Against the backdrop of religious disaffiliation and social fragmentation in the United States, the future of both practices and venues for American religious education is uncertain. In this study of Tapestry, a church-run foster youth mentoring network, and St. Sebastian’s Summer Camp, a predominantly Latinx church-run community day camp, I develop and document one promising pairing in response to this quandary: an adapted form of Digital Storytelling (Lambert, 2012) as a communal spiritual practice appropriate to what I call faith-adjacent spaces. Such spaces are convened by modes of activity separate from formal institutional programs and rituals but still connected to religion in meaningful, visible ways. In this participatory multimodal ethnography, I draw on socio-spatial and narrative analytic frameworks to reveal and explore (1) organizational practices of belonging that already exist at Tapestry, (2) the function of new collaboratively designed Digital Storytelling practices at Tapestry and St. Sebastian’s, and (3) the role of my various researcher-facilitator identities in this work. I present these findings in the form of a four-part audio documentary that interweaves recordings from my ethnographic fieldwork, excerpts from the artifacts that participants and I co-created, audio engagements with academic and practitioner literature, and researcher narrative and analysis. The annotated production scripts for Becoming Tapestry comprise both the bulk of this manuscript and, together with the four podcast episodes themselves, the dissertation proper.

This study highlighted factors informing instructors’ instructional beliefs and practices and the activities that help students engage in and develop a deep understanding of mathematics. The study also described instructors’ instructional activities and curricular practices when teaching mathematics and an interdisciplinary curriculum that integrates mathematics with other subjects. Through a qualitative phenomenological approach, surveys, semi-structured interviews, and analyses of instructional activities using an adapted version of the Teaching for Robust Understanding in Mathematics (or TRU Math©) framework characterized the experiences of 13 instructors, from elementary through college years, who taught mathematics as a subject and within an interdisciplinary lesson. The study revealed several factors that informed instructors’ beliefs, practices, and activities (B, P, & A) about teaching mathematics and interdisciplinarity through descriptions and synthesis of meanings and TRU Math analyses of artifacts. Instructors felt strongly about helping students value learning, making mathematics meaningful and joyful, and saw their students as capable problem solvers. They utilized activities to illuminate thinking and understanding of mathematics and used assessments to communicate mathematics. T he study also revealed three significant ways that instructors engaged in interdisciplinarity as seen through the practices of the Constructors, Curators, and Connectors, and referred to accordingly as the 3C’s framework. These interdisciplinary characterizations reveal instructors’ practical ways of using various approaches to practice interdisciplinarity. It also showed how frameworks like TRU Math helped assess an interdisciplinary activity’s potential to foster a deep understanding of mathematics content. The conclusions offer implications for research and practice.

Since 1970, researchers at Johns Hopkins University have studied the effects of a game technique called the tearns-games-tournament method on the achievement scores, attitudes, and classroom process of elementary and junior high students. Their findings raised many questions about the applicability of team-games to affect achievement at the high school level or in subject areas other than math and English. In 1980, the National Science Foundation allocated funds for the creation of TGT materials for seventh-grade science, even though research of its effectiveness for science courses had not been conducted. This study was designed to provide answers to the following questions: Would high school students playing teams-games-tournaments have greater academic achievement in a high school biology course than students in classes using traditional classroom methods? Would high school students in TGT classes have greater retention of knowledge after a delayed period of time than those students in classes using traditional classroom methods? Would high school students in TGT classes have more positive attitudes toward the subject of biology than students in classes using traditional classroom methods? Would high school students like TGT better as a means for studying chapter material than traditional methods? Eight biology classes were involved in the seven-week treatment period. Analysis of variance was used to compare control and experimental groups for (1) pre-test cognitive knowledge, (2) post-test cognitive knowledge, (3) delayed post-test cognitive knowledge, (4) pre-test attitudes towards biology, and (5) post-test attitudes towards biology. Analysis of covariance was computed using I.Q. and pre-test scores as covariates for post-test cognitive means and delayed post-test cognitive means. A dependent t-test was computed for attitudes of experimental classes towards team-games. TGT had no significant effect on the biology achievement scores or attitudes towards biology of high school students in this study. Experimental classes did like team-games and sustained their attitudes towards them for the duration of the study. / Ed. D.

A longitudinal study of the effects of instructional technology on learning and knowledge retention was conducted in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech. Instructional technology has been promoted as a means of improving knowledge retention among engineering students. The practical, long-term effects of such technology use were assessed at numerous times over a period of twenty-five weeks. Students in various sections of an undergraduate mechanics course used two different software titles, a structural analysis tool and an electronic textbook, in their studies of trusses and truss analysis. Two other sections of the same course used no software in their classes but spent class time solving problems by hand in teams. All sections were taught truss analysis by the same guest lecturer who also facilitated in the intervention. Demographic data, including gender, ethnicity, grade point average, and course load, were gathered from each of the sections and compared to assure group equality. Pretests were completed by students in each of the sections and also compared among treatment groups to assure that all sections had equivalent levels of prior knowledge. All students were tested immediately after the intervention to assess their learning of the material. Students were again tested ten and twenty-five weeks after the intervention to assess their long-term retention of the material. Results indicated that technology use increased students’ problem solving efficiency. The results of the assessments further indicated that all students had high levels of knowledge retention, but that there were no differential levels of learning or retention among the different groups. It was thus concluded that instructional technology can make the educational process more efficient without hindering long-term knowledge retention. It was further concluded that solving problems by hand in teams was just as effective at leading to high levels of performance over time as using instructional technology.

With the world amidst globalization and economic flux affecting business, industry, and communities the need to work together becomes increasingly important. Higher education serves an important role in developing the individual teaming capabilities of the workforce. This environment is the time and place - opportunity for student personnel to develop these capabilities. This multiple case study utilized the analysis phase (learner, setting and job) of an instructional design model to analyze learner characteristics, the higher education environment/undergraduate experience, and the job/skills associated with individual teamwork knowledge, skills, and abilities of students from a senior cohort of the TRiO - SSS Project at a public student-centered research institution. The results yielded themes to promote the development of target populations individual teamwork KSAs which should increase their readiness to meet the teaming demands of today's employers. With an engaging undergraduate experience, inclusive of interaction with faculty members and collaborative learning with their peers, structured opportunities to practice individual teamwork KSAs in a work setting or internship, these underrepresented students may be an asset that is needed to meet the global workforce needs and fill civic capacities in their home communities.

The purpose of this project is to develop a website that helps left handed students, their parents, and teachers to help left-handers, whether they are left-or-right-brain dominant, succeed. This website will be a tool to get to know their children and students better. The project consists of a paper and a website to educate about left-handed people.

Project THINK was designed as a classroom project that combined the use of instructional multimedia technology, linked to the California History/Social Science standards, which engaged gifted middle school students in the design of these standards-based video materials.

Enrollment in online courses within colleges and universities is growing at a rate far exceeding that of enrollment in classroom-delivered, face-to-face courses. Given this growth, it is important that administrators understand the costs required to deliver online courses. A frequently asked question by policy-makers is whether online instruction is more or less expensive to deliver than comparable face-to-face, classroom-delivered instruction. The objectives of this study were to 1) develop a exploratory model for deriving a cost measure for classroom-delivered instruction and an analogous model for deriving a cost measure for delivering online instruction, 2) perform an interinstitutional comparison of both classroom-delivered and online-delivered courses, 3) identify the opinions and assumptions of various campus administrators regarding online courses, and 4) identify the role of costs in the academic decision-making process regarding offering online courses. The study employed a mixed-methods research methodology. The quantitative analysis was performed using publicly available data from seven public institutions. The qualitative analysis entailed directed interviews with 12 preidentified campus decision makers from those institutions: six chief business officers and six chief academic officers. The study found that, for the organizations studied, online courses are delivered at a lower unit cost than face-to-face courses. In addition, the study determined that as an academic decision factor, cost is overwhelmed by other factors such as enrollment growth, campus space constraints, and broadening access. / text

The purpose of the project was to develop a web-based instructional design tool. The tool provides guidelines, templates, and checklists to simplify the overall process, and give the designer a path to follow to help manage the instructional design project. It is based on the generalized model of Instructional Systems Design (ISD), but is applicable to the design of instructional materials for delivery by an instructor, by Computer-based Training (CBT), or a combination of instructor-led and technology-based delivery.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the weaknesses of current e-learning environment development models and to establish a comprehensive e-learning environment development model (EEDM). In the literature study I established the components of a comprehensive EEDM by looking at five existing models. The main concern in all of the models is the lack of configuration management, which lead to the investigation of other characteristics that an EEDM should have to be described as a comprehensive model. I then used these characteristics to establish the E-learning Dome - a comprehensive EEDM. The E-learning Dome consists of three layers, namely the Infrastructure layer, E-learning administration layer and the Course development layer. The Quality Dome encompasses the combination of these three layers. Through the use of case studies to test the feasibility of the E-learning Dome I concluded that the E-learning Dome is successful as a comprehensive EEDM. / Theoretical Computing / M.Sc. (Information Systems)