published_or_final_version / Medical Sciences / Master / Master of Medical Sciences

published_or_final_version / Zoology / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Civil and Structural Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy

<p> The Montessori method is a comprehensive, child-centered, developmentalist philosophy of education developed by Dr. Maria Montessori in Rome, Italy, in the early 1900s. The Montessori method differs from traditional approaches to education, and has had limited exposure in the U.S. until the last 20 years. Despite this growth, little research data exists on the effectiveness of the method or of parent understanding the method. This research project attempted to determine parent understanding of the Montessori method of education at three Montessori schools in Massachusetts that educate children from toddlers to grade 8.</p><p> The objective of the research was to design, implement, and analyze a survey that measured parent understanding of the Montessori principles and classroom practices. The survey was developed using the Montessori principles as the foundation. The goal was to determine both the extent of parent understanding of the Montessori principles and parent perception of how these principles are carried out in the Montessori classroom.</p><p> Parents and guardians were asked a total of 10 questions, 7 of which were five-point Likert scales. The quantitative questions specifically addressed the six Montessori principles and were designed to test parents&rsquo; overall understanding of each principle. Responses ranged from a principle being not at all important to very important. The qualitative portion of the survey instrument utilized three open-ended, self-completed questions designed to reveal a range of parent perceptions about Montessori education and classroom practices.</p><p> The surveys revealed that parent values and thinking do line up with some aspects of the Montessori method and philosophy. The surveys also revealed that parents seem to value classroom practices contrary to the founding principles. What parents value and what parents think about regarding concepts such as goal setting, achievement, competition with peers, and teachers preparing and presenting lessons is in direct contrast with some of the Montessori founding principles and intentions.</p><p> If Montessori schools wish to remain viable, they will need to reconcile the Montessori principles with conflicting parent values and, further, determine how to better align their principles with parent views and desires for their children.</p>

No description available.

<p> As part of the National Common Core Curriculum, critical thinking skills are expected to be taught by teachers in every subject and at every grade level. Teachers will also be evaluated on teaching critical thinking skills to students to a mastery level as part of the educators' annual evaluations. However, there is not a common definition for critical thinking established by the National Governors Association for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers. Nor is there equitable training on how to teach critical thinking skills to students to mastery level. The following qualitative case study consists of survey question, interviews, and observations of one English department in a rural county to determine the answer to the overarching research question, "What do teachers know about critical thinking?" Paul and Elder's Critical Thinking Model (2007) was used as benchmark to determine what knowledge and what gaps were present amongst the teachers. Teachers defined critical thinking individually, determined what activities encouraged good critical thinking practices, discussed obstacles that deterred the teaching of critical thinking skills in the classroom, and suggested how to prepare teachers to better teach critical thinking skills to meet national expectations. Although the definitions and activities often varied between educators, all agreed that a common definition was necessary. Lack of time and lack of training were the biggest obstacles perceived by the participants.</p>

This is a presentation of 21 slides at the ASIST 2005 Annual Meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina in the session on Progress in the Design and Evaluation of Digital Libraries.

National Science Digital Library (NSDL) projects were briefly surveyed to find out if they were submitting metadata records to OCLC. The responses of the projects are given in this report. iLumina is the only library sending item-level records for all resources to both NSDL and OCLC; although, it appears that the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues and the Animal Diversity Web have entered a single Collection Record into OCLC.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / Research shows that recommendations comprise a valuable service for users of a digital library [11]. While most existing recommender systems rely either on a content-based approach or a collaborative approach to make recommendations, there is potential to improve recommendation quality by using a combination of both approaches (a hybrid approach). In this paper, we report how we tested the idea of using a graph-based recommender system that naturally combines the content-based and collaborative approaches. Due to the similarity between our problem and a concept retrieval task, a Hopfield net algorithm was used to exploit high-degree book-book, useruser and book-user associations. Sample hold-out testing and preliminary subject testing were conducted to evaluate the system, by which it was found that the system gained improvement with respect to both precision and recall by combining content-based and collaborative approaches. However, no significant improvement was observed by exploiting high-degree associations.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / The Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) was one of six sponsored by the NSF, DARPA, and NASA from 1994 through 1998. Our goal was to develop widely usable Web technology to effectively search technical documents on the Internet. We concentrated on building the experimental Illinois DLI Testbed with tens of thousands of full-text journal articles from physics, engineering, and computer science, and on making these articles available over the Internet before they are available in print. Our DLI Testbed used document structure to provide federated search across publisher collections, by merging diverse tags from multiple publishers into a single uniform collection. Our sociology research evaluated the usage of the DLI Testbed by more than a thousand UIUC faculty and students. Our technology research moved beyond document structure to document semantics, testing contextual indexing of document content on millions of documents.