The purpose of this study was to improve problem solving attitudes and abilities in students of mathematics through the exploration of John Mason’s general problem solving strategy and the use of problem solving groups, and to document and understand this improvement process. The types of problems and tasks assigned to students as well as assessment practices were also examined. A Design-Experiment Research approach was used with thirty grade 9 students participating throughout the year-long study. A teacher-researcher journal, student problem-solving journals, and surveys were used. The study showed that using a general problem solving strategy with groups of students working together to solve problems can improve problem solving attitudes and abilities. Students made significant improvements during initial engagement of problems, in specializing and generalizing, and in communication. Almost all students expressed a more positive attitude toward problem solving and their problem solving abilities. The study demonstrates how focusing on initial stages of the problem solving process like the understanding of the problem in a group context can reach multiple learning objectives and positively impact later stages of problem solving. In addition, recommendations for classroom teachers are provided concerning the roles within the groups, the nature of beneficial problem types and student tasks, and concerning the role of the teacher as researcher of his or her own teaching practice.

This thesis approaches Thomas Pynchon's novel, Mason & Dixon, in terms of its narrative structure and sentimental content. Pynchon is generally regarded as a challenging and innovative writer, so narrative is an unsurprising subject for a study of his most recent work; sentimentalism, on the other hand, is a far cry from traditional approaches to his writing. Despite this, however, as I outline in my introduction, sentimentalism has long hovered around the edges of Pynchon's work. In Mason & Dixon it takes a privileged role as the dominating mood of the novel's final section, "Last Transit." This sentimentalism, far from being the retrogressive move that the term might imply, is bound up in a radically reconceived approach to the narrating voice of novelistic discourse, whence comes the unifying feature of my study. In Mason & Dixon, I identify this unity in the novel's referencing of film, long-established as one of Pynchon's major cultural influences. In my first chapter, I outline my approach to sentimentalism and narrative-in the modern and, specifically, modernist novel, as well as in contemporary film. In chapter two I outline my conception of Mason & Dixon's narrator as emulating film's visual representations; in chapter three, I explore this narrator as a "radically underdetermined" identity, who represents, not a linguistically embodied subjectivity, but rather representation as its own agent, as representation itself. In my fourth and final chapter, I examine how this narrator manages the sentimental content of the novel, concentrating on the character of Mason.

The purpose of this study was to improve problem solving attitudes and abilities in students of mathematics through the exploration of John Mason’s general problem solving strategy and the use of problem solving groups, and to document and understand this improvement process. The types of problems and tasks assigned to students as well as assessment practices were also examined. A Design-Experiment Research approach was used with thirty grade 9 students participating throughout the year-long study. A teacher-researcher journal, student problem-solving journals, and surveys were used. The study showed that using a general problem solving strategy with groups of students working together to solve problems can improve problem solving attitudes and abilities. Students made significant improvements during initial engagement of problems, in specializing and generalizing, and in communication. Almost all students expressed a more positive attitude toward problem solving and their problem solving abilities. The study demonstrates how focusing on initial stages of the problem solving process like the understanding of the problem in a group context can reach multiple learning objectives and positively impact later stages of problem solving. In addition, recommendations for classroom teachers are provided concerning the roles within the groups, the nature of beneficial problem types and student tasks, and concerning the role of the teacher as researcher of his or her own teaching practice.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Tulsa, 1990. / Bibliography: leaves 217-225.

Theses (M.S.)--Marshall University, 2005. / Title from document title page. Includes abstract. Document formatted into pages: contains ix, 111 p. Bibliography: p. 103-106.

Thesis (S.T.M.)--Dallas Theological Seminary, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-85).

Thesis (M. A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

This artistic inquiry was conducted to explore specific processes in dance making and expand upon how I use my own history in the choreographic process. For my Movement Project Shedding Skin: Expose, Educate, and Evolve, I address my phenomenological experience as an African-American choreographer residing in Oregon. I expanded my choreographic processes after conducting a personal interview with choreographer Gesel Mason based on the Oral Historian Association's interview techniques and analyzed the creative process used by Mason in creating No Boundaries: Dancing the Visions of Contemporary Black Choreographers. This information and that gathered from utilizing the Liz Lerman Critical Response Process in choreographic feedback sessions led to the culmination of three solos, which I choreographed on my dancing body. These works address my identity through exploring African-American culture, identity in new environments, and experiences with racism, bias, and stereotypes. My Movement Project video footage is included as a Supplemental File.

Vietnam War literature is a reflection of a sustained tension between politics and history on the one hand and morality and the effect of the war on human nature on the other hand. Although the authors under discussion urge the reader to forget the political, moral and historical milieu of the Vietnam War, it is impossible to separate the war from those three factors and by extension, the literature that stems from it. I have chosen Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War (1977) and Robert Mason’s Chickenhawk (1983) because I think they represent, perhaps in the simplest and least obtrusive way, the voices of 55 000 men whose names appear on a black, granite wall in Washington. The authors chose to write their respective memoirs for the Everyman who died in, or lived through, the aberration that was Vietnam. Through their reconstruction of the war and their experiences, they keep the demand for recognition of those who fought (whether morally sanctioned or not) in Vietnam for their country. While American society tried to force the war from its psyche because so many of them thought it was unjust, immoral and unnecessary, authors like Caputo and Mason demanded that the nation examine itself on the whole and reconsider its political endeavours. But perhaps one of the starkest revelations is their portrayal of the corruption of innocence, loyalty and idealism of those soldiers who represented their country abroad.

Practices of sculpture and geography have collaborated ever since Stone Age humans hoisted up rocks to point them into the air. The ephemerality of life was rendered in a circle of forms and mass that celebrated the union of sky, earth and dwelling. Through the manipulation of stone, the land became a place, it became a home, it became situated and navigable. As millennia unfolded, the land was written with the story of itself. The creativity woven into the story of place is an evolution of material collaborations. In recent decades, academic geographers have explored the realms of creativity in their work, and sculptors have critically engaged with the nature of place. I have united these disciplines in the exploration of a truth of materials. The aim of the research was to investigate the relationship between making and place. The structure of my PhD focussed on the development of a transdisciplinary research environment that could host a range of creative practices around stone-working. I developed a long-term relationship with Trenoweth Dimension Granite Quarry, working as an apprentice sawman and mason. Here, I examined the everyday practices of labour and skill development, from which emerged deeper material and human interactions, that went on to inform my sculpture and modes of making. Arguing that granite has threads of relational agency embedded within its matrix, I initiated a series of practices that made use of my emerging knowledge as a granite-quarry worker, cast within experimental sculpture, texts, performance, photography and film. By formulating my methods around the vibrancy of matter, I disclosed new materialisms and more-than-human relations. This assemblage of documentation and artwork records and reflects on a series of practices and processes in tension. This productive tension arises from a re-rendering of artisanal practice as a research method; ushering in modes of representation as loops of experience and interpretation take place across different sites, spaces and times of mediation. The objective for the PhD research was to present a critically informed practice of sculpture-as-ethnography that could not only provide a model for practice-based research in general, but also significantly expand what might be meant by stone-work. This PhD by alternative submission is presented as a Commentary with an accompanying Digital Archive website.