<p>To address the U.S. labor shortage in the fields of agriculture and STEM, higher education needs to recruit, retain, and prepare more underrepresented minority students into agricultural and STEM disciplines. Teachers play important roles in student learning, which can lead to student academic and professional success. With university classrooms becoming more diverse, faculty need to adopt inclusive teaching methods in order to accommodate the needs and expectations of diverse students. Culturally responsive teaching embraces and integrates students’ culture into the teaching and learning process. As a result, culturally responsive teaching can offer a more engaging learning experience for all students; however, in the context of higher education, there is a lack of understanding and application of culturally responsive teaching by faculty. This study examined students’ perceptions of culturally responsive teaching practices in their first college mathematics course through a developed and modified instrument for higher education. Further, this study used a structural equation model to predict the relationships among students’ perceptions of culturally responsive teaching, sense of belonging and academic self-efficacy. Data were collected through the anonymous questionnaire administrated through Qualtrics. Participants of this study were undergraduate students enrolled in the college of agriculture, college of science and college of liberal arts at a predominately white institution (PWI) and an Historically Black College and University (HBCU). Five conclusions were generated from the study. First, the scale developed to measure students’ perceptions of culturally responsive teaching in higher education was a valid instrument. Second, college students observed and sensed different types of culturally responsive teaching differently. Third, students’ perceptions of culturally responsive teaching predicted students’ academic self-efficacy and sense of belonging. Fourth, students who had a higher sense of belonging were more confident as college students. Finally, African American students at an HBCU had higher perceptions of culturally responsive teaching. Implications for practice were provided to help promote the application of culturally responsive teaching in higher education. Recommendations for future research were also discussed to inform future studies regarding culturally responsive teaching in university settings.</p>

Thesis advisor: Marilyn Cochran-Smith / The purpose of this study was to understand beginning teachers’ experiences with learning to teach in an educational system that puts intense pressure on teachers to prepare students for standardized tests. The situation is common in many developed and developing countries whose educational systems are run by policies grounded in neoliberal and human capital ideologies. Using a phenomenological research design, I explored teachers’ experiences in two very different educational systems, the United States and South Korea, and focused on the commonalities and differences of their experiences of learning to teach. I recruited four secondary-school teachers (two English and two mathematics) who had been teaching fewer than three years from each country. I conducted a series of three phenomenological interviews with each teacher in his or her native language, following the guidelines set out by Irving Seidman (2012). My analysis suggested that, although there were many differences between US and Korean teachers’ lived experiences in the context of test-based accountability, the groups were primarily similar. Both novice teachers in the United States and Korea faced significant conflicts between their prior beliefs about good teaching and the educational system that demanded them to teach to tests. All teachers in this study described experiencing various levels of frustration with having to teach to the tests, which was not their preferred approach to teaching. While struggling to meet the demands of their test-based accountability systems, the beginning teachers in this study established firm student-centered beliefs and strived to integrate practices that were consistent with their beliefs. The findings suggest that support in the form of policies and teacher education is necessary to promote teachers’ constant learning and growth in the challenging context of test-based accountability. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

Instructional practices in mathematics courses at two-year colleges include lecture as the predominant instructional form in 78% of two-year colleges, with class sizes averaging about 26 students (AACC, 2005). The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) indicates that there is a need for change in the practices of mathematics teachers because students are not being served well by the traditional pedagogical approaches (Burrill & Hollweg, 2003). The standards-based reform movement has had a positive impact on pedagogy but there are ongoing issues of alignment of teaching strategies to more student-centered practices (Barrington, 2004). This study examined the standards-based teaching practices of college mathematics faculty in the first two years to answer the research questions: What alignment exists between two-year college mathematics instructor’s knowledge and the instructional standards published by the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges in Beyond Crossroads? What are the components that characterize the instructional practices of two-year college instructors? What relationship exists between the alignment of Two-Year College mathematics faculty instructional practices with Beyond Crossroads? An interpretative qualitative methodology with an embedded survey was applied to examine how the American Mathematical Association of Two Year Colleges standards are currently being aligned with instruction in the first two years of college. An analysis of the data revealed that standards-based teaching strengthens instructor delivery and accommodates diverse learning styles. Mathematics faculty use technology as a teaching tool and use a variety of student-centered activities to engage students to help them make meaningful connections. Findings from the study suggest there exist a strong relationship between the American Mathematical Association of Two Year College standards and instructor practice in the first two years. The findings indicate that mathematics faculty struggled in changing their instructional practice to meet the needs of their students. Furthermore, findings suggest that those invested in the mathematics education in the first two years constantly adjust their teaching through professional development opportunities. Additionally, mathematics faculty modified the curriculum to customize their instruction to align with standards-based teaching practices as their knowledge and awareness of standards develops as a professional.

The growing complexities and dramatic changes in the contemporary health care system require nurses to practice successfully with essential professional knowledge and skills required for safe and competent practice. The implication is that nurse educators are confronted with the challenge to redefine effective teaching strategies appropriate to prepare nurses for the complexities of the current practice demands. To this end, student-centered teaching (SCT) has emerged in many undergraduate nursing curricula as a tool to develop essential practice skills in nursing students. A lack of understanding of how nurse educators experience SCT may hinder its success and sustainability. This qualitative study explored the lived experience of clinical nurse educators (CNEs) using SCT in the practice settings. Ten CNEs who self-identified as using SCT volunteered to participate. Data were collected using a semi-structured interview guide and audio recorder. Additional data source included a demographic survey and a reflective journal. Analysis of the CNEs’ perspectives revealed an overarching theme entitled “SCT in a non-student-centered world” with a variety of meanings of SCT from a humanistic point of view. Participants identified individual, staff, and contextual factors including policy issues that hinder successful implementation of SCT in the practice settings. The study also unveiled that a successful paradigm shift to SCT may not be the sole responsibility of the CNEs but a joint endeavor by all stake-holders within the health care delivery system. Findings of this study may be used by nursing and health sciences faculty and administrators to guide policy and program planning that incorporates student-centered clinical education. / October 2016

There has been a call to reform science education to integrate scientific thinking practices, such as data interpretation and modeling, with learning content in science classrooms. This call to reform has taken place in both K-12 science education through Next Generation Science Standards and undergraduate education through AAAS initiative Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education. This dissertation work examines undergraduate students' learning of multiple scientific thinking skills in a curricular format called Teaching Real data Interpretation with Models (TRIM) applied to a large-enrollment course in Cellular and Developmental Biology. In TRIM, students are provided worksheets in groups and tasked to interpret authentic biological data. Importantly, groups are tasked to relate their data interpretations to a 2D visual model representation of the relevant biological process. This dissertation work consists of two studies with the overarching question: How do students use model representations to interpret data interpretations? In the first study, we primarily describe how students learn to navigate and interpret discipline-based data representations. We found the majority of groups could construct quality written data interpretations. Qualitative coding analysis on group discourse found students relied on strategies such as decoding the data representation and noticing data patterns together to construct claims. Claims were refined through spontaneous collaborative argumentation. We also found groups used the provided model to connect their data inferences to a biological context. In the second study, we primarily target our analysis on how individual students relate their data interpretations to different modeling tasks, including student-generation of their own model drawing. I interviewed students one-on-one as they worked through TRIM-style worksheets. From iterative qualitative analysis of transcripts and collected video on hand movements, I characterize the forms of reasoning at play at the interface of data and model representations. I propose a model at the end of Study 2 describing three modes of reasoning in data abstraction into models. I found when relating between data and models, students needed to link signs in both representations to a common referent in the real-world phenomenon. Establishing this sign-referent relationship seemed to depend on bringing in outside mechanistic information about the phenomenon. Once a mechanism was established, students could fluidly move between data and model representations through mechanistic reasoning. Thus data abstraction seems to rely on mechanistic reasoning with models. The findings from this dissertation work support the feasibility of student development of multiple scientific thinking skills within a large lecture course, and provide targets for curriculum and assignment designs centered on teaching higher order reasoning skills.

The intent of this two-phase, sequential explanatory mixed methods study was to examine the role teachers' beliefs play when making instructional decisions. The population included in-service teachers representing four Career and Technical Education disciplines located within the commonwealth of Virginia. Using a stratified random sample, 622 teachers were selected for the quantitative strand, and employing a system of four contacts, quantitative data were collected from 292 participants. Dweck's Theories of Intelligence scale assessed the nature of in-service teachers' beliefs about intelligence, and the Epistemic Belief Inventory was used to measure their epistemological beliefs. Finally, the participants rated their use of teacher-centered and student-centered teaching methods. In the second phase, qualitative data were collected from nine participants to further understand how in-service teachers' beliefs are related to the teaching practices they use. The quantitative and qualitative data were combined to determine if the descriptions of teaching method used, beliefs about intelligence, and epistemological beliefs aligned with the outcomes of the quantitative questionnaire. Significant correlations existed between the Theories of Intelligence scale and the Epistemic Belief Inventory. A significant positive relationship existed between the Epistemic Beliefs Inventory and the overall teaching practices score, indicating in-service teachers' advanced epistemological beliefs are related to the use of student-centered teaching practices. A regression analysis indicated that teaching discipline, epistemological beliefs, teaching experience, and highest level of education completed predicted the teaching practices in-service teachers' select. The qualitative data supported the claim that beliefs about intelligence and epistemological beliefs influence teaching practices. Six themes emerged from the qualitative data, and the themes were used as a framework for organizing the findings. The researcher acknowledges that teachers possess a variety of beliefs, and those beliefs influence how teachers teach. The researcher recommends that teacher educators attempt to identify the beliefs pre-service teachers hold, and if modifications of beliefs are needed, facilitate interventions to modify those beliefs. While some have labeled the direct relationship between teacher beliefs and teaching practices as "messy", the evidence indicates the two, are in fact, related. / Ph. D.

Using a combined quantitative, qualitative approach, this study explores the teaching practices of outstanding faculty at a private, liberal arts institutions by posing questions that revolve around learner-centered teaching practices, characteristics of outstanding teachers, effective teaching, and pressures on the professoriate related to the phenomena of academic capitalism. Outstanding professors from the College of Arts and Sciences, and Schools of Business, Education, and Nursing were invited to participate in this research. Weimer's (2002) five learner-centered changes to teaching practice framed this investigative study. This conceptual framework consists of altering the role of the teacher, balancing power in the classroom between teacher and students, changing the function of course content, instilling student responsibilities for learning, and using different processes and purposes for evaluation that serve to guide teacher and students interactions throughout the course.The findings of the study suggest that faculty from the School of Education agree with and implement all five of Weimer's (2002) learner-centered changes to teaching practice. However, there is incongruence between the learner-centered teaching beliefs and learner-centered teaching practices of outstanding teachers from the College of Arts and Sciences and the Schools of Business and Nursing. This study seems to indicate that several pressures on the professoriate including the phenomena associated with academic capitalism affect teaching practices in the classroom. Existing learner-centered practice models can be informed by the salient findings of this study.

In Senegal, in recent years the rural sector has undergone major reforms which are partly due to macroeconomic policy reforms adopted by the Senegalese government. Therefore, all the actors of economic and social development have a common concern and share in promoting rural agriculture (Bernard et al., 2008). Changes observed in the agricultural and rural sector reflect the will of the actors to have a productive, competitive, and sustainable agriculture system in order to ensure food security (International Monetary Fund, 2011). The purpose of the study is to develop a set of recommendations to improve the educational program planning and teaching skills of educators in the extension system by focusing on extension educators' approaches to teaching farmers and cart owners animal welfare practices for proper care of working animals. The extension agents and teachers involved in the animal husbandry and animal extension system in Thies and Bambey served as participants in this study. This descriptive qualitative study connected qualitative data derived from participant interviews, qualitative document analysis, observations of an educational program planning professional development program for state agents and university faculty members in Diourbel and Thies regions, as well as a final focus group to allow participants clarification of preliminary themes found in the data. The findings revealed 11 themes: characteristics of the participants, job expectation and responsibilities, institutional and organizational factors, capacity building and professional development plans, diagnostics of the extension system, regulations and legislations, limited sources of information, limited knowledge and skills technologies, recommendations for utilizing student-centered teaching practices, standard welfare for animal husbandry, recommendation for acceptance and improvement standard animal welfare related to the four research questions which addressed the topics of challenging current teaching methods used in the extension system for other owners of animal species in the animal extension programs, the use of student-centered teaching practices in extension education and university instruction, and the level assistance given to farmers in order to ensure accepted standards of animal welfare working animal and other animal species in the animal husbandry system. / Master of Science in Life Sciences / In Senegal, in recent years the rural sector has undergone major reforms which are partly due to macroeconomic policy reforms adopted by the Senegalese government. Therefore, all the actors of economic and social development have a common concern and share in promoting rural agriculture (Bernard et al., 2008). Changes observed in the agricultural and rural sector reflect the will of the actors to have a productive, competitive, and sustainable agriculture system in order to ensure food security (International Monetary Fund, 2011). The purpose of the study is to develop a set of recommendations to improve the educational program planning and teaching skills of educators in the extension system by focusing on extension educators' approaches to teaching farmers and cart owners animal welfare practices for proper care of working animals. The extension agents and teachers involved in the animal husbandry and animal extension system in Thies and Bambey served as participants in this study. The methodology used for this descriptive qualitative study were interviews, qualitative document analysis, observations of an educational and professional development program planning for state agents and university faculty members in Diourbel and Thies regions, as well as a final focus group to allow participants clarification of preliminary themes found in the data. The data collected from participants were connected to the different used qualitative methods to gather data. The 11 themes found in this study were the characteristics of the participants, job expectation and responsibilities, institutional and organizational factors, capacity building and professional development plans, diagnostics of the extension system, regulations and legislations, limited sources of information, limited knowledge and skills technologies, recommendations for utilizing student-centered teaching practices, standard welfare for animal husbandry, recommendation for acceptance and improvement standard animal welfare related to the four research questions which addressed the topics of challenging current teaching methods used in the extension system for other owners of animal species in the animal extension programs, the use of student-centered teaching practices in extension education and university instruction, and the level assistance given to farmers in order to ensure accepted standards of animal welfare working animal and other animal species in the animal husbandry system.

This dissertation is a rhetorical analysis of the theories and practices surrounding student-centered mentor-teaching. I examine textual representations of the teacher/student relationship as well as theories and practices involved in the discursive formation of teacher/student relationships, examining the intersection (or lack thereof) between the ways we as researchers talk about teacher/student relationship formation and the way(s) such relationships form in the “real world” of the English classroom. This institutional critique of teacher/student relationships draws on the works of ancient rhetorical scholars like Quintillian and Socrates, and on the post-1980 scholarship of Robert Connors, Lad Tobin, bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Parker J. Palmer, Mike Rose, Wendy Bishop, Louise Rosenblatt, Jeffrey Berman, and Peter Elbow. These scholars have all provided helpful models for me as I have framed my own beliefs about the value of expressive writing, the usefulness of writing conferences, the need for teacher vulnerability as a model for students’ expressive writing, the appropriateness of various relational settings beyond the classroom, and the ways grading/responding to student writing can either promote or inhibit a trusting student/teacher bond. While all of these scholars have contributed to my own beliefs and ideas, I am merely identifying and classifying pedagogical movements; rather, I am synthesizing these movements’ theories and practices in order to formulate an overall critique of the strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches. I also draw heavily upon the theoretical underpinnings of psychoanalysis, feminism, reader-response criticism, and composition studies to weave together a synthesized working model of mutually beneficial teacher/student relationships as they pertain to the high school and college English classrooms. Ultimately, I suggest my own contributions to the existing scholarship that will call for a mixture of both bolder pedagogical approaches and greater relational caution, depending upon the concept and the student(s) involved. I conclude with suggestions for utilizing teacher research to formulate new theories and practices for mentor-teaching in the English classroom.

Traditional teacher-centered methods of lectures and PowerPoint presentations are commonly used when teaching secondary social studies, yet these methods continually prove to be boring for most high school students and neglect to teach critical thinking skills. Student-centered methods are different than teacher-centered methods because these methods incorporate several learning styles, cooperative activities, and even technology in order to engage the student and promote critical thinking skills. Critical thinking is important for students to master because it gives them the skills to move past the obvious and make individual connections with the text. The intent of this thesis was to explore the effectiveness of integrating student-centered methods in high school social studies classrooms as a means of promoting critical thinking skills. All students were given the same pretest and posttests. Students were divided into three groups: one was taught using student-centered methods, one was taught using teacher-centered methods, and one was the control group and was not directly taught by anyone. Based on analyzing students' posttest scores compared to their pre-test scores, student-centered teaching produced a higher average score increase, though all methods had students who scored higher, and students whose scores remained constant. Evidence and student feedback showed that continued future research should be conducted to see if student-centered methods should be used throughout all secondary social studies classrooms to promote critical thinking.