizes were 0.73 (p<0.01) and 0.77 (p<0.01), respectively. MCSI had positive effects on achievement for a variety of student populations. Effects for all four outcomes varied significantly across studies, which justified the need for moderator analyses to identify factors that strengthen and weaken the impact of MCSI on student achievement. Several characteristics of the content and pedagogical methods used in MCSI had marginally significant relationships to treatment effectiveness after accounting for methodological and sample characteristics. The findings of this study update and expand previous reviews of research on comprehension instruction and provide recommendations for classroom practice and future research in this area.

The following multi-paper dissertation addresses issues of effectiveness and implementation inherent in preschool curriculum interventions. This document consists of an overview of challenges faced by educational researchers and issues addressed by the three separate papers that follow. These papers include: (1) a meta-analysis examining the effectiveness of preschool curriculum interventions; (2) an analysis of fidelity instruments used in preschool studies; and (3) a report illustrating the development and use of fidelity and quality measures.

Many educators, organizations, committees, and curricula promote the importance of preschool childrens math talk, particularly among children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, to better prepare children for elementary school mathematics. However, there are no clear examples of preschool math talk, no specific guidance on strategies for developing this skill, and little evidence it leads to greater math achievement. Talking About Mathematics in preSchool (TAMS) was a project designed to explore these issues. Activities and strategies theorized to develop and encourage preschool math talk were piloted with 58 preschool children in three Head Start classrooms over six weeks. To test the final model of a math talk intervention, 95 preschool children enrolled in nine diverse Head Start classrooms were pre- and post-tested using five measures of achievement. Children were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions. The first condition involved a pull-out intervention where children played small group math games that developed number sense. The second condition was identical to the first condition, but children were also encouraged to engage in math talk during the games. The third condition carried on business as usual, serving as the counterfactual condition. Using linear mixed modeling, results showed that children who participated in either treatment condition made significantly greater gains on all math measures than children in the control condition. Further, children who played games with a focus on math talk showed greater gains than children who only played math games, although the differences between the gains in the two groups were not statistically significant. The same pattern of results emerged from analyses testing childrens gains on nine early numeracy skills targeted by the intervention. Children who played games with a focus on math talk gained significantly more than those in the control condition on all nine early numeracy skills. Children who only played math games gained significantly more than those in the control condition on five of those skills. Results from this study are directly relevant to the types of interactions teachers could adopt to foster childrens early math development.

This three-paper dissertation investigates how mathematics coaches support teachers to develop ambitious instructional practices that will provide richer opportunities for students learning. The goal of the first study was to identify types of activities established in the professional learning literature as being likely to support teachers development of high quality instructional practices. Therefore, I conducted a conceptual analysis to determine the potential value of different types of activities in terms of the learning opportunities they provide for teachers to develop deeper understandings of mathematics, student reasoning, and ambitious instructional practices. The results of this analysis delineated a range of activities that, when facilitated effectively by coaches, have the potential to support teachers learning. In the second study, I used social network and interview data collected across seven middle schools in a large urban district to examine what influenced mathematics coaches to become a central source of expertise. The findings suggest that teachers perceptions of the coachs competence, specific structural aspects of the school setting and principal support may influence whether a majority of teachers within a school go to their coach for advice or information about teaching mathematics. Finally, in the third study I analyzed interview data of one coach across four years to investigate what, in addition to being relatively accomplished teachers, mathematics coaches need to know and be able to do in order to engage teachers in activities that are likely to support their development. This analysis identified potential practices that coaches need to be able to do and aspects of knowledge that coaches need to provide individualized support for teachers. Overall, I sought to understand how mathematics coaches can support mathematics teachers development. Together, these three interrelated studies constitute a significant step towards this goal and contribute to research on content-focused coaching. In addition to research contributions, these studies have pragmatic implications as the findings can assist district leaders in implementing or revising current school-based coaching designs.

The sociological literature on professions often portrays medicine and law as ideal-type professions. This is asserted largely on the basis of a list of criteria that tends to commonly include: extended education, specialized knowledge, prestige and autonomy. Other occupations, such as teaching, are seen to not measure up. This study questions the legitimacy of this claim and the relevance of literature, which does not seem to recognize the current reality of teacher’s work. Based on data collected through interviews with high school teachers, it becomes clear that they see themselves in a very different light. The issues that are of particular interest are the way the education system’s structure actually increases teacher autonomy and the importance of self-perception to professionalism. The need to reassess the literature is argued in light of these missing elements.