Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Instructional Systems Technology of the School of Education, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-01, Section: A, page: 0152. Adviser: Thomas M. Duffy. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed Jan. 8, 2007)."

Contemplative practices and orders of consciousness| A constructive-developmental approach

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: . Adviser: Steven Aragon. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 189-195) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

The purpose of this study was to describe the perceptions and experiences of teachers participating in an on-site master's degree program in their school district. Its intent was to provide school districts and universities with information for establishing future programs. To accomplish this, a questionnaire was distributed to teacher participants and instructors of six school districts in metropolitan Phoenix. Additionally, selected teacher participants, all program administrators and the university program administrator were interviewed. The following conclusions were based on the findings of this study. Teachers, instructors and administrators agreed that: (1) a master's degree is important to a teaching career and improves teaching, provided the course content is implemented. (2) participation in and completion of a master's degree program impacts student achievement. (3) courses taken through the on-site program were more appropriate than those offered through a university-based program. (4) a cohort system is beneficial to teachers in completing the program. Teachers agreed that: (1) a master's degree program has an impact on their practice. (2) courses in instructional strategies, diversity issues, special needs, child psychology, educational research and issues an valuable to their role. Instructors saw all courses offered as valuable. (3) the quality of a course is determined unilaterally by the instructor. (4) the convenience of proximity of the on-site program facilitates pursuing a master's degree. Teachers and instructors agreed that: (1) the on-site program is the best professional development for teachers and more helpful than inservice courses. (2) an on-site program should include more practical than theoretical aspects. All administrators indicated the program must include a balance. Teachers and administrators agreed that: (1) district and non-district instructors both provided quality instruction; however, district instructors bring relevant district information to the instruction. (2) the on-site program provides a meaningful professional development experience through its alignment with district philosophy and goals, and, as administrators further expressed, the optimum professional development experience for teachers. The long-term implication of the findings is the need for continued and extended university/school district collaboration in the area of teacher professional development.

This research examines the stress producing life events experienced by private college students and their possible effects on the retention rate of students at these colleges. A comparison of selected success factors was made between ATB students (students entering college without first completing a GED or high school diploma) and Non-ATB students (students completing a GED or high school diploma before entering college). A comparison was also made of selected success factors between past students who completed a program of study successfully and those who left college before successful completion of a program of study. Comparisons were made when the sub-populations of past students were further broken in ATB students and Non-ATB students. Comparisons were made of the total stress levels and the stress producing life events that were reported by ATB students and Non-ATB students. Data was collected during September 1998 at a small, private, four-year college in Southern Arizona, made up of 411 adult students enrolled in certificate, diploma, associate degree, and bachelor's degree programs. As with all adult students, the students at the college have enrolled in college to complete a program of study while maintaining the responsibilities of an adult life. The primary data collection instrument was a survey based on the Holmes and Rahe Social Readjustment Scale. Students were asked to indicate all of the events that they had experienced in the previous 12-month period. Students were asked for a variety of demographic data. Data was also collected from the college-maintained databases of all students enrolled at the college during 1993-1998. Few significant differences were found between ATB students and Non-ATB students to support the difference in the retention rates of the two populations. This suggests that it may not be the actual stress producing life events that affect the student's ability to persist until successful completion of his or her chosen program, but rather the individual student's ability to cope with those life events. Although there was a variety of slight differences, and the issue of the additive affect was not addressed by this study.

Over the last fifty years, literacy and its study have moved considerably beyond the ability solely to read and write; it may be now viewed as a centrally mediating factor to interpret the signs engraved into the texts of our experiences and the fulcrum to participate more fully in our public and our private worlds. Among these realms of literacy, the world of work has borne witness to incredible changes in the form and content of professional occupation. With growth in global political, economic and technological interdependency, transfer of knowledge and professionals across borders accelerates and becomes more prevalent. Addressing the professional domains of literacy practices, this is a descriptive study designed to investigate how professionals experience and use literacy, be they literacy skills (technical knowledge or expertise) or literate behaviors (practical knowledge or know how) in transnational contexts of practice. Using an ethnographic methodology and multimethod strategies (informant interviews with professional stakeholders from the regulated, globalized professions in the United States in construction and design, business and finance, allied health, and technology and engineering; published professional development international training program curriculum review; and focus group sessions with accreditation, licensing and certifying body officials addressing the need for guidelines for professionals in transnational practice) data gathering and analysis are focused on input from quality assurance authorities, faculty from professional schools, multinational corporate human resource executives, and the practitioners themselves. In the broadest sense, the study's purpose is to map the relevant dimensions of literacy in transnational professional practice in the regulatory, cultural, linguistic, technological and locational realities of another country. The results of this study indicate that across the affinity groupings mentioned above, professionals in transnational contexts of practice operate within at least five categories of literacy engagement: resources, people, information, systems, technology, with literacy skills and literate behaviors being directed principally toward working with people and within systems overseas. An array of literacy insights are also provided, drawn from thematic congruencies across the three data sets.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the assessment instruments that a southwestern community college (SWCC) used to evaluate its incoming students' academic literacy skills and to determine how well the results of those tests placed students in either college-level or developmental reading courses. The three college-level academic literacy instruments that were investigated were: the Nelson-Denny Reading Test (NDRT), the Degrees of Reading Power (DRP), and the Turrentine/Bradley Literacy Testing Battery (TBLTB), consisting of two response types: the TBLTB Multiple-Choice (TBLTB-MC) and the TBLTB Short-Answer (TBLTB-SA). Interrelationships were computed for reliability, concurrent validity and extent of agreement for placement into the three developmental reading courses. The three tests were administered to 88 students placed into the three developmental reading courses, Reading 071, Reading 081 and Reading 091, taught by the researcher during the Fall 1997 semester. The NDRT was used by the college for placement purposes. The DRP and the TBLTB were given during the first and second weeks of the semester for comparison purposes. Pearson Product-Moment correlations indicated that there were low to moderately low positive correlations among all the tests at the .01 level of confidence. The Kappas obtained between pairings of the three tests demonstrated that two of the tests showed concurrent placement validity: (1) the NDRT with the TBLTB-MC and (2) the TBLTB-MC with the TBLTB-SA. The extent of agreement exceeded the .01 level of confidence. The other tests did not show sufficient extent of agreement for placement purposes. The ANOVAS demonstrated significant mean differences among students placed into the three SWCC developmental reading classes by: (1) the NDRT and the DRP, (2) the NDRT and the TBLTB-MC and (3) the NDRT and the TBLTB-SA at the .01 level of confidence. Two other combinations of tests showed significance at the .05 level of confidence: (1) the DRP and the TBLTB-MC and (2) the DRP and the TBLTB-SA. Although the three tests did not have extent of agreement sufficient for placement into the three developmental reading classes, all three tests did agree that this sample of students did not possess college-level reading abilities.

This study: Rhetoric and Reality: USAID-Funded Training Programs for Professionals from the Former Soviet Union in the United States, attempts to gauge the intentions and motivations of the United States Agency for International Development's (USAID) foreign national participant training programs. USAID facilitates these training programs by providing foreign aid money to local subcontractors to train professionals from the former Soviet Union. Against this backdrop, the views of USAID are contrasted against the views and perspectives of the local training directors who receive this funding, and the training participants who are recruited by the U.S. government in their home countries so that they may travel to the United States to take part in this training. The results of this dissertation indicate that the U.S. government has been using these participating local training organizations to transmit an ideologically conservative agenda onto the training participants. The data portrays, however, a nuanced acceptance of this ideology among the trainers and the training participants. The data is also rife with contradictions, or 'disconnects', concerning the U.S. government's motives of its foreign aid policies, the training directors' acceptance of federal grant money to conduct the training, and the training participants' reaction to and internalization of the training messages embedded in the training programs.

This dissertation examines the use of group support systems (GSS) and cooperative learning techniques to improve classroom productivity. Cooperative learning assumes that learners have prior knowledge they can contribute, that knowledge is expanded, clarified and created as it is shared, participation is critical to learning and learners will participate given necessary and sufficient conditions. GSS were initially developed to support users and analysts in identifying system requirements, a task which satisfies the assumptions of cooperative learning. GSS features such as anonymity and parallel communication can overcome obstacles to cooperative learning such as air-time fragmentation, production blocking, free-riding, evaluation apprehension and dominance. Additional issues examined in this dissertation include the relationship between deindividuation and electronic communication and the effect GSS have on affective reward. The following research questions were identified: (1) What influence can the use of GSS have on classroom participation? (2) How are obstacles to participation such as dominance, free-riding, production blocking, evaluation apprehension and the sucker effect influenced by the use of GSS? (3) What effect can the use of GSS in the classroom have on both self-reported and observed learning? (4) What is the relationship between GSS and both flaming and off-task buffoonery in the classroom? (5) What is the relationship between GSS and affective reward? A longitudinal experiment was conducted comparing two sections of an introductory MIS course held in consecutive semesters. The two sections were identical with respect to lectures and class-activities with the exception that the second class received GSS-support for the course's eight group tasks. In the GSS-supported class, total student participation increased by over 500% with all students engaging in every task. Dominance was cut by 50%. Process losses such as free-riding, production blocking and the sucker effect were substantially reduced. Flaming and off-task buffoonery occurred in the first task and then subsided. Students in the GSS-supported class reported a greater degree of affective reward. Perhaps more impressively, students in the GSS-supported class were more successful in retaining and applying concepts learned during the group tasks.

<p> Community college graduation rates are low, and community colleges have been tasked with producing more graduates to meet workforce needs. Research has determined that engaged students remain at their institutions and complete their degrees. Service learning has been identified as a high-impact practice that engages students with their learning and builds connections between students and campus personnel. The majority of service-learning research, having been conducted with 4-year colleges and universities, may have limited applicability to the community college population. This qualitative descriptive case study describes how institutionalized service learning on 1 community college campus is structured, supported, and operated. The study used the framework of student success, service learning, and institutionalization to determine how the college provided resources and opportunities for service learning. Participants for the study were selected using mixed purposeful sampling to identify individuals recently involved with service learning at the college; data came from document reviews, campus and Internet observations, college staff interviews, and student group online discussions. Data were collected and analyzed using a spiraling technique. Findings indicated that the college's curricular and cocurricular service-learning activities were integrated throughout the campus in many departments and with different groups. While the service-learning coordinators made distinctions between curricular and cocurricular service learning, student participants did not make such distinctions. Students in this study were engaged with their service learning. These findings have applicability for all community college educators, demonstrating that institutionalized community college service learning might lead to greater retention through graduation.</p>