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- Title
- PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND TEACHER IMPACTS: THE NSF GK-12 EXPERIENCE
- Creator
- Camasta, Susan Fullett
- Date
- 2012-05-21, 2012-07
- Description
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Professional development is a central piece in the continuing education of teachers. The purpose of this study was to examine professional...
Show moreProfessional development is a central piece in the continuing education of teachers. The purpose of this study was to examine professional development for teachers, in particular, the impact of one program that has the potential to positively influence educators as their careers evolve. Twenty-seven teachers who served as participants in the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) Fellows in K-12 Education Program (GK-12) volunteered to be interviewed about their experiences as teacher partners with graduate student Fellows who were considered experts in their content area and research methods. The teachers taught 1st through 12th grades in 22 different schools, and represented nine GK-12 programs in six states. The data collected in this qualitative study indicate enduring impacts on teachers and those included: affective impacts, as well as impacts on their practice, their colleagues and their professional involvement. In addition, Fellow and student impacts were reported. The teacher reports indicate that the design and goals of the GK-12 program—which is meant to impact graduate student Fellows, teachers and students—are consistent with the literature on best-practice professional development including facilitating teacher change. Thus, this program can serve as a model for designing effective professional development. A limitation of this study is that most of the data collected were from teacher reports.
Ph.D. in Science Education, July 2012
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- Title
- DEVELOPING MATHEMATICAL KNOWLEDGE FOR TEACHING: DOCUMENTING PRESERVICE ELEMENTARY TEACHERS' EXPERIENCES
- Creator
- Kwiatkowski-egizio, Erica
- Date
- 2013, 2013-07
- Description
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The two research questions that guided this study were: (1) How do preservice teachers develop mathematical knowledge for teaching during a...
Show moreThe two research questions that guided this study were: (1) How do preservice teachers develop mathematical knowledge for teaching during a coordinated math methods course and field experience? and (2) What types of portfolio tasks lend themselves to documenting mathematical knowledge in teaching? Six, female, elementary (K-8) teacher candidates who were co-enrolled in Math Methods, K-9, and Field Experience II, during the 15-week, fall 2012 semester at Lewis University were the participants in this study. The six teacher candidates all completed their field experiences in the same K-8 school, St. Joseph, in Lockport, Illinois. Three of the teacher candidates had elementary placements (grades K, 1, and 4) and three of the teacher candidates had middle school placements (5, 6, and 7). Each of the teacher candidates completed pretest and post-test DTAMS assessments. All candidates taught three mathematics lessons, which were videotaped and observed by the researcher. After each lesson was taught, a debriefing interview on the strengths, improvements, and next steps was conducted. Math Methods class sessions and Field Experience II seminars were recorded. Finally, each teacher candidate submitted a Math Teaching Portfolio. Results illustrated the growth of mathematical knowledge for teaching that occurred for each participant. In addition, results indicated which portfolio tasks are best for documenting mathematical knowledge for teaching. Implications for the field of mathematics education, future research, and teacher preparation programs are also discussed.
PH.D in Mathematics Education, July 2013
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- Title
- THE PEDAGOGY OF INGENUITY IN SCIENCE: AN EXPLORATION OF CREATIVE THINKING IN THE SECONDARY SCIENCE CLASSROOM
- Creator
- Antink, Allison
- Date
- 2012-07-17, 2012-07
- Description
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The importance of creative thinking in science cannot be overstated. Creativity is integral to the development of knowledge about the natural...
Show moreThe importance of creative thinking in science cannot be overstated. Creativity is integral to the development of knowledge about the natural world and the knowledge, skills and abilities that support it are in need of greater understanding. The Next Generation Science Standards (2012) include practices that implicitly emphasize the creative thinking in science that students should develop by the 12th grade. These science practices were utilized in a framework to explore a group of secondary science classrooms in order to investigate potential relationships between classroom variables and student creative thinking in science. A measure of scientific creative thinking (Hu & Adey, 2002) was used with 284 student participants from 21 different classes, six different schools and from seven different teachers. Students’ performance on a pre to post-administration of the measure was compared against case studies that were developed of each classroom to determine trends. Those case studies were developed across one semester using 2-3 observations per class per semester and the collection and analysis of teachers’ labs and other instructional materials. The outcomes of a pre to post-administration of the measure, when coupled with the case studies, suggested three distinct trends in relationships between classroom variables and students’ scientific creative thinking. These trends: originality in the use of scientific tools, originality and variety in the development of scientific questions, and the role of context in the development of original, engineering-type design tasks are discussed in the context of research on creative thinking in science and in the science practices in the Next Generation Science Standards (NRC, 2012).
Ph.D. in Science Education, July 2012
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