Thesis (Ed.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: . Adviser: Debra D. Bragg. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 158-164) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: . Adviser: Susan Noffke. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 222-231) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

<p> Mexican/Mexican-Americans are native to this continent on both sides of the U.S./Mexico Border and while projections show a 300% population increase by 2050, the struggle for equity and educational access persist. This Chicana Critical Feminist <i>Testimonio</i> reveals a Mexican/Mexican-American Ethic of Care which creates schooling spaces in which Mexican/Mexican-American students find healing, dignity, and academic preparation necessary to build hopeful futures for themselves and their families.</p><p> This research reveals curriculum and pedagogy that embody a Mexican and Mexican-American Ethic of Care and the <i>Testimonios</i> of racialized struggle and survival that undergird it. Utilizing Testimonio as methodology, I conducted individual interviews, field observations, focus group interviews, and collected ongoing self-reflections and photographic data over the course of five months with four Mexican/Mexican-American female educators within a mid-sized U.S./Mexico border city.</p><p> The findings of this study reveal rootedness of a Mexican/Mexican-American Ethic of Care within intergenerational <i>Testimonios</i> and within the larger Mexican/Mexican-American struggle for equity and access. Findings likewise reveal that participants reconstruct notions of social justice revolution through a blurring and blending of mainstream notions of revolution. Within participants' knowledge of the professional, personal risk of fighting for social justice in visible ways reminiscent of. the 1960's Chicano Movement, participants fight for their Mexican/Mexican- American students beneath an ambiguous blurring&ndash;a <i>mestizaje</i>&ndash;which conceals and protects their long-term ability to do so. Their concealed <i>Revoluci&oacute;n </i> is then fought by way of their tongue/language, physical bodies, and spirits as <i>Revolucionistas</i>&ndash; re-imagined and reconstructed Revolutionaries&ndash;who carry education as an ethical imperative.</p><p> Findings of this research have implications for educators at all levels and of all backgrounds to conceal and thereby sustain their battle for all marginalized students. Findings have implications for challenging mainstream constructs of success, for recruitment and retention of Mexican/Mexican-American teachers, and for rooting curriculum and pedagogy within <i>Testimonios </i> of resilience which position Mexican/Mexican-American students not within oppression frameworks but within the complexity of their intellectual and resistance legacies. Findings likewise have implications for researchers with regard to methodological reflexivity within decolonizing research epistemologies. Findings likewise challenge notions of researcher reciprocity and participants' inclusion as co-researchers within a Chicana Critical Feminist research epistemology. </p>

A systems thinking approach to classroom instruction is a relatively new instructional method, and effects of this approach have not been comprehensively documented even though interest in this approach is growing rapidly. This study examines teachers, emerging conceptions and implementation of systems thinking as a instructional methodology. The investigation explores the challenge of developing a systems thinking orientation among educators. Findings are based on the learning experiences of four middle school teachers working in an urban Northwestern school setting. A case study, ethnographic approach was used to investigate the teachers' emerging conceptions and implementation of systems thinking in their classrooms. Data were derived from journal entries, interviews, observation and classroom artifacts. Findings suggested that teachers perceived systems thinking as a beneficial classroom methodology, yet evidence supporting the validity of this perception was insufficient. In addition, teachers viewed systems thinking as an important life-long orientation and incorporated this view in their teaching. The impact of professional development structures such as training, resources, coaching, planning time, outside assistance, and a collegial atmosphere was significant. It was evident that teachers involved with systems thinking developed and articulated theories about the effects of systems thinking on their students.

Despite the more than 300 questions teachers ask on a daily basis, research indicates that teachers in elementary, secondary and post-secondary classrooms do not understand the power and potential of questions to advance student reasoning. It has been found that when teachers are taught to ask higher-level, open-ended, instructional questions, opportunities for student reasoning increases. However, there has been little research on the use of questions to advance reasoning in early childhood education. This research sought to determine the generalizability of available research on teacher questioning and reasoning to early childhood settings. Further, this research examined the effectiveness of a workshop developed by the researcher to teach teachers about the power and potential of questions. A quantitative examination of early childhood teachers' questioning techniques revealed that early childhood teachers' questioning techniques are similar to that of teachers in other settings. They were found to ask primarily lower-level, closed-ended and diagnostic questions. After participation in a workshop developed to improve the teachers' questioning techniques, the participants were found to ask more of the types of questions that advance reasoning.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the interaction of select variables (cognitive style, gender, and achievement) when middle school students are involved in learning about music through two different instructional modes. The two modes of instruction explored were a researcher-designed interactive hypermedia program and an expository teaching method. The sample consisted of the entire grade six and seven population of one public elementary school in a western Canadian city. A researcher-designed preknowledge test was administered to determine if any of the potential subjects had previous information about the lesson material--the steel band orchestras of Trinidad. To test for cognitive style, the Group Embedded Figures Test was administered to all potential subjects. Based on the results of these two tests, four groups were created: field dependent males, field dependent females, field independent males, field independent females. Half of the Ss from each of the four classifications were randomly assigned to the hypermedia instruction (experimental) group and the other half to the expository teaching (control) group. All Ss completed an achievement posttest immediately after treatment and a delayed posttest approximately six weeks later to test for long term retention. Results suggest that cognitive style, mode of instruction, and gender do not, either alone or in combination, affect long term retention of information by middle school music students. Irregardless of instructional mode, girls and boys in this project achieved similar results when measured using an achievement posttest. However, it was also found that field dependent female students using the hypermedia program achieved significantly lower posttest scores than any other combination of Ss' cognitive style, gender, and the mode of instruction being used. Contrary to previous studies, it was found that Ss receiving hypermedia-assisted instruction achieved significantly lower scores on the initial posttest than those experiencing an expository teaching lesson. Based upon these findings, recommendations for future research were made.

Over the years the field of evaluation has developed many models for evaluating curricula. These models suggest that teachers ought to be concerned about testing and measurement, technical quality, objectives, equity, and the views of stakeholders (Guba & Lincoln, 1989). The curriculum and teacher change literatures (Doyle & Ponder, 1977; Fullan, 1982; Hawthorne, 1992), on the other hand, have suggested that teachers are guided by a different set of concerns: student learning and classroom management, the amount of work involved, the pressure and support provided, the fit of the new curriculum with the teacher's system of beliefs, its clarity and explicitness, and so forth. Those studies, however, were based on curriculum innovations which were developed outside the school and implemented from the top-down. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the evaluative framework teachers used when they evaluated a curriculum developed within their own department. Focused interviews were conducted with six high school mathematics teachers. The teachers had been involved to varying degrees in the development of their own Pre-algebra course in which they replaced the textbook with an activity-based curriculum. The study found that the teachers, in general, considered those criteria suggested by the change literature to be of greater importance for evaluation than those suggested by the evaluation literature. The study also found that the teachers' views of the importance of the individual evaluation criteria was not uniform, but that the teachers' views were mediated by the degree to which they had participated in the development of the curriculum. A model of the teachers' evaluative framework was developed, but further research is needed to illuminate the role of the teacher participation. This study is of particular interest to those concerned with curriculum development, implementation, and evaluation.

This dissertation is an exposition of Percolation Theory, directed to the audience of beginning undergraduate mathematics students, though this can include gifted high school students. The vehicle by which the theory is taught is that of problem solving. The reader of the dissertation is invited into a web of mathematical exploration and inquiry by attempting to solve the real real-world problem of designing composite conductors. By making real composite conductors, carrying out various experiments, using computers to do data collecting, and using calculators for subsequent data analysis the reader can participate in the creation of mathematics, the development of mathematical techniques, and in the discovery of new and unexpected connections. The mathematics of Percolation Theory are in this way constructed with the reader. The necessity and importance of this work are many-fold. It is the first such treatise on Percolation Theory that makes the theory accessible to a larger audience than mathematics graduate or senior college students. It will be of interest to high school and beginning college students who desire to know in what real-world contexts some of the mathematics they know can be put. This work will be of interest to educators for the hands-on way in which it reinforces the student's current mathematical ability, while enriching the student's understanding of problem solving, mathematical modeling, use of technology, and probability.

This study investigated the factors that influence two secondary teachers' planning and teaching when incorporating newly acquired genetics content into their existing curriculum. Data included transcriptions of six audio taped interviews, field notes from two summer content courses and eight classroom observations, classroom documents such as work sheets, and content and pedagogical diagrams completed prior to and immediately following the two summer content courses. Data were analyzed and used to construct three cases: the case of content, the case of Natalie, and the case of June. The cases were combined for additional analysis. The cross case analysis aided in the identification of influential factors and the development of a model of secondary school curriculum influences. Factors found to influence teachers as they incorporate new content into their teaching can be divided into internal and external factors. Internal factors include: the teachers' past experiences with science, personal content knowledge, confidence, and beliefs about science, learning and science teaching. External factors include: students' abilities, time constraints, and physical classroom limitations. The findings suggest that the teachers' previous content knowledge and beliefs have the greatest impact in determining the new content a teacher will incorporate into her existing curriculum.

This study, conducted in a large southwestern U.S. city during the spring semester, 1997, explored an environment in which students in an engineering and technology magnet middle school were to work with video and computers to produce a series of products. The initial purpose of this exploratory-descriptive study was to look for literacy events relating to learning about these technologies. This study's population included the teacher, her classroom aide, the school's principal, and approximately 21 students. Students, who were to develop individual 10-step video production projects, achieved a mean of 4.55, a median of 4, and a mode of 3 based on step completed. only one student finished the project. Expecting each student to produce an individual project appeared to restrict the discourse necessary for students to learn the literacies of video and computers. Other mitigating influences involved materials and equipment, teacher health, and outside influences (e.g., a death in the family and university course work). Future studies should consider: (1) a classroom in which a strong collaborative/cooperative group relationship is established among the students and/or; (2) an approach examining several video production classes each day for an entire semester.