The purpose of the study was to explore and describe the perceptions of several elementary science mentors and their mentees within one school district based on a fivefactor mentoring model. Utilizing a qualitative methodology in the form of a case study, five mentors and three mentees were interviewed using a structured protocol. From verbatim interview data and field notes, three themes pertaining to the role of the mentor within elementary science emerged as emotional support, technical support, and educative support. Within the five-factor mentoring model, personal attributes suggested notions of support and expert status as critical elements for effective mentoring. The factors of system requirements, pedagogical knowledge, modeling, and feedback were found to be interrelated amongst themselves and with the factor of personal attributes. Effective mentors demonstrated a commitment to the role as well as a flexibility pertaining to role adjustment depending on the context of the mentoring relationship.

The purpose of the study was to examine college science professors’ beliefs regarding the use of inquiry in the college science classroom, how these beliefs impacted their instructional choices and how these beliefs were enacted in the classroom. Additional questions were how teachers’ beliefs vary across institution types (community college, private, four year college, and large research institution), and how beliefs vary across disciplines (life sciences and physical sciences). A case study design was required for this study due to the complexity of the topic and different data sources needed to answer the fore stated research questions. These data sources included surveys, interviews, classroom and laboratory observations and written records such as laboratory activities and syllabi. Twelve college professors at three different institutions; large research institution, small, private four year college and community college were interviewed. In addition to interviews, classes and labs were observed, a questionnaire on the five essential features of inquiry was given and samples of labs and syllabi were obtained. A laboratory coordinator was also interviewed as she was responsible for the laboratory section for two of the professors at the research institution. All schools were located in the southeast United States. The perception of inquiry by college science professors has been found to be a barrier to the inclusion of inquiry in college classrooms and was supported in the current study. While the professors described constraints to inquiry such as large class size, lack of time, disinterest of students, and lack of equipment, these limitations were due, in part, to the professors’ incomplete view of inquiry as what researchers do. This view was most pronounced with the professors at the large, research institution. At the research institution, observations in the classroom mirrored the beliefs of inquiry. Lecture was the primary instruction in the science classroom, and the labs were scripted and shown to be “cookbook” with little or no evidence of inquiry noted in the labs iv obtained. There was more evidence of inquiry at the private four-year college and community college than at the large research institution; what was observed in the classroom mirrored what the professors believed about inquiry. There was a difference in the beliefs between institutions with the professors at the research institution holding an incomplete view of inquiry while the professors at the private college and community college included many aspects of the inquiry continuum in their view of inquiry. There were no differences noted between disciplines.

In the face of environmental breakdown, this dissertation focuses on the emergent field of biomaking as a learning space to reflect on human-nature relationships. The purpose of this qualitative study is to explore what occurs in interspecies creative encounters (particularly between humans and fungi) and how ethical engagement can be supported through the design of biomaking experiences, techniques, and materials. Building on a constructionist tradition of maker education and drawing from embodied cognition, I propose a learning design framework to support learning through creative engagement with other beings. The Interspecies Creativity framework aims to (1) guide the design of constructionist experiences rooted in local ecologies and (2) foster mindful creative relations between learners and living systems. The design principles of the framework—grounding, listening, responding, and relating—invite learners to empathize with other living beings in their local landscapes to meet their needs while leveraging their behavior for collective creation. Using a design-based research approach, I developed a six-session biomaking workshop to test and refine the affordances of the framework. In this program, twelve middle school students built living art pieces at a lab and installed them at a nearby park, where they continued growing after the implementation. I gathered multimodal data—including interviews, questionnaires, videos, photographs, drawings, and artifacts—and analyzed the creative process from an embodied cognition lens. The study reveals that biomaking, intentionally framed as an interspecies creative practice, provides multiple entry points to deal with tensions and build relationships with living organisms and local ecosystems. I highlight critical events in the making process in which there was a shift in students' perception of the organism in their work. In these events, participants intentionally tested or where surprised by the organism's behavior, turning its agency apparent and decisive for the creative outcome. In closing, I offer practical and theoretical insights to guide the implementation of interspecies making and biomaking education to support learners in modulating creative interactions with their extended communities of life.

This study is an account of the Computer Science for All Initiative in New York City (CS4All). In this study, I draw on actor-network (Latour 2005) approaches to trace connections among actors in assemblage with this effort to bring computer science education to all students in all grade bands of New York City public schools in the span of ten years. I explore terms contained in the announcement and official descriptions of the initiative such as “public private partnership” “in use” (Varenne 1977) among actors. I trace assemblages and work involved in training in-service teachers to teach computer science. I also situate initiative goals related to, among other terms, employment, literacy, and equity “in use” as they relate to initiative activities such as recruitment and evaluation. This dissertation may be of most interest to those with connections to efforts to expand computer science education, and I hope it will also interest anyone who wants to engage with examples of changes in schooling. While this account traces a small span and limited part of the assemblage connected to the CS4All initiative, my hope is that it provides a worthwhile elaboration on the who, what, when and where of initiative efforts. I aim to treat descriptions of the initiative as a starting point to examining the large amount of work and many actors assembled with the initiative, both human and non-human. I join others in anthropology of policy who look to how policy is assembled in practices that are situated and far flung (Shore and Wright 1997; Levinson and Sutton 2001). In doing so, I aim to provide opportunities for those who wish to engage with schooling policies to make useful connections to an account of situated activities assembled with CS4All. In tracing an assemblage of actors involved in an initiative to change New York City public schools, I focus on actors and work outside of classrooms to extend this inquiry into the shaping of the conditions of schooling beyond school buildings and program settings. However, I also include teachers and the many roles they play in shaping the initiative in this account. I found actors assembled with a range of goals as they worked to connect the expansion of computer science education with institutions. Attempts to create standards, forms and evaluations unfolded in assemblage with these multiple goals and motivations for involvement. I hope this account is useful in joining with other examinations of how the conditions of schooling encountered by teachers and students in classrooms are made and remade in assemblages that extend beyond classrooms, through an instance of efforts to make changes in the largest public school district in the United States.

The ability to design controlled, unconfounded experiments in order to test hypotheses via the Control of Variables Strategy (CVS) is fundamental to all scientific reasoning and inquiry, considered a cornerstone of critical thinking as a whole which enables individuals to make valid causal inferences (Kuhn, 2005a). CVS is considered so crucial to science and science education, in fact, that various scientific and governmental agencies a have begun including it in student curricula, such as the Framework for K-12 Science Education (National Research Council, 2012), Benchmarks for science literacy (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1993), and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS; NGSS Lead States, 2013). However, despite its unique power and flexibility as a cognitive tool and its centrality to the entire architecture of scientific inquiry, most children do not spontaneously develop use of CVS without some form of instruction or scaffolding. According to the National Academy of Sciences (1995), students of various ages still have difficulty manipulating variables and conceptualizing controlled experiments. Thus, a significant amount of research effort has gone into the examination of the circumstances under which the learning and transfer of CVS is best supported. One such avenue has been within the realm of embodied cognition. Embodied cognition is a concept in Cognitive Science which suggests people create mental perceptual simulations of concepts in order to understand them (Barsalou, 2004; Morrison and Tversky, 1997; Martin, 2007). In the realm of CVS research, the computerization of instructional and assessment materials has met with some success. Klahr, Triona, and Williams (2007), for example, found virtual training tasks in CVS to be equally effective as training tasks with real physical equipment, a result replicated by Smetana & Bell (2012), as well as Triona & Klahr, 2003). Nonetheless, even in these studies, the virtual tasks undertaken by students appear to largely be an extension of a classroom lecture, merely replicating the experience of a physical task without taking advantage of the more unique qualities of the medium. Black (2014) found strong evidence for the potential of video games as perceptually rich grounding environments for embodied learning. Further, significant literature exists establishing the beneficial impacts of game-based learning on motivation and engagement (e.g. Rigby & Przybylski, 2009; Cordova & Lepper, 1996; Malone, 1981). This study combines these two streams of research by investigating the impact of an interactive simulation game on scientific reasoning skills, specifically effective use of CVS. It seeks to know the impact of game-based learning on scientific reasoning skills and engagement with science, as well as whether structured or unstructured access to an interactive narrative simulation game has a differential impact on immediate learning and retention after a delay following formal instruction. Students were randomized into three groups—two with unstructured and structured access to the game and a control group and given tests of scientific reasoning at baseline, immediately following the training phase, and a week thereafter. They then took two surveys on their science engagement and game experience, the latter of which also included submitting a record of their thoughts and reactions while playing the game. The study found significant effects of group on all measures, with the game groups outperforming the control, and the unstructured group showing the strongest performance in the post-study test while the structured play group performed the most poorly in the retention test. The unstructured group also showed the highest level of intrinsic motivation, as well as higher self-determination and self-efficacy than the structured playing group in the science engagement survey. The dissertation begins with an establishment of a theoretical framework and literature review before going on to discuss the study and game design in detail. Results and implications are discussed in depth.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether a read- aloud nonfiction picture books would increase fifth grade students' science comprehension as measured by a criterion reference test. Four questions guided the research in this study: 1. What are the benefits of reading aloud to fifth grade students? 2. According to the Fry Readability graph, what is the readability of the Harcourt textbook used in fifth grade and the readability of the nonfiction picture books chosen for this study? 3. Does the use of a read aloud nonfiction picture book increase fifth grade students' comprehension versus a round-robin instruction of the textbook? 4. What is the attitude of fifth grade students when exposed to read aloud picture books? The subjects in the study included eighty- seven students in four fifth grade classrooms. Four fifth grade teachers from two schools participated. Two fifth grade classes received the nonfiction picture book treatment and two received the textbook round robin instruction. Pretests were given before each lesson and posttests were given after each lesson or treatment. Based on the posttests scores of each group it was determined that the mean rate of change for students in the nonfiction picture book group exceeded that of the textbook group.

No description available.

Science students often bring naive models of the natural world to the classroom which can be resistant to traditional methods of teaching. If both the teacher and the student are unable to detect and change these conceptions, the student's ability to learn may be seriously impeded. A solution to this instructional dilemma would be to devise a method which a teacher could use to determine whether such naive models, or alternative conceptions, are held by a student and, if so, help the student to develop a plausible conception more in line with the current scientific viewpoint to replace each alternative conception. This is a report on the investigation of such a method: a microcomputer-based system for the diagnosis and remediation of three Aristotelian alternative conceptions of force and motion held by 8th-grade physical science students. The present investigation employed a microcomputer-displayed, graphics-based system to select students for possession of alternative conceptions and to posttest following remedial instruction. When alternative conceptions were detected, the system presented two simulations which were designed to facilitate the student's alteration of one or more of these naive conceptions. The instructional strategies incorporated into the computer simulations were consistent with a theory of instructionally-elicited conceptual change which: a) facilitated the student's recognition and discovery of a phenomenon which was anomalous to his or her conceptual framework and which epitomized the relevant scientific concept, and b) allowed the student to manipulate the objects and relationships of the phenomenon, experiencing the consequences of that action, so that the student would gradually adjust his or her conceptual categories until the phenomenon became anticipated. Students who had completed the study of force and motion (completed students) exhibited a very different pattern of non-scientific answers on the computer diagnostic test than did students currently studying that topic (in-process students). The completed students who were selected for possession of alternative conceptions were facilitated by the computer simulations in altering their naive conceptions to a significant degree. The computer posttest supplied evidence of the students' short-term conceptual change, and the Retention Test 1.5 months later supplied evidence of robustness of the change. / Ed. D.

The purpose of the study was to explore the effect of integrating technological activities with science instruction. The researcher examined whether fifth-grade students' achievement and curiosity relative to the science unit were related to their participation in classes where the experimental treatment was employed. A secondary focus of the study was to determine whether students' curiosity about the unit prior to studying it was related to their achievement. The researcher used a quasi-experimental,pretest/post test design for the study. The researcher developed and field tested two instruments for use in the study: a measure of curiosity and a measure of students' science knowledge and comprehension relative to the unit studied on changing forms of energy. The sample (n=l23) was drawn from a population of fifth-grade students in Staunton and Augusta County, Virginia. Classrooms were randomly assigned as treatment and control. Treatment group teachers taught the unit by having students participate in two technological activities that corresponded with the science unit. Control group teachers used traditional science methods (i.e., primarily teacher demonstrations of science experiments) to teach the unit. Pretest and posttest data were analyzed using correlation analysis and analysis of covariance procedures. The researcher reported a significant difference between treatment group students' and control group students' curiosity, favoring the treatment group. No significant differences were found between groups in science achievement and no significant relationship between students' curiosity and achievement was reported. The researcher concluded that the integration of technological activities with science instruction may positively affect fifth-grade students' curiosity but may not enhance or deter from their science achievement. Hence, the science-technology linkage shows promise as a useful method of promoting greater student curiosity without negatively affecting their achievement. / Ed. D.

Traditional explanations for the lack of scientific activity in the antebellum South are not sufficiently inclusive. Past accounts generally consider religion, climate, lack of urbanization, and deficiency of intellectual activity as the major causative factors. I assert that scientific activity was proceeding along "normal" developmental lines; that is, it was following the national pattern established by the Northern universities whose proximity to urban centers provided the impetus for the earlier start of intellectual activities of various sorts. In this thesis I present as a case study the scientific program at the University of Mississippi developed by John Millington and Frederick Barnard - - with a central focus on Barnard's efforts - - from 1848 to 1861. The case study provides evidence of a Southern academic institution's ability to hire qualified and ambitious scientists, to promote a sophisticated curriculum in science, and to procure the instruments necessary to support a full-fledged scientific effort. An Appendix provides a detailed inventory of the ante-bellum instruments at the University of Mississippi. / Master of Science