Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, August, 2008. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.Ed.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 1981. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2795.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Catholic University of America, 1941. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 227-251) and index.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of California. / Bibliography: p. [84]-87.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1961. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Bibliography: leaves 112-120.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University

This thesis project explores the ways that we/us/our, they/them, you/your and other grammars/pronouns position readers in relation to a nationalizing we. Building on the work of Michael Billig and his articulation of a theory of banal nationalism, I argue that curricular materials, authorized grade eight Ontario textbooks specifically, reflect and represent a national we that gets racialized—essentialized, arbitrarily defined and divided and continually reproduced—through the use of a grammar that permeates the representations of geography, language arts, science and mathematics discussions in curricular textbooks. Using a theory of racialized deictic nationalism, one that points to the representation of a racialized us that reproduces and reflects seemingly natural nationalized populations, I argue that the texts both actively operate to contain the imagined spaces of the nation and describe it as our space exclusive of a them through the subtlety of grammar. As a means of contesting the ease with which a racialized deictic nationalizing grammar is used, I analyze a Wikipedia article as an exploration of a potential space for re/writing notions of the racialized deictic national we. While the analysis of the Wikipedia article and the “behind the scenes” discussion highlights the difficulties of escaping the trappings of a racialized deictic national us, the analysis serves to show that individuals do hold differential conceptions about who we are and how seemingly static notions of us don’t accurately reflect us. I conclude with a discussion of the pedagogical implications of this project.

The major purpose of the study was to capture a representative sample of natural language from the textbooks prescribed for use in the junior secondary curriculum for British Columbia schools, organize the sample for computer processing through the development of needed programs, develop a lexical analysis and describe the word and sentence characteristics of the samples organized by grades, subjects across grades, subjects within grades and textbook corpora. A number of hypotheses related to the distribution of frequently occurring words and a sub-set of representative sentence lengths across the corpora were then tested and a model was developed to aid in selecting lexically significant vocabulary from word lists based on samples from subject area textbooks. A stratified sampling model, applied to thirty-seven textbooks from seven subject areas, produced a Corpus of approximately a quarter million running words of natural language text based on 469 samples of approximately 500 words each. The results of the lexical analysis indicated that Grade 9 makes significantly greater reading demands in terms of volume of material (tokens) and vocabulary (word-types) than either Grades 8 or 10. Considerable diversity was exhibited in type and token distribution by grades, subjects, and textbooks but no apparent pattsrn emerged. However, use of Yule's K characteristic to determine the repeat rate frequency of word-types across the various corpora, revealed great variation in redundancy of word-types with the most striking differences exhibited in the samples from English textbooks and to some extent those from Home Economics and Commerce. Similar results were obtained in applying Yule's K as a measure of the repeat rate frequency for sentence lengths. Samples from English textbooks, again, exhibited exceptional variability in sentence length variety. These results were further substantiated by the analysis of other measures of variability based on computation of standard deviations, coefficients of variation, Pearson's skew factor and, to a lesser degree, the average number of sentences per 500 word sample. In all instances, organization of the samples by gross grade groupings tended to mask the real inherent variability of the samples organized by subjects and textbooks. Chi-square analyses of word and sentence distribution further substantiated the inherent variability revealed by the lexical analysis. Little uniformity was exhibited in the distribution of the most frequently occurring words in English and a representative sub-set of sentence lengths with the samples organized by grade levels, subjects across grades and subjects within grades. Grouping by gross grade level again masked subject variations. The style and content characteristics of the print materials prescribed for use in the separate subject areas are therefore significantly instrumental in affecting the frequency of occurrence of even the most common words in English and a representative sub-set of sentence lengths. Further analysis of the word lists produced in the study substantiated the utility of developing an elimination technique, based on omission of the most frequently occurring words and the relatively rare words, to identify the significant vocabulary from word lists based on samples from texts in subject areas. The major conclusion of the study suggests that the print materials prescribed for use in junior secondary grades exhibit marked variability when examined on even the most straightforward of linguistic characteristics such as word and sentence frequency. It is suggested that this variability would be even more pronounced if analyses were developed based on other syntactic and semantic variables. The expertise of the subject area specialist and the reading specialist should be combined in developing instruction to maximize learning from print materials. Such instruction would best be based on materials organized by subjects across grades and by separate subjects within grades rather than on materials organized by gross grade groupings. / Education, Faculty of / Graduate

Man measures many things. The development of suit~able units to represent the magnitude of a given property with consistency and accuracy and under varying conditions has enabled him to understand and control his environment better and to predict future events and behavior. The land and its produce, the radioactivity of an element and its power to destroy, the child and his capacities, all of nature and her mysteries stimulate the quest for an ever more exact system of quantification and evaluation. But of all the things which man has attempted to measure, none has proved so provocative as himself. This paper is concerned with one aspect of such measurement , educational achievement.

"The purpose of this paper is to analyze certain significant changes in subject matter presentation that have occurred in Spanish textbooks since the participation of the United States in World War I and to relate these changes to selected aspects of the growth and reorientation of the American education system during this period. The textbooks chosen for comparison are the 1915 edition of A Spanish Grammar by E. C. Hills and J. D. M. Ford and First Year Spanish by C. H. Staubach and J. W. Walsh, published in 1954"--Introduction. / "August 1957." / Typescript. / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Advisor: Marion J. Hay, Professor Directing Paper. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 70).