abstract: This study examined the effects of different constructed response prompts and text types on students’ revision of misconceptions, comprehension, and causal reasoning. The participants were randomly assigned to prompt (self-explain, think-aloud) and text type (refutational, non-refutational) in a 2x2, between-subjects design. While reading, the students were prompted to write responses at regular intervals in the text. After reading, students were administered the conceptual inventory of natural selection (CINS), for which a higher score indicates fewer misconceptions of natural selection. Finally, students were given text comprehension questions, and reading skill and prior knowledge measures. Linear mixed effects (LME) models showed that students with better reading skill and more prior knowledge had a higher CINS score and better comprehension compared to less skilled students, but there were no effects of text type or prompt. Linguistic analysis of students’ responses demonstrated a relationship of prompt, text, and reading skill on students’ causal reasoning. Less skilled students exhibited greater causal reasoning when self-explaining a non-refutational text compared to less skilled students prompted to think-aloud, and less skilled students who read the refutational text. The results of this study demonstrate a relationship between reading skill and misconceptions in natural selections. Furthermore, the linguistic analyses suggest that less skilled students’ causal reasoning improves when prompted to self-explain. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Psychology 2020

This dissertation is about collaboration as an organizational practice that is communicatively constituted. Specifically, I examine how members of a team in an English language program located in a large southeastern university in the United States make sense of what they define as a collaborative work environment and materialize it in their meetings in spoken and written discourse, and in their mention and use of organizational artifacts. Though the study examines the practices of one organizational setting, the insights generated illuminate broader organizational and discourse dynamics and speak to important issues in the discipline of communication such as authority, leadership, organization sensemaking, materiality, and the role of texts in organizations. The data in this dissertation consists of spoken and written discourse. The spoken and written discourse data consist of 11 audiorecorded and transcribed meetings. To collect these data, I attended team meetings for a period of one year. I transcribed selected meeting data, and analyzed this data using a tool kit called discourse analysis. The written discourse data I examine is comprised of two documents: The Statement of Core Values and the Philosophy on Teamwork. My analysis shows how team members operating in a collaborative environment favor strategies that lead to consensus. These strategies include the use of politeness strategies such as the use of mitigating and inclusive language. Team members also use discursive strategies that demonstrate top down leadership and authority, albeit marked by indirectness. I offer practical recommendations for practice starting with the idea that collaboration does not have meaning outside of communication; collaboration means what the members of a discourse community say it means. I contend that discourse analysis can be a useful tool for organizational members as it can help them become mindful of the language they use and its constitutive force in the workplace. I also offer suggestions that can help organizations retroactively make sense of their organizational texts to ensure that they are accountable to others for what their organizations stand for.

The purpose of this study has been to explore reading comprehension with a focus on how teachers talk about their teaching of reading comprehension. To gain knowledge about how teachers work to increase and stimulate pupils’ reading comprehension, we decided to use qualitative interviews to further our knowledge and understanding of reading comprehension. Therefore, we interviewed five teachers who teach English in years 7–9, asking them to define reading comprehension and reading strategies, describe a lesson opportunity when they worked with texts and tasks, and encouraging them to talk about what reading strategies they usually promote in their teaching to enhance pupils’ understanding of texts.  The results show that teachers defined reading comprehension in similar ways. From the interviews it appeared that all teachers believe that pupils can understand texts if they link them to their own experiences. Therefore, it is important that texts are interesting to read. The results differed among the teachers regarding the teaching of reading strategies. Even though several of the interviewed teachers believe that it is important that pupils use different strategies to develop their reading comprehension, four of them do not spend time on teaching them. Instead, they advise pupils to use some strategies that they think are useful. In addition, the results reveal that pupils also need to distinguish between strategies and adapt them to the purpose for reading texts. The findings also show that teachers work with different types of texts and they design various tasks for texts according to pupils’ levels and needs.

The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the underlying factors involved in introducing authentic literature to the EFL classroom. The purpose has been to establish which factors should be considered in order to facilitate both the discrepancies between more literate pupils and less literate pupils, and the differing experiences and backgrounds of the class as a whole. The research focuses on the introduction of literature within whole group reading sessions, and considers factors such as equal reading levels versus below reading levels, protagonist gender, book titles and the amount of English read outside of the classroom.The dissertation discusses the reliability of readability programs, vocabulary required in order to comprehend second language literature, pupils’ ever increasing contact with English outside of school and pupils’ reactions to texts deemed either equal or below their own literacy level. In a classroom investigation, pupils were presented with texts taken from books judged to be either equal to or below their suggested age group, and asked to comment on their reading experiences. Results showed that texts from both sectors were received favourably, and that factors such as genre, protagonist gender and the book’s title were more decisive factors to a book’s popularity. Indeed, pupils noticed little or no difference in books written for a younger audience. Furthermore, an interview with an English teacher at a compulsory school confirmed that a book’s suggested age range had little or no importance when choosing texts for the classroom, and suggests that vocabulary focus in class can combat any discrepancy in pupil literacy levels.

Beliefs about the relationship between human beings and computing machines and their destinies have alternated from heroic counterparts to conspirators of automated genocide, from apocalyptic extinction events to evolutionary cyborg convergences. Many fear that people are losing key intellectual and social abilities as tasks are offloaded to the everywhere of the built environment, which is developing a mind of its own. If digital technologies have contributed to forming a dumbest generation and ushering in a robotic moment, we all have a stake in addressing this collective intelligence problem. While digital humanities continue to flourish and introduce new uses for computer technologies, the basic modes of philosophical inquiry remain in the grip of print media, and default philosophies of computing prevail, or experimental ones propagate false hopes. I cast this as-is situation as the post-postmodern network dividual cyborg, recognizing that the rational enlightenment of modernism and regressive subjectivity of postmodernism now operate in an empire of extended mind cybernetics combined with techno-capitalist networks forming societies of control. Recent critical theorists identify a justificatory scheme foregrounding participation in projects, valorizing social network linkages over heroic individualism, and commending flexibility and adaptability through life long learning over stable career paths. It seems to reify one possible, contingent configuration of global capitalism as if it was the reflection of a deterministic evolution of commingled technogenesis and synaptogenesis. To counter this trend I offer a theoretical framework to focus on the phenomenology of software and code, joining social critiques with textuality and media studies, the former proposing that theory be done through practice, and the latter seeking to understand their schematism of perceptibility by taking into account engineering techniques like time axis manipulation. The social construction of technology makes additional theoretical contributions dispelling closed world, deterministic historical narratives and requiring voices be given to the engineers and technologists that best know their subject area. This theoretical slate has been recently deployed to produce rich histories of computing, networking, and software, inform the nascent disciplines of software studies and code studies, as well as guide ethnographers of software development communities. I call my syncretism of these approaches the procedural rhetoric of diachrony in synchrony, recognizing that multiple explanatory layers operating in their individual temporal and physical orders of magnitude simultaneously undergird post-postmodern network phenomena. Its touchstone is that the human-machine situation is best contemplated by doing, which as a methodology for digital humanities research I call critical programming. Philosophers of computing explore working code places by designing, coding, and executing complex software projects as an integral part of their intellectual activity, reflecting on how developing theoretical understanding necessitates iterative development of code as it does other texts, and how resolving coding dilemmas may clarify or modify provisional theories as our minds struggle to intuit the alien temporalities of machine processes.

The subject of my dissertation is how phenomenology can be used as a tool for understanding the intersection between texts and technology. What I am suggesting here is that, specifically in connection with the focus of our program in Texts and Technology, there are very significant questions concerning how digital communications technology extends our humanity, and more importantly what kind of epistemological and ontological questions are raised because of this. There needs to be a coherent theory for Texts and Technology that will help us to understand this shift, and I feel that this should be the main focus for the program itself. In this dissertation I present an analysis of the different phenomenological aspects of the study of Texts and Technology. For phenomenologists such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, technology, in all of its forms, is the way in which human consciousness is embodied. Through the creation and manipulation of technology, humanity extends itself into the physical world. Therefore, I feel we must try to understand this extension as more than merely a reflection of materialist practices, because first and foremost we are discussing how the human mind uses technology to further its advancement. I will detail some of the theoretical arguments both for and against the study of technology as a function of human consciousness. I will focus on certain issues, such as problems of archiving and copyright, as central to the field. I will further argue how from a phenomenological standpoint we are in the presence of a phenomenological shift from the primacy of print towards a more hybrid system of representing human communications.

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Multimodal theory has developed out of social semiotics and can be seen as a response to the rise in the use of new technologies for the creation, distribution and consumption of media texts and the need to find new ways of describing and explaining their role in representation and communication. Its development is historical. It is a response to change over time. The incorporation of the visual into social semiotics marks a key moment in the development of multimodal theory. Visual literacy is discussed in relation to changes in modes of representation and a critique of this concept is provided. This is conducted in relation to how the visual modality has been integrated into social semiotics as a platform for research into multimodal communication more generally. Framing is developed along three main lines of enquiry (semiotic, cognitive and affective) as alternative ways of accounting for some of these shifts in communication and each are presented in the form of case studies. Framing and its close relationship with composition in media texts is discussed and this understanding, one that emphasise proximity as a multimodal principle, is applied to the visual design of content, the realisation of context through the provision visual cues, and later to embodiment and urban space. The three case studies, the application of framing to a range of media texts, the critical judgements made about the role visual in contemporary theory and the application of these concepts to multimodality are presented as part of an intellectual journey.

The purpose of this study was to discover whether or not the accompaniment of a lyric sheet while listening to rock music would aid a student's correct identification of the message conveyed by that song. Participants included one 7th and one 8th grade class of "gifted" students (N = 62). Other elements examined involved students' judgment of the messages as negative or positive, as well as the tonality of each song as pleasant or unpleasant and how these judgments related to correct or incorrect identification of the messages. Results indicated that there was no statistically significant difference regarding correct or incorrect identification of the message depending on whether or not students did or did not have a lyric sheet to read while listening to the U2 song, while there was a statistically significant difference concerning the Black Sabbath song. Additional results of this study are discussed, and implications for future research are suggested.

No description available.