Category: Education

This study aims to examine the impact that online discussion activities, designed to encourage collaboration and question posing, have on students' understanding of statistical concepts in an undergraduate statistics course. The sample is composed of 82 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory statistics course. Techniques were utilized to match students that participated in the online discussions to those that did not participate in the online discussions. The differences between pre and posttest grades on the LOCUS assessments were compared to determine if participation impacted student learning outcomes.

Customizing Learning using Embedded Assessment

Students who have a higher level of mathematics anxiety seem to perceive mathematics as a negative experience. What key features of adults are influenced by their own mathematics anxiety and/or mathematics avoidance? By using eleven peer-reviewed studies, within the last five years, to synthesize literature on adults in the United States, two themes appear. The first theme is situated around a student's perception of mathematics. Students who have a higher level of mathematics anxiety seem to perceive mathematics as a negative experience. The second theme centers around the impact of stress on a student who is learning mathematics. A few of the studies did indicate a correlation between the higher the level of stress to more mathematics anxiety was reported. One of the studies used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure stress on the brain. This review will look at these studies for understanding of the current research on mathematics anxiety and identify areas for further research.

The purpose of this research was to examine how middle school leaders conceptualize STEM education program implementation and to more fully understand how their leadership practices are enacted within their situational context of an intensive structured STEM education program, subsequently referred to as the STEM Academy. The STEM Academy, a four-year project launched in 2016 was designed to promote STEM interests by developing teachers and leaders through intensive summer academies and providing coaching support throughout the school years. Findings reveal that school leaders conceptualize STEM education in similar ways across different campuses and describe challenges and barriers faced while navigating internal and external expectations during implementation of the STEM Academy. While some common themes emerged that led to interpretations across the four cases, each leader contributed a unique lens and perspective and no single, absolute, truth was ascertained from this analysis.

In this presentation, I will provide a brief history of moderated mediation analysis, introduce the types of moderated mediation models, and explain how moderated mediation models work with two types of variables: continuous mediator/outcome variables and categorical mediator/outcome variables. Moreover, I will explain why we need to treat categorical outcome variables differently, and provide an example using moderated mediation model with dichotomous outcome variable from the literature.

We have stumbled into one of the largest accidental experiments in the history of education. The COVID-19 pandemic forced districts to flip their traditional instructional programming from in person learning to distance and hybrid models. This research will be an embedded case study bounded by a conurbation of southern metroplex cities, suburbs, and rural areas encompassing 11 counties and a population of 7.5 million. ​It will consist of up to 50 semi-structured, open ended interviews with shelter workers, parents, teachers, administrators, counselors, and students 18 and older. The study will seek to understand how the COVID-19 quarantine affected the educational and social emotional lives of students experiencing homelessness in multiple settings and to ascertain how the future of distance learning may enhance social and organizational capital for students who are homeless and highly mobile. How can education writ large enhance the positive aspects of this event while mitigating the negative aspects to help fill in the gaps in distance learning and involvement for the benefit of homeless and highly mobile students? The evolving educational landscape that is responding to the pandemic may reveal how connectivity can enhance social and organizational capital as well as how it creates deficits in social and organizational capital.

Faculty socialization and development occurs before and during the early career, as faculty gain a sense of identity and belonging in academia. Despite the modern professor wearing many hats, socialization processes often deprioritize teaching development. Still, early-career faculty learn to teach because they must, and do so through myriad means in sometimes divergent contexts: their graduate, other early-career and employing institutions. They also approach teaching from increasingly diverse backgrounds and encounter increasingly diverse students. Colliding faculty and student diversity and lacking teaching development suggests possible tension and stress but also growth as faculty navigate teaching in the early career. Yet the lived process of teaching development is largely neglected in socialization research. This study addresses how early-career faculty are shaped as teachers within an increasingly diverse higher education context. Using interview and document data from faculty at one public 4-year research institution, this qualitative case study probes how early-career faculty conceptualize teaching identity, how they experience teaching development and how these experiences contribute to their development. In addressing these questions, this study elucidates teaching development experiences and outcomes of early-career faculty working at diverse institutions.

This research aimed to investigate why some Latina principals decided to implement Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) programs in the urban elementary schools they lead. This research specifically explores the motivations and belief systems that school principals embraced as they move forward in the challenging task of implementing a rigorous, non-traditional STEM curriculum in urban schools that have minimal resources, training, and implementation support. The study also aims to seek out an explanation of what drives these principals to go above and beyond the established district expectations for their schools. Using an ethnography approach in my qualitative study method, I examined the belief systems, motivations, and experiences of seven Latina principals who have successfully implemented STEM programs in a large urban city in the Southwest elementary schools.

According to the National Reading Panel (2000), researcher-developed measures best assess vocabulary instruction's impact because they are more sensitive to gains than standardized measures. This study details the initial development of a proximal vocabulary assessment for a robust kindergarten vocabulary intervention (Project GROW) for students at-risk for reading difficulties. The purpose of the Proximal Project GROW Expressive Vocabulary assessment is to measure a student's expressive vocabulary knowledge of specifically targeted Tier Two, social emotional learning (SEL) focused academic vocabulary words. The assessment, similar to those used in prior research (Coyne et al., 2007; Baker et al., 2013), has been developed to evaluate the effects of explicit vocabulary instruction closely aligned to the intervention and examine student response to instruction. This assessment focused on student acquisition and mastery of child-friendly definitions of age-appropriate academic vocabulary identified and explicitly taught in the context of the unit storybook via evidenced-based instruction, including explicit vocabulary instruction and dialogic reading. The measure will be piloted as a pre-and post-test for prototype units of the intervention this Spring.

The purpose of this paper is to create a research design to find a correlation between food security status and student success, as well as measure how school funding per student and the location of participants' high school moderates student success. This research design employs regression analysis and multiple regression analysis to calculate correlational coefficients and determine associations. Future directions for research include (a) observing an interrupted time series intervention quasi-experiment of food retailers being built in food deserts, and measure the impact the natural intervention has on students' GPA, and (b) depending on the results and findings of this study, another direction for future research is to qualitatively examine the students that reside in food deserts, but are considered food secure.

Problem-posing is an instructional activity that has been suggested to be beneficial for students' mathematical learning. However, the gap between problem-posing research and classroom implementation remains. The purpose of this presentation is to demonstrate how instructional technology can be integrated in mathematics classrooms to support students' problem-posing in different contexts. In this project, students were instructed to create geometry proof problems using the Hidden Village motion capture game, Algebra word problems using the ASSISTments web-based platform, and general mathematical problems based on students' surroundings using the online walkSTEM Gameboard. In addition, this presentation discusses students' learning behaviors, problem-posing performances, and dispositions toward mathematics when participating in these problem-posing activities.

This study investigates how debrief conversations unfold during virtual coaching sessions that provide embedded opportunities to practice teaching within a mixed reality simulation (MRS). We examine how teacher and coach topical episodes function (agreeing, explaining, clarifying, probing, recapping, reflecting and suggesting) to activate reflection as part of virtual coaching. Grounded in Vygotsky's sociocultural theory and the belief that learning is collaborative and impacts how pre- and in-service teachers construct knowledge, this exploratory case study draws on insights from 15 graduate students (5 pre-service teachers (PSTs) and 10 in-service teachers (ISTs)) who participated in virtual coaching with embedded practice opportunities. Data sources were video recordings and transcripts of 15 virtual coaching sessions, and one-on-one post coaching interviews. Coding categories were determined through the constant comparative analysis method. Findings indicate that MRS provides an immediate context for reflection, which guided the debrief conversations. Additionally, functions occurred with varying frequency among PSTs and ISTs, and across both groups, probing questions often led directly to reflecting and recapping the shared simulation context. In times of remote teaching, like during coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19), opportunities to simulate clinical experiences become vital.

This literature review describes effective features of storybook reading practices captured across three decades. The selected studies consist of (a) randomized control trials and quasi-experimental studies, (b) participants from low socioeconomic backgrounds, and (c) an age range of 2 to 7 years old. The selection of studies began with an exploration of two education databases and later cross-referenced with a manual search of storybook reading interventions approved by the Institute of Educational Science (IES). In the seven well-cited studies was a collection of classics published as early as the 1990s, with a total of 735 students, researchers reported the use of similar video-training techniques across. While read aloud interventions were found to have profound impacts on students' achievement across different types of implementers (teacher, parents, and researchers), many students remained unresponsive to storybook reading interventions. Finally, the differences detected across this small scope of studies made it challenging to compare their methodological rigor; however, implications and directions for future research are described in greater depth.