In response to the federal legislation No Child Left Behind, schools across the country implemented required reading programs for classroom instruction. Open Court's Reading program meets this criterion for many schools. The text in Open Court Reading for grades two and three was evaluated for science and social science content standards that would be supportive of environmental education. Supplemental lessons from Project Learning Tree, Project WILD, and Project WET were identified.

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

Designed to answer the overarching question: does the implementation of direct vocabulary instruction strategies improve the comprehension of fifth grade students during the social studies lessons? The study included three fifth grade classes in the Corona-Norco Unified School District. To answer the question seven areas were considered: lesson selection, word selection, developing a vocabulary note guide, developing the test with a rubric, making handouts with critical analysis questions, designing semantic maps and semantic feature analysis handouts of the lesson design. Results showed that students who received the direct instruction in vocabulary words benefited greatly and in most cases doubled their score from the pretest to the posttest. The control group showed minimal to no growth from the pretest to the posttest.

The problem with which this investigation is concerned is the effect of work-study method instruction upon the achievement of students in fifth grade social studies. The purpose of this investigation is to determine the effects of the SQ3R (Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review) Study Method instruction upon the achievement of students in fifth grade social studies. The subjects ranged in age from ten years two months to thirteen years three months. Th I.Q. for the subjects ranged from 70 to 135. Of the 102 subjects involved in the study, 42 were male and 60 were female. The I.Q. score from the California Test of Mental Maturity, S Form was used to structure the subjects into three intelligence levels. Fifty-four subjects served as the experimental group, and forty-eight served as the control group. The instrument used to obtain pretest and posttest scores on the variable relating to achievement was the SRA Assessment Survey, Blue Level. Form E was used for the pretest, and Form F was used for the posttest. The subjects were assigned to four classes which were near equal. Two classes were selected by the principal to serve as the experimental group. The other two classes served as the control group. The investigator spent equal time with the control and the experimental group. The four classroom teachers rotated between experimental and control groups on an equal basis. Students in the experimental group met nineteen times during the study for a thirty-minute period. During these sessions, the experimental subjects used the SQ3R Study Method to do social studies assignments. The control group met for the same number of sessions and for an equal amount of time. They worked with the same content but without using the SQ3R Study Method. The analysis of covariance was employed with pretest scores as the covariant.

The problem of this study is concerned with the change in social distance to foreigners after the inclusion of Spanish language instruction in a four-week, fifth-grade social studies unit on Latin America.

The purpose of this study was to assess whether guided practice is more effective than no guided practice (1) in fifth and sixth grade classrooms, (2) in fifth and sixth grade social studies classrooms and fifth and sixth grade science classrooms, and (3) in science classrooms and social studies classrooms. In this experimental study, all fifth and sixth grade students in a small school district in north Texas were randomly assigned to two experimental groups and two control groups in each grade. Over the course of one month two teachers who had previously been trained in the use of guided practice procedures taught the experimental groups in each grade, using, extensive guided practice. Two other teachers taught the control groups in each grade without the use of guided practice. Students in both groups were administered a pretest before beginning each of two chapters in each textbook, while a posttest was administered after the study of each chapter. The analysis and interpretation of data yielded the conclusions that the use of guided practice in classes can be expected to result in higher student achievement than in classes using little or no guided practice in the following areas: science classes, social studies classes, sixth grade classes in general, fifth grade classes in general, fifth grade science classes, and fifth grade social studies classes. The use of guided practice did not result in significant gains in student achievement in sixth grade science classes and sixth grade social studies classes when compared with classes which used little or no guided practice.

This qualitative case study examined the extent to which learning styles were used by teachers in four seventh and eighth grade social studies classrooms in a large suburban north Texas junior high school. The conclusions were as follows: 1) The environment on the junior high level did not afford the flexibility found in the elementary classroom. The changing of students, teachers, and the multi-purpose use of rooms did not afford flexibility of light, temperature, sound, and design preference. 2) The physical and the psychological categories had elements within each category that overlapped. A right brain activity closely aligned to a tactile/kinesthetic activity. A parallel between physical-mobility and psychological-global was noted, as well as a pattern between the global and the tactile/kinesthetic projects. 3) The split lunch period created problems for the global, kinesthetic, impulsive students. The academic environment was interrupted for a thirty minute period; students had to re-acclimate to a more analytic environment after lunch. 4) Each teacher alternated between primary style and secondary and tertiary styles. This mediation ability enabled each teacher to use all styles in lessons the researcher observed. 5) Abstract random and concrete random teachers did more group and team teaching than concrete sequential and abstract sequential teachers. Further, dominant sequential ordering in a teacher limited random activities. Whereas, dominant random ordering in a teacher limited sequential ordering activities. Both groups of teachers experienced teacher burnout when forced out of their primary style. 6) It was easier for those teachers whose primary and secondary ordering were opposite (CS/CR or AS/AR), as opposed to those whose primary and secondary ordering were the same (CS/AS or CR/AR), to align to a different environment. 7) These results suggest that teachers should not be required to stay in any one style. The flexibility of being able to alternate between styles will conserve energy and prevent teacher burnout.

This dissertation entitled “Educational choice and educational space” aims to explore the confluence of constructed space and geographic space using a supply-side context for New Zealand’s public school system of quasi-open enrollment. In Part I, New Zealand’s state and state-integrated school system across four urban areas is analyzed spatially and analytically in an attempt to learn about supply-side motivations of individual schools for selecting students. Since 1999 there has been a gradual encroachment on the open enrollment initiative due to excess demand for certain schools altering the landscape of choice. Most studies of school choice examine household motivations to choose schools- what is referred to as the demand-side dynamic of the education market. The contribution of this study to educational choice literature is provided by the opportunity presented by New Zealand’s public education system to examine the supply-side dynamic. School motivation for choosing students is warranted by the fact that individual schools are funded on a per-pupil basis and they are able make operational decisions that include defining their own catchment areas (home zones) when oversubscribed. In order to test the hypothesis that schools are behaving selectively, I leverage boundary discontinuity design (BDD) (Bayer, Ferreira, & McMillan, 2007) and meta-analysis techniques and use census data that reflects neighborhood composition closely linked to the time at which the home zone was drawn. Household characteristics as represented by 2006 census data are within 5 years old at the time the home zone was drawn in 53-percent of cases, and range to a maximum of 7 years for the full sample of schools used in the analysis. The result is a truly unique opportunity to examine evidence of school selective behavior while accounting for logistical, geographic and market features. Across a sample of 886 publicly funded state and state-integrated schools in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin I evaluate 372 schools that implemented enrollment schemes with geographically defined home zones as of the 2009 school year. I find that schools are engaging in selective behavior across one or more household socioeconomic or demographic characteristics – with indicators of deprivation and minority status consistently maintaining significance in boundary and zone discontinuity. Between 37 and 52-percent of schools sample-wide are estimated to be participating in gerrymandering in small to large ways (discontinuities were greater than 0.2 standard deviations, favoring households with affluence and non-minority status). Cases of medium to large discrimination (standardized mean differences of >0.5) are evident in 12 to 26-percent of schools. Schools are zoning out households that contain higher proportions of minorities with an emphasis on non-indigenous (Māori) minorities, in particular the Pasifika group. When examining schools separately by city, sector, gender and school student body socioeconomic status I find heterogeneity in school behavior. Findings corroborate and expand upon previous work regarding New Zealand’s policies of enrollment schemes and their adverse effects. Part II expands the implications of school-level selective behaviors to the macro setting of the metropolitan area education market. Because school zones are not mandated to be mutually exclusive or completely exhaustive of the metro area they serve, it is possible that home zones overlap in some areas and provide no coverage in others. School choice is modeled using an ordered probit approach where the number of home zones claiming the household (census meshblock) is the dependent variable. I also calculate meshblock-level schooling opportunity sets (SOS) for the primary and secondary sectors using methods developed by (Gibson & Boe-Gibson, 2014). The SOS factors household-school proximity with school performance into a summary estimate of educational opportunity for each meshblock. The determinants of each meshblock’s choice set and SOS are modeled as a function of household characteristics, with controls for geographic and market influences. I find evidence that both the size and quality of household educational opportunities are statistically significantly associated with socioeconomic status and racial composition. Affluence is a strong predictor of additional choices and higher quality school access while racial composition continues to be negatively associated with both. The “lay of the education landscape” is then considered for each metro area using the Index of Dissimilarity and mapping techniques. The exercise reveals helpful insight into each of the four education markets. The dissertation concludes with a discussion on the implications and relevance of this work to educational reform discourse and planning for both New Zealand and abroad.

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Formal curricula, official curriculum documents and recommended resources, are revised periodically and have the opportunity to reflect feminist scholarship available at the time of writing. This feminist project analyzes the treatment of women's history in British Columbia's Social Studies 8-10 Integrated Resource Package 1997, the Social Studies 11 Integrated Resouces Package 1997, and the History 12 Integrated Resource Package 1997, all of which are due to be implemented in September, 1999. Informed by feminist historiography and pedagogy, the above curricula are analyzed using the following thematic organizers: degree of representation; segregation versus integration; experience, diversity and voice; and the construction and deconstruction of gender knowledge. A sampling of recommended learning resources found in the above Integrated Resource Packages are also examined for their treatment of women's history. The outcome of the research suggests that while limited gains have been made in the degree to which women are addressed in the new curricula, the manner of representation largely reflects her-story approaches that have been considered problematic by most feminist historians since the mid-1970s. Recommendations for future revisions are also included.