This study investigated the effect of inquiry-based instruction in technical undergraduate education. Specifically, the effect was measured along two dimensions: 1) the effect on student learning and, 2) student attitude towards subject matter. The researcher designed an inquiry-based instructional approach to encourage interaction between teacher and students and to help students take more responsibility for their learning. Three technical undergraduate classes participated in the study. Each class was divided into experimental and control groups. For the experimental group, a twice-a-week traditional lecture was replaced with a once-a-week inquiry-based question and answer session. Students in the control group were taught as normal, by a traditional style lecture. Students in the experimental group were expected to use the extra hour, gained by meeting only once once-a-week, to study and prepare. Both groups were administered pre- and post- tests to determine the learning that took place during the experimental intervention. Pre- and post- surveys were also administered to assess the effect of the inquiry-based instruction on student attitude. Additionally, scores from student exams, professor surveys, and researcher observations were used to collect data and understand the effect of the instructional approach. The findings suggest that inquiry-based learning in technical classes can have a positive effect on learning and attitude.

Orientador: Ines Signorini / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-08T02:17:50Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Bazarim_Milene_M.pdf: 1574722 bytes, checksum: 85eb6ea3d823b0cf3db4bae81f37a5d4 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006 / Resumo: Este trabalho apresenta os resultados de uma investigação sobre a construção da interação em mensagens escritas trocadas entre mim, enquanto professora, e meus 98 alunos de uma escola pública da periferia de Campinas-SP. Trata-se de uma investigação de cunho qualitativo na qual a geração dos registros foi orientada pela metodologia da pesquisa-ação. As 189 mensagens que constituem o corpus foram geradas durante o mês de novembro de 2004, sendo que 125 foram produzidas por mim e 64 pelos alunos de quinta e sexta séries. Inicialmente, essas mensagens eram curtas e visavam estabelecer um contato amigável entre professora e alunos. À medida que os alunos foram respondendo, as mensagens foram se individualizando, tornando-se mais longas e se aproximando do gênero carta pessoal. A troca de mensagens foi uma atividade extraclasse e os textos assim produzidos não foram objeto de correção ou discussão em sala de aula. As análises revelaram que nessas mensagens, embora os papéis institucionais de professora e aluno não tenham sido apagados, houve deslocamentos significativos e de grande interesse para a reconfiguração do contexto sociointeracional da sala de aula, pois procurei me construir como um interlocutor interessado no que o aluno teria a dizer sobre si mesmo e sobre a escola. Desse modo, a interação estabelecida escapa aos padrões escolares vigentes naquela instituição sem, contudo, deixar de ter um caráter institucional e pedagógico importante para o letramento do aluno, uma vez que houve também a mobilização de recursos lingüístico-discursivos necessários à interação via carta / Abstract: The present dissertation presents the results of a research on the accomplishment of interaction through the exchange of written messages between myself, as a teacher, and my 98 students in a peripheral public school in the city of Campinas, SP. It is a qualitative-driven research, and the generation of registers was based on the action-research methodology. The 189 messages comprising the corpus were written during November, 2004. From such amount, 125 were written by me, and 64 by the fifth and sixth grade students. At first, such messages were short, and aimed at making a friendly contact between teacher and students. As long as the students started answering, the messages became individualized, longer, resembling the personal letter genre. The exchange of messages was an extra activity, and the texts written in such context were not object of correction or class discussion. The analyses show that in such messages, even though the institutional roles of teacher and student were not erased, there were remarkable displacements, which are of great interest for a change in the sociointeractional classroom context, since I attempted to posit myself as an interlocutor who is interested in the student opinion on herself and on the school. Therefore, the accomplished interaction differs from the patterns which are common in such school. Such interaction has an important institutional and pedagogic feature, contributing to the student¿s literacy, once it could be observed the use of linguistic-discursive resources necessary to the interaction through letters. Keywords: Student-teacher interaction, literacy, action-research / Mestrado / Lingua Materna / Mestre em Linguística Aplicada

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This dissertation analysed the interactions between instructors and students in a language classroom in Russia. Using video-recorded data, instructor interviews, and student assessments from English classes at a private language school for children in the Urals region of Russia, a Conversation Analytic [CA] framework was employed to determine: how the talk (specifically turn-taking, adjacency pairs, and repairs) was sequentially organised; if and how the institutional setting constrained the talk; and if previously determined 'universal' structures of talk applied to this Russian academic discourse. This research also tested the hypotheses that the 'universal' structures of talk would apply regardless of gender, but would be used differently by the boys and girls, and by the instructors interacting with them. The relevance of the participants' institutional identities or gender to the interaction was also examined. The analysis showed that the participants did orient to their institutional identities of instructor or student, and the institutional setting did constrain the organisation of talk. The instructors' responses to the interviews and 'student assessment' questionnaires showed that they generally had positive attitudes toward girls and mixed attitudes toward boys. While the underlying sequences, the universal 'rules' of interaction, applied to interactions with both boys and girls, how (and how frequently) the sequences were used did vary by gender (i.e., typically 'male' and 'female' speech styles). Also, some of the organisation of talk showed that the instructors did orient to the students' genders in the classroom. This research is significant as the first CA study of the sequential organisation of talk in an institutional setting in Russia. In general, this research contributes to the CA findings on the organisation of talk in different languages, cultures, and settings; specifically, it provides the first point of comparison of Russian classroom interactions, from a CA perspective, with the large corpus of data already collected in classrooms in the Western tradition of education. Finally, this research is significant as it provides a thorough microanalysis of the relativity of gender-specific verbal behaviour; the analysis also shows how the instructors behave verbally, and in this way produce gender-specific communication styles. / Slavic Linguistics

The fundamental advancement of information technology has given rise to distance education industry hence it has helped to the popularity of distance education among people. However, for employing innovative and advanced tools universities need financial resources. Reaching to these resources is not easy and accessible. Interaction equivalency theorem can be a good solution for overcoming the financial problems but designers are reluctant to utilize it because they think that education quality will decrease due to lack of teacher interaction. This study demonstrated that students’ perception toward interaction equivalency is positive as long as they have high level of interdependency with other students. Without this level of, students are not motivated in order to continue their courses. This study by providing techno-pedagogical design and IS design theory for support of IE helps e-learning practitioners who want to design an acceptable distance educational system with limited financial resources. / Program: Magisterutbildning i informatik