This qualitative and quantitative study examines the potential improvement in aggressive student behaviors when a block schedule is implemented in a rural, low socio-economic and multi-cultural middle school. The number of incidents of physical aggression and harassment were obtained from official school records for the years 1992-1996. Interviews were also conducted with staff members who had long term tenure in the school and who had a clear vision of student behaviors both pre and post-block schedule implementation. The face value of the school record data suggest a dramatic improvement in student behaviors. These data corroborate very closely with interview information. Teachers believe behaviors have substantially improved. In 1992-1993 there were 30 assaults in the school. In 1993-1994 there were 15, in 1994-1995 there were 0, in and in 1995-1996 there were 4. The substantive conclusion is the development and implementation of a block schedule in this particular middle school was highly successful in helping alter the aggressive behaviors of students. / Graduation date: 1997

There is no abstract available for this dissertation. / Department of Educational Psychology

There is no abstract available for this dissertation. / Department of Counseling Psychology and Guidance Services

Children's interaction with peers supports cognitive development in numerous ways. The claim investigated in the present study is that these benefits include support at a metacognitive level that children provide one another, specifically in the form of meta-level speech aimed at regulating the other's behavior. This proposition originates in Vygotsky's views of a bi-directional zone of proximal development between peers with resulting transfer from inter-mental to intra-mental planes. Sixty-four 7th graders participated in the study. Students who shared a position on a social issue engaged in electronic dialogs with a succession of pairs who held an opposing position. In one condition (Stay), students worked with the identical same-side partner over six twice-weekly dialog sessions. In the other condition (Switch), students worked with a new same-side partner at each session. Students experienced both conditions, half of them first the Stay condition and then, discussing a new topic, the Switch condition. Condition order was reversed for the other half of participants. Students engaged in more frequent meta-talk in the Stay than the Switch condition; Stay conversations contained more frequent regulatory utterances than Switch conversations and a greater proportion of planning statements. Electronic dialogs produced in the Stay condition contained a higher proportion of meta-talk than those produced in the Switch condition; however, differences favoring the Stay condition in direct counterargument use were found at only one of two data collection points. On the whole, differences suggest that collaborators scaffolded one another’s meta-level development through regulatory conversation that evolved over time as collaborators developed their relationships, and that, for Stay pairs, this evolving shared regulatory talk extended to the electronic discourse. There was no consistent evidence, however, that this success extended to argument strategies on the discourse task.

This dissertation research focuses on assessing student behavior, academic emotions, and knowledge within a middle school online learning environment, and analyzing potential effects on students’ interests and choices related to decisions about going to college. Using students’ longitudinal data ranging from their middle school, to high school, to postsecondary years, this dissertation uses quantitative methodologies to investigate antecedents to college attendance that occur as early as middle school. The dissertation asks whether student behavior, academic emotions, and learning as early as middle school can be predictive of college attendance years later. This is investigated by developing predictive and structural models of said outcomes, using assessments of learning, emotions and engagement from student interaction data from an online learning environment they used in their middle school curriculum. The same middle school factors are also assessed with self-report measures of course choices, interests in college majors and careers formed when they were in high school. The dissertation then evaluates how student choices and interests in high school can mediate between the educational experiences students have during middle school and their eventual college attendance, to give a fuller illustration of the cognitive and non-cognitive mechanisms that students may experience throughout varied periods in school. Such understanding may provide educators with actionable information about a students’ in-depth experiences and trajectories within the college pipeline.

Previous research has shown that instruction followed by problem solving (I-PS) is an effective pedagogical approach in many procedural domains, but engaging students in problem solving before instruction (PS-I) can benefit conceptual learning and transfer. However, it is unclear which order of instruction is optimal for domains that rely heavily on both procedural and conceptual knowledge, such as symbolic modeling. This study investigates optimal order of instruction for learning modeling when instruction is based on incorrect examples. In an experiment with 97 eighth graders, we tested which order of instruction, I-PS or PS-I, was most beneficial for learning to create and evaluate mathematical models of rate-based situations, and for transferring learning to create models with different structures. The study also investigated whether optimal order of instruction depended on a student’s prior knowledge. Students in the I-PS condition performed better on model generation, regardless of prior knowledge, but no condition differences were found in model evaluation or transfer outcomes. Students in the PS-I condition reported more instances of confusion. Confusion negatively predicted transfer and showed a trend toward negatively predicting model evaluation. However, confusion did not mediate the relationship between condition and learning outcomes. This study extends the research on the role of instructional order in learning, and its impact on students’ affective experiences.

This study examined relationships among epistemic beliefs, achievement goals, self-regulated learning, cognitive strategy use, and academic performance for 131 sixth graders and 100 eighth graders.

School garden programs have become increasingly popular for their diverse, positive benefits. School gardens are often promoted as a relatively low cost means to offer hands-on learning opportunities that may foster academic achievement, particularly in the sciences, however only six studies have been published on the impact of garden education programs on science achievement. Five out of six of these studies focused on elementary age students. One study has identified motivational engagement as the mechanism responsible for fostering academic success. School gardens are more common in elementary schools. However, they may be most beneficial in a secondary school setting, when students tend to lose interest in academics and often perform poorly on national assessments of science. Thus, in this study we evaluated adolescent students at three schools with well-established garden education programs. We used pre-test and post-test measures to see how students' levels of various predictors of engagement (e.g. autonomy, competence, relatedness, and intrinsic motivation), actual engagement (in the realms of academics, science, and the garden), garden learning, and academic achievement measures (e.g. overall grade point average and science grade point average) would change over the course of this study. We also assessed how the different realms of engagement correlated with predictors of engagement, with garden learning, and with academic achievement measures. In addition, we examined correlations among the different realms of engagement. At one of the schools, a non-gardening group participated in the study as a control group. Thus, we also compared the gain scores in predictors of engagement, engagement, and academic achievement between the control and garden group from that school. At all three schools, academic or garden engagement significantly increased for the garden groups. Garden engagement was significantly correlated with academic engagement, science engagement, or both, at each of the three schools for post-test measures. Predictors of garden-based engagement were significantly correlated with academic and/or science engagement at each school, at least for post-test measures. These results show that gardening may have the potential to be a contributor to positive motivational changes that in turn can be related across academic domains. The non-gardening group showed significant gains in predictors of- and engagement itself, while the gardening group either marginally declined or maintained its level. However, the non-gardening group had significantly lower pre-test scores in comparison to the gardening group, which in part accounts for their comparative significant gain. The garden group showed significant increases in predictors of garden engagement and garden engagement itself. These results show that the garden group, comprised of at-risk students, are experiencing positive motivational benefits, which can possibly prevent further decline in their general performance. The lack of improvement in academic achievement suggests that the full academic benefit of garden education programs has yet to be consistently reached. We recommend that researchers use a more refined evaluation test and survey, specific to the garden program at hand and include qualitative measures. / Graduation date: 2013

The present study examined the factor structure and measurement invariance of the revised version of the Athletic Coping Skills Inventory (ACSI-28), following adjustment of the wording of items such that they were appropriate to assess Coping Skills in an educational setting. A sample of middle school students (n = 1,037) completed the revised inventory. An initial confirmatory factor analysis led to the hypothesis of a better fitting model with two items removed. Reliability of the subscales and the instrument as a whole was acceptable. Items were examined for sex invariance with differential item functioning (DIF) using item response theory, and five items were flagged for significant sex non-invariance. Following removal of these items, comparison of the mean differences between male and female coping scores revealed that there was no significant difference between the two groups. Further examination of the generalizability of the coping construct and the potential transfer of psychosocial skills between athletic and academic settings are warranted.

郁之虹. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 335-354). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in Chinese and English. / Yu Zhihong.