Recent studies indicate that American high school students are not performing adequately on standardized tests in the area of science. In response, there has been a call to reform science education in the United States. These reform efforts coincide with advances in electronic communication and information technology that have revolutionized knowledge sharing. This study describes an effort to assess the effects of inter-school electronic collaboration on the quality of student final written products. In this study, students ranging in grade levels from 9-12 completed a problem-based earth science module delivered via the Internet. The module presented students with an ill-structured problem, problem-solving model, resources, and recommendations for further inquiry, all related to an authentic environmental issue. Students were also given a set of guidelines for a final written product and a minimum of 4 weeks to complete the project. While all students worked in cooperative groups within their classrooms, selected cooperative groups worked with cooperative groups of students in other schools via e-mail. These groups were collectively referred to as parallel groups. Cooperative groups of students who did not work via e-mail with other groups were collectively referred to as nonparallel groups. A team of evaluators scored the written products of parallel and nonparallel groups. The results were unexpected: The nonparallel groups scored significantly higher than the parallel groups on the final written product. / Ph. D.

In this thesis, I explore the concept of a scientific fact through the work of Polish physician Ludwik Fleck (1896-1961). Fleck has had an alleged influence upon contemporary philosophy of science, primarily through the work of Thomas Kuhn with subsequent echoes from the direction of the sociology of science. Most writers, however, have restricted their focus upon only one of Fleck's publications, The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935), and have highlighted the Polish philosophical community as a primary influence upon Fleck's ideas. I argue in this thesis that since Fleck was a doctor by trade, his views must be understood in the context of the medical issues and philosophy of medicine of his time. Furthermore, in order to appreciate Fleck's concept of a scientific fact, one must turn to his other philosophical works. A more judicious picture of Fleck and his concept of a scientific fact is provided by this analysis even though, I conclude, his approach remains philosophically unsatisfactory. / Master of Arts

<p dir="ltr">In response to the escalating demand for proficient programming skills in today's technological landscape, innovative educational strategies have emerged to mitigate the challenges inherent in mastering programming concepts. Contextualization, a pedagogical approach embedding learning within real-world contexts, has demonstrated efficacy in enhancing student engagement and understanding. However, its implementation in programming education encounters hurdles related to diverse student backgrounds and resource-intensive material preparation. To address these challenges, this paper proposes leveraging learnersourcing, a collaborative approach wherein students actively contribute to the creation of contextualized learning materials. Specifically, we investigate the viability of implementing a learnersourcing workflow in an advanced database programming class during the Spring semester of 2022 with a group of 23 students enrolled, where students are tasked with generating contextualized worked-out examples. The results reveal that students successfully incorporated diverse contexts into their WEs, demonstrating the potential of learnersourcing to enrich educational content. However, challenges such as vague problem descriptions and formatting errors were identified, emphasizing the need for structured support and guidance. Self-assessment ratings tended to overestimate clarity and educational value, while peer assessments exhibited variability among assessors. Ambiguities in evaluation criteria and limited granularity of rating scales contributed to inconsistencies in assessments. These findings underscore the importance of addressing challenges in learnersourcing implementation, including providing explicit guidance, scaffolding support, and integrating real-time feedback mechanisms. Additionally, efforts to enhance the reliability of self and peer assessments should consider standardization measures and clear evaluation criteria. Future research should explore alternative approaches to improve the validity and consistency of assessments in learnersourcing contexts.</p>

This thesis explores how the landscape, or the physical environment in general, can play a more active, meaningful role in historical site interpretation for the public. It asserts that the landscape can serve not merely as a passive backdrop or stage set for interpretation but as an active tool for communicating important understandings about history. To accomplish this, a constructivist approach to design—one that emphasizes the direct interaction between the individual visitor and the physical site as the origin of meaning—is presented. The Constructivist Design Approach (CDA) emphasizes the manipulation of form, scale, materials, and path to facilitate visitors' physical, psychological, and emotional immersion in their environment. The CDA was developed from three research areas: an epistemological grounding in constructivism, ritual theory, and case studies of built works that promote the interaction of visitor and site. Application of the CDA to historical site interpretation is explored through a conceptual design proposal for an Appalachian slavery interpretive complex in Southwestern Virginia, which interprets mountain slavery from the slaves' perspective. Through direct interaction with the landscape of the participatory living history complex, visitors deepen their understanding of how mountain slaves perceived, moved through, and appropriated the landscape for their survival. The design project indicates that the CDA can enhance the effectiveness of interpretive programs. It also reveals the importance of ongoing collaboration between landscape architects and historians throughout project development in order to achieve a physical site design that effectively incorporates and reflects interpretive content and objectives. / Master of Landscape Architecture

Many war memorials today face loss of relevant meaning to the members of their community over time, an inability to adapt to evolving historical perspectives, and a lack of ability to engage visitors in a deep and authentic way of creating meaning and understanding. New war memorials should provide opportunities for visitors to engage with them in an active, conscious, and dynamic relationship with the built site. Encouraging such a connection facilitates deep and authentic meaning making that continues beyond the site visit, and that allows the memorial's form to evolve over time in response to visitor interaction. The constructivist model for war memorial design incorporates ten strategies, and the Active Physical Interaction strategy in particular, that allow designers to create places that encourage visitors to have personalized interaction. These strategies are built on the constructivist philosophy that explains how individuals and groups of people understand the non-objective world through experience. This position was tested through the design of a Dutch World War Two memorial at Warm Hearth Village in Blacksburg, Virginia. This memorial's main features include community garden beds for cultivation by the Village's elderly residents. The concept of sharp contrast reflected in three distinct areas of the memorial recall the oppression under five-years of Nazi occupation, the celebration of liberation in 1945, and the efforts of Allied and Resistance fighters in making this liberation possible. / Master of Landscape Architecture

To Kill a Mockingbird is the story of Scout and her adolescence in Maycomb, Alabama, in the 1930s. Her social environment is colored by traditional and contemporary gender roles and the demands and expectations that accompany them. Aunt Alexandra is the character in Scout’s closest circle of influence who embodies such ideals. However, Scout also has the nuanced influence of her father, Atticus, and her neighbor, Miss Maudie, two characters that can act as role models for Scout when it comes to conformity to gendered expectations or the rejection of the same. As such, these characters also demonstrate that agency is a factor, even in such instances as gender. Beauvoir, Butler, Wittig, and Jay, to mention some of the research referenced in this essay, contribute to a reading of the novel and of Scout from the perspective of socially constructed gender, or more specifically, socially constructed femininity. Scout is biologically female, but this essay argues, with the aid of the above-mentioned scholars and their work, that this fact does not mean that there is such a thing as inherent femininity. Instead, Scout personifies the agency within socially constructed gender as she chooses to conform or reject the expectations based on her due to her sex. Furthermore, she is able to do so in part because of her tomboy appearance and the insight she gains regarding the stereotypes surrounding her, as well as the role models she finds in Atticus and Miss Maudie and their androgynous approach to life and their surroundings in turn.

The purpose of this ethnographic venture was to explore the social interactions in a Kindergarten classroom with a focus on the rules in the classroom. Participant observations were conducted in a public school Kindergarten classroom for a period of three and a half months. Data were recorded through field notes, audiotape recordings and two semi-structured interviews with the classroom teacher. The presentation of discoveries along this journey includes a detailed description of a typical day in the classroom, a taxonomy of the classroom rules, and an elaboration of the process through which children understand the teacher created rules in the classroom. The importance of planning developmentally appropriate rules and affording children the opportunity to negotiate the meaning of the rules through dialogue has been stressed. These interpretations reinforce the importance of the constructivist approach to child development and learning. Implications for researchers and practitioners revolve around the redefinition of rules as tools for negotiation of individual differences among members of the classroom community. / Ph. D.

As evidenced by a large body of research within the engineering education community, those individuals who do not maintain a sense of belonging, identify with engineering groups, or perceive themselves as engineers are more likely to leave the profession. However, little is known about the ways in which engineering students construct or develop their personal and professional identities as influenced by the disciplinary values, behaviors, and practices learned during the undergraduate education experience. In order to deepen the understanding of professional identity formation within the engineering disciplines, a grounded theory study was conducted to explore the experiences of 31 sophomore, junior, and senior level undergraduate students enrolled in a civil engineering program. Upon conducting an iterative process of data collection and analysis, a theory of professional identity negotiation emerged from interviews depicting participants' experiences. This theory titled Negotiating Equilibrium: Advancing from Outsider to Insider or the AOI Model, captures the identities negotiated by students as they iteratively define, adjust, and readjust definitions of self and profession to maintain a balance between their personal self and the learned disciplinary identity of the civil engineering profession. As participants gained this balance, they began to see themselves as professionals and advance from an outsider (i.e., one not belonging to the civil engineering profession) to an insider (i.e., one belonging to the civil engineering profession). The AOI Model provides a framework for researchers to further explore professional identity formation, promotes the development of identity-influencing coursework and instructor teaching approaches, and inspires future research trajectories in engineering and civil engineering education. / Ph. D. / As evidenced by a large body of research within the engineering education community, those individuals who do not maintain a sense of belonging, identify with engineering groups, or perceive themselves as engineers are more likely to leave the profession. However, little is known about the ways in which engineering students construct or develop their personal and professional identities as influenced by the disciplinary values, behaviors, and practices learned during the undergraduate education experience. In order to deepen the understanding of professional identity formation within the engineering disciplines, a grounded theory study was conducted to explore the experiences of 31 sophomore, junior, and senior level undergraduate students enrolled in a civil engineering program. Upon conducting an iterative process of data collection and analysis, a theory of professional identity negotiation emerged from interviews depicting participants’ experiences. This theory titled <i>Negotiating Equilibrium: Advancing from Outsider to Insider</i> or the <i>AOI Model</i>, captures the identities negotiated by students as they iteratively define, adjust, and readjust definitions of self and profession to maintain a balance between their personal self and the learned disciplinary identity of the civil engineering profession. As participants gained this balance, they began to see themselves as professionals and advance from an outsider (i.e., one not belonging to the civil engineering profession) to an insider (i.e., one belonging to the civil engineering profession). The AOI Model provides a framework for researchers to further explore professional identity formation, promotes the development of identity-influencing coursework and instructor teaching approaches, and inspires future research trajectories in engineering and civil engineering education.

Project-based learning (PBL) is a teaching approach where students engage in the investigation of real-world problems through their inquiries. Studies found considerable support for PBL on student performance and improvement in grades K-12 and at the collegiate level. However, fewer studies have examined the effects of PBL at the collegiate level in comparison to K-12 education. No studies have examined the effects of PBL with preservice teachers taking educational psychology courses. The purpose of this study was to provide an analysis of PBL with preservice teachers taking educational psychology courses. An experiment was conducted throughout two semesters to evaluate student achievement and satisfaction in an undergraduate educational psychology child development course and in an undergraduate educational psychology assessments course, which included the same students from the first semester. Student achievement was determined using quantitative and qualitative analyses in each semester and longitudinally. Results in semester one indicated that the comparison group outperformed the PBL group. Results in semester two suggested there were no differences in instructional styles between groups. Longitudinal analyses showed that the comparison group declined in performance over time, whereas the PBL group improved over time; although, the comparison group still outperformed the PBL group. Results of this study indicate that PBL was not an influential teaching method for preservice teachers taking educational psychology courses.

Thesis (MA (Political Science))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Africa(ns) are currently marginalised within the discipline of International Relations. This thesis explores the possibility that employing a constructivist approach could facilitate the inclusion of Africa as an object of study and Africans as potential agents of IR knowledge within the discipline by bridging a theoretical abyss. Two discourses, namely the rationalist and Africanist, are identified. They frame the sides of the theoretical abyss to which Africa(ns) have been marginalised within IR. These discourses adhere to the opposing analytical approaches which constitute the Third Debate, namely rationalism and reflectivism. This thesis proposes two theoretical reconstructions that can facilitate the bridging of this theoretical abyss. The theoretical reconstructions are explicated by employing different research stances. The researcher is situated within the intellectual space afforded by the boundaries of the discipline in order to propose the first reconstruction. The second theoretical reconstruction is proposed by problematising the boundaries the discipline of IR. This study found that constructivism facilitates the process of establishing the middle ground between rationalism and reflectivism and in so doing could include Africa as an object of study. It also found that the intervention of constructivism facilitated a necessary change in the culture of the discipline to create the possibility of extending the notion of engaged pluralism and re-imagining the discipline as a disciplinary community of difference. This leads to the opening up of the necessary dialogical space to include Africans as potential agents of IR knowledge. Constructivism is therefore the mutually constituting link between the two proposed theoretical reconstructions as they are made possible by its intervention in the discipline. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Afrika(ne) word huidiglik gemarginaliseer binne die dissipline van Internasionale Betrekkinge. Hierdie tesis ondersoek die moontlikheid dat die gebruik van ‘n konstruktiwistiese benadering die insluiting van Afrika as ‘n onderwerp van studie of Afrikane as potensiële agente van IB kennis deur die oorbrugging van ‘n teoretiese kloof kan fasiliteer. Twee diskoerse, naamlik die rasionalistiese and die Afrikanistiese, word geïdentifiseer. Hierdie diskoerse stel die sye van die teoretiese kloof voor waarin Afrika(ne) gemarginaliseer word binne IB. Hulle hou verband met die twee opponerende analitiese benaderings van rasionalisme en reflektiwisme wat die Derde Debate uitmaak. Hierdie tesis stel twee teoretiese rekonstruksies voor wat die oorbrugging van die teoretiese kloof kan fasiliteer. Hierdie teoretiese rekonstruksies word ontvou deur verskillende navorsingsposisies in te neem. Die navorser plaas homself binne die intellektuele spasie wat deur die grense van die dissipline toegelaat word om sodoende die eerste rekonstruksie voor te stel. Die tweede rekonstruksie word voorgestel deur die problematisering van die grense van die dissipline. Hierdie studie het gevind dat konstruktiwisme die proses van die opstelling van ‘n middelgrond tussen rasionalisme en reflektiwisme fasiliteer en sodoende Afrika as ‘n onderwerp van studie kan insluit. Die studie het ook gevind dat die toetrede van konstruktiwisme die nodige verandering aan die kultuur van die dissipline veroorsaak het wat die moontlikheid skep dat die begrip van ‘engaged pluralism’ uitgebrei en die hervoorstelling van die dissipline as a dissiplinêre gemeenskap van diversiteit kan word. Hierdie hervoorstelling lei tot die skepping van die nodige dialogale spasie om Afrikane as potensiële agente van IB kennis in te sluit. Konstruktiwisme is dus die onderliggende skakel wat die twee voorgestelde teoretiese rekonstruksies moontlik maak deur die benadering se toetrede tot die dissipline.