This descriptive study investigates what happens when an English Language Arts teacher implements multimodal instruction in his senior-level World Literature course. The study is grounded in theories of transmediation and New Literacy Studies and examines the following research questions: 1.) What does multimodal instruction enable students to do and how does it shape and support students engagement and interpretation with literary texts? 2.) What are the cognitive affordances of students participation in multimodal tasks? The research site was a private all male high school a few miles outside a medium-sized city in the Northeast. One twelfth-grade World Literature classroom was observed for a nine-week period as students read two literary texts and composed three multimodal representations in response to each text. Data included field notes, videotaped classroom sessions, student-produced multimodal representations, student reaction forms, students rationales for representation and debriefing sessions with the teacher. Findings of the study reveal there are multiple cognitive and learning strategies that take effect as a result of multimodal instruction and that this type of instruction can be a valuable method for teaching literary interpretation.

This study investigates the role of digital cognitive technologies in supporting students mathematical thinking while engaging with instructional tasks. Specifically, the study sought to better understand how the use of technology is related to the cognitive demand of tasks. Data were collected in four secondary mathematics classrooms via classroom observations, collection of student work, and post-lesson teacher interviews. Opportunities for high level thinking by students were evaluated using the Mathematical Tasks Framework (Stein, Smith, Henningsen, & Silver, 2009). Technology use was evaluated with respect to whether it served to amplify students thinking by making students work more efficient or accurate without changing the nature of the task, or whether it was used to reorganize students thinking by supporting a shift to something different or beyond what the technology was doing for them (Pea, 1985). Results indicate that the mere inclusion of technology in a task was not related to the cognitive demand during any of the three phases of implementation, as technology was used in both high and low level tasks. However, results suggested an association between the level of cognitive demand of a task and the way that technology was used. In general, when technology was used as an amplifier, it was not related to the thinking requirements of the task, while the use of technology as a reorganizer was central to the thinking requirements of the task. The decline of tasks set up at high level often corresponded to technology being used as an amplifier and reorganizer during set up, but as only an amplifier during implementation. Overall, the role of technology in the decline or maintenance of high level thinking during implementation seems to depend more on teachers classroom practice than any particular issues related to the use of technology. How prepared students were to engage in high level thinking tasks in general, how teachers anticipated students needs while using technology to engage with the task, and how teachers responded to student questions and difficulties were influential factors in the maintenance or decline of these tasks.

This descriptive study investigates the ways that students in an Ancient History class make meaning of past events by relating them to their present lives and experiences. The study is grounded in theories of historical thinking, particularly focusing on the concepts of presentism and its usefulness for examining classroom teaching. The following two research questions guided the study: 1) How do students make connections between the past and present? 2) When given the opportunity in writing and discussion, in what ways are students engaging with distant events in the past? The research site was a middle school in a medium-sized city located in the Midwest. Data was collected in the Fall of 2010 over the course of eight weeks during two units of study (Ancient Civilizations Review and Ancient Greece). The following data sources were collected: five audio-recorded classroom discussions and other instruction, twelve interviews with students and student assignments and journal entries. The analysis revealed two categories of the students thinking about the relevance of past events: (1) conflating the past with the present and the challenge of presentism, and (2) translating and adapting the past to the present. The data showed that some students viewed history from a presentist perspective that did not distinguish sufficiently between time periods. However, many students also applied lessons from the past to their own lives by associating historical ideas and themes to their individual experiences, which was especially evident in the discussions. Students tended to make sense of history by assigning meaning to the concepts they were studying in a personal manner and by finding similarities between the past and present.

Children with special school healthcare needs (CSSHN) are entering early education environments with increasing frequency. Advances in medical technology and interest in providing early education in least restrictive environments are cited as the reasons for the phenomenon. Most often, full-time nurses are not available in such settings to care for the needs of children with medical complexities. And yet, case law dictates that the delivery of nursing services is indeed the responsibility of the local education agency and, furthermore, that such nursing services do not need to be related to a special education program in order to be provided (Diaz, 2000). This case law, coupled with a current overall shortage of school nurses, results in a certain conundrum for early educators (Barrett, 2000). Literature is reviewed about the attitudes of teachers and other personnel, the delegation of nursing duties to unlicensed assistive personnel (UAP), and the needs of school entities and staff members in serving this population of children. Taken together, the studies indicate that the body of knowledge is growing about how to best serve children with such needs and that further study is needed to keep pace with medical advances that enable increasing numbers of children to access least restrictive environments. Via this research, policies and procedures were gathered from early intervention service providers across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania revealing the extent to which agencies have formalized planning for supports and services to CSSHN. The text from the policies and procedures was coded and analyzed to reveal the elements of service delivery to Children with Special School Health Needs (CSSHN) receiving early childhood special education (ECSE). The study concludes with a suggested framework for practice in serving CSSHN.

Thesis--PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references.

The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate the effectiveness of teaching students to write essays using a multi-cue decision-making strategy that asked students to Inscribe the writing space, Define the rhetorical problems locally, Discover the information necessary to solve the local rhetorical problems, and Link the individual units of the essay logically (IDDL). An explanatory mixed methods research design was employed to investigate the importance of using direct explicit instruction of single-cue writing strategies. The research questions were: what is the effect of teaching first-year university students single-cue heuristics as measured by their growth in essay writing between a pretest and posttest measure? and, what is the effect of teaching first-year university students single-cue heuristics as measured by their final essay grades at the end of term? A total of 99 students, divided into control (22 students) and experimental (77 students) groups, participated in the quantitative data collection by providing pretest and posttest writing samples. In the qualitative data collection phase, twenty students (ten from each group) were individually interviewed. While the results indicated that the control group outperformed the experimental group on all measures, except content, there were a number of confounding variables that require further investigation.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between addition and subtraction as inverse operations, to determine how drill in addition facts will affect knowledge of subtraction facts; to infer, if possible, when addition is conceptualized as an operation with reversibility; and to determine at which grade levels at a particular method of drill is effective. The sample was drawn from Logan, Utah small, city school district of 3700 students. The experimental groups consisted of 12 elementary and eight secondary existing classrooms of students. The control groups consisted of 10 elementary and five secondary existing classroom groups. A total of 1007 elementary and secondary students were involved in the study. The sample included treatment and control groups form first through the ninth grades. The treatment consisted of administering drill on the addition facts, to classroom groups using the overhead projector. All students were tested three times, at the beginning of the study, after one week and after two weeks; using two tests, an Addition Facts Test, which contained the 100 basic addition facts, and a Subtraction Facts Test which contained the 100 basic subtraction facts. Four scores were considered for each test; "time", the "number left out", the "number missed", and the "total error". Gain scores showing loss or progress from the pretest to each of the two posttests were computed for each of these four scores. All groups corrected their own test papers immediately after taking the tests. The statistical analysis included the following: 1. Correlation coefficients were computed between addition and subtraction scores for each of the four scores mentioned. 2. Correlation coefficients were computed between the addition and subtraction scores for each gain score. 3. Two-way analyses of variance were computed for grade level effect and treatment effect for each of the 16 gain scores. The results included: 1. The correlation coefficients for addition and subtraction "time" scores were positive and significant at every grade level. The correlation of the first grade, .30, was significantly lower than that of the second grade, .72. The correlations showed an increasing trend to .87 at the seventh grade, then a falling off in the eight and ninth grades. The correlation coefficients for addition and subtraction error scores were positive and significant for the "number left out" and "total missed" scores for grades one through seven. 2. For the two posttests, the correlation coefficients for the "time" gain scores from the first grade were negative. They were positive and significant for grades two, four, five, seven, and eight. The results for the correlation of error gain scores were mixed. 3. Of the 16 two-way analyses of variance for gain scores, five showed significant F ratios, two were concerned with addition and three with subtraction; four analyses showed significant grade level effect, three analyses showed significant treatment effect, and two showed significant interaction. On nine scores there were large differences between first and second grade groups. The results are consistent with what one would expect if first grade students had not formed the concept of addition as an operation with reversibility. The results are consistent with that one would expect if: at the second grade level, addition were conceptualized as an operation with reversibility for a good portion of the students, yet there were a good number for whom this reversibility were limited or inoperative; the concept of addition as an operation continued to develop with a more pronounced reversibility during grads three and four. It was concluded: 1. First grade children do not possess the requisite understanding to profit from drill of the type used in this study. 2. Second grade students have a good start on understanding and can profit from practice experiences in addition and subtraction. 3. Maximum gains were made in third and fourth grade groups with the type of drill used in the study.

The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate the effectiveness of teaching students to write essays using a multi-cue decision-making strategy that asked students to Inscribe the writing space, Define the rhetorical problems locally, Discover the information necessary to solve the local rhetorical problems, and Link the individual units of the essay logically (IDDL). An explanatory mixed methods research design was employed to investigate the importance of using direct explicit instruction of single-cue writing strategies. The research questions were: what is the effect of teaching first-year university students single-cue heuristics as measured by their growth in essay writing between a pretest and posttest measure? and, what is the effect of teaching first-year university students single-cue heuristics as measured by their final essay grades at the end of term? A total of 99 students, divided into control (22 students) and experimental (77 students) groups, participated in the quantitative data collection by providing pretest and posttest writing samples. In the qualitative data collection phase, twenty students (ten from each group) were individually interviewed. While the results indicated that the control group outperformed the experimental group on all measures, except content, there were a number of confounding variables that require further investigation.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Sydney, 1981. / Title from title screen (viewed February 11, 2009) Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the honours degree of Master of Arts to the Faculty of Arts. Degree awarded 1981; thesis submitted 1980. Includes bibliography. Also available in print form.