published_or_final_version / abstract / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / abstract / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / abstract / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / abstract / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

This study examined the role service learning might play in increasing students’ public speaking self-efficacy in a required public speaking course. By increasing students’ public speaking mastery experiences with real world audiences and by providing them with additional feedback from community professionals in the audience, a service learning approach might potentially raise students’ perceptions of public speaking selfefficacy beyond what is gained from a public speaking course taught in a traditional way. A repeated measures, quasi-experimental study design with a comparison group was utilized in this study. Participants included 274 students enrolled in service learning public speaking courses and 328 students enrolled in traditionally taught public speaking courses at the University of Kentucky during the fall 2010 semester. Students enrolled in the service learning sections participated in at least 10 hours of service at a local nonprofit agency in lieu of classroom “seat time” over the course of the semester and developed their speech assignments around the experiences they had at the agency. First, this study attempted to provide support for a new measure of public speaking selfefficacy. In addition, it examined the relationship between students’ public speaking selfefficacy and their public speaking skill, as well as whether students enrolled in the service learning sections experienced different levels of public speaking self-efficacy than their non-service learning counterparts. This study also aimed to discover which sources of self-efficacy are most influential for students in developing their public speaking self-efficacy. Finally, this study compared speech performance ratings (including overall speech performance generally and delivery, structure, and content specifically) of students enrolled in service learning sections and students enrolled in traditional sections. Overall, results provided support for a new public speaking selfefficacy scale. In addition, public speaking self-efficacy and skill were weakly correlated. Next, service-learning and non-service learning students did not differ significantly on measures of public speaking self-efficacy or skill. Finally, mastery experiences seemed to have a larger impact on public speaking self-efficacy for servicelearning students than for non-service learning students.

<p>Abstract</p><p>This study reports a project within which leaders in a local government administration develop their skills about and in action learning. The main focus is on the conditions that are needed in an action learning process. The aim is to analyse the working process, how the leaders make use of their own experiences from daily working life and put them into questions and actions, and finally, to question and analyse my own leading process as an action researcher.</p><p>During nearly two years, the leaders taking part in the study and myself have been involved in a complex, social process where experiences from daily working life have put questions into actions and investigations.</p><p>Results show that the leaders, through the working process, learned how to investigate, collect information and analyse data. Time and process were found to be key concepts in their action learning. Uncertainty characterised the leaders´ initially work while the enthusiasm and more initiative from their side appeared as the work proceeded. Through the process they had to deal and struggle with their staff’s notions about working conditions as well as their own leadership. Demands on responsibility for their own actions were mixed with a permitting atmosphere holding both laughing and testing of new ideas. Another result shows tensions within this learning process, on one hand, between the leaders who wanted to keep their agreed understanding and, on the other, my intentions to challenge their understandings. The variation and changing in interaction patterns over time between me and the leaders seem to be crucial to make this project the leaders´ own working process. My leadership changed from initially instructing, to coaching and finally to take a back seat. A main conclusion from the study is that designing adult education in a learning perspective, deals with working methods as well as content.</p><p>Keywords: action learning, leadership, interaction, process, experiential learning, adult education</p>

<p>After rigorous criticism on trait approach and with the emergence of behavioral approach in entrepreneurship during 1980s, the researchers started to introduce learning and cognitive theories in entrepreneurship to describe and explain the dynamic nature of entrepreneurship. Many researchers have described venture creation as a core and the single most important element of entrepreneurship. This thesis will discuss and present the role of entrepreneurial learning and heuristics in venture creation. Hence, the purpose of this research thesis is to study and analyze the role of entrepreneurial learning and heuristics in venture creation.</p><p>To fulfill the purpose of this thesis, we followed qualitative research and conducted semi structured interviews with open ended questionnaires to collect empirical data. For this study, we have included only four interviews which were conducted on four different businesses based in Jönköping, Sweden, following convenience sampling. In the analysis, we used data analysis model of Walker, Cooke and McAllister (2008) and inductively generated three propositions, depicting the role and importance of entrepreneurial learning and heuristics in venture creation.</p><p>Individuals adopt entrepreneurship in their careers with necessary skills, abilities, and knowledge, which are learned or gained through experiential learning and/or vicarious learning (i.e., learning by observing or modeling the actions of others). Learning by doing is considered the most important factor by entrepreneurs which helped them to overcome different business start up hurdles, to make various entrepreneurial decisions and to perform many entrepreneurial activities during venture creation. Similarly, individuals within their own situation use, learning by observing or modeling other people’s behaviour, actions and consequences of the actions. Entrepreneurs use learning by modeling the behaviour and actions of others as benchmarking strategy during venture creation. Entrepreneurs believe that without any learning they will not be able to start their own businesses. Heuristics as decisions making mechanism, particularly during venture creation, is used by entrepreneurs as simplifying strategy when sufficient information related to a specific market, certain industry and products are scarce. Additionally, entrepreneurs are passionate to grab profitable business opportunity, and due to time pressure and brief window of opportunity, they can’t go for gathering each and every information of the potential business or product. Hence, heuristics as decisions making mechanism is considered the best suitable approach to make many entrepreneurial decisions during venture creation.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>

The purpose of this research is to examine ways that the instructional use of voluntary risk-taking and multimodality might decrease preservice elementary educators' artistic trepidation and assist them to reconceptualize elementary art education. The study investigates participant-reported impacts and insights, and inspects ways that participants utilize multimodality during course assignments. This qualitative action research study was conducted in a semester-long arts methods and materials course with 23 participants who were university preservice elementary education students. Data were collected during instruction through open-ended questionnaires, researcher fieldnotes, participant fieldnotes, course culmination projects, participant artwork, written reflections, and participant-created elementary art lesson plans. A hybrid theoretical construct utilized both multimodal and reconceptualist theories. Participant self-reported comfort ratings during the study indicate increased artistic comfort in both making art and teaching art after instruction. Findings from the study suggest the need for educators to focus on arts integration during course instruction and to address the art apprehension held by some preservice elementary educators. Insights shared confirm that recognizing preservice elementary educators' multimodal skills contributes to educational possibilities for their own future instructional practice. By facilitating voluntary risk-taking and multimodality opportunities during the teaching of art education to preservice elementary educators, this study contributes to scholarship about successful instructional strategies and the importance of contemporary arts methods.

The Teaching Abstract Algebra for Understanding (TAAFU) project was centered on an innovative abstract algebra curriculum and was designed to accomplish three main objectives: to produce a set of multi-media support materials for instructors, to understand the challenges faced by mathematicians as they implemented this curriculum, and to study how this curriculum supports student learning of abstract algebra. Throughout the course of the project I took the lead investigating the teaching and learning in classrooms using the TAAFU curriculum. My dissertation is composed of three components of this research. First, I will report on a study that aimed to describe the experiences of mathematicians implementing the curriculum from their perspective. Second. I will describe a study that explores the mathematical work done by teachers as they respond to the mathematical activity of their students. Finally, I will discuss a theoretical paper in which I synthesize aspects of the instructional theory underlying the TAAFU curriculum in order to develop an analytic framework for analyzing student learning. This dissertation will serve as a foundation for my future research focused on the relationship between teachers' mathematical work and the learning of their students.