VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Designing EvoRoom: An Immersive Simulation Environment for Collective Inquiry in Secondary Science

This dissertation investigates the design of complex inquiry for co-located students to work as a knowledge community within a mixed-reality learning environment. It presents the design of an immersive simulation called EvoRoom and corresponding collective inquiry activities that allow students to explore concepts around topics of evolution and biodiversity in a Grade 11 Biology course. EvoRoom is a room-sized simulation of a rainforest, modeled after Borneo in Southeast Asia, where several projected displays are stitched together to form a large, animated simulation on each opposing wall of the room. This serves to create an immersive environment in which students work collaboratively as individuals, in small groups and a collective community to investigate science topics using the simulations as an evidentiary base. Researchers and a secondary science teacher co-designed a multi-week curriculum that prepared students with preliminary ideas and expertise, then provided them with guided activities within EvoRoom, supported by tablet-based software as well as larger visualizations of their collective progress. Designs encompassed the broader curriculum, as well as all EvoRoom materials (e.g., projected displays, student tablet interfaces, collective visualizations) and activity sequences. This thesis describes a series of three designs that were developed and enacted iteratively over two and a half years, presenting key features that enhanced students' experiences within the immersive environment, their interactions with peers, and their inquiry outcomes. Primary research questions are concerned with the nature of effective design for such activities and environments, and the kinds of interactions that are seen at the individual, collaborative and whole-class levels. The findings fall under one of three themes: 1) the physicality of the room, 2) the pedagogical script for student observation and reflection and collaboration, and 3) ways of including collective visualizations in the activity. Discrete findings demonstrate how the above variables, through their design as inquiry components (i.e., activity, room, scripts and scaffolds on devices, collective visualizations), can mediate the students' interactions with one another, with their teacher, and impact the outcomes of their inquiry. A set of design recommendations is drawn from the results of this research to guide future design or research efforts.

Keywords: collaboration
collective inquiry
digitally-augmented physical spaces
educational technology
mixed-reality
technology-enhanced learning environment
Advisor: Slotta, James D
Secondary Educators Perceptions of Teacher to Parent Communication and the Relationship to Student Achievement

The intersection of principal leadership and teacher to parent communication was examined through this original research, with an analysis of how principals' beliefs and actions influenced teachers' beliefs and the relationship between these perceptions and teacher level factors. The frequency and focus of teacher to parent communication was examined in relation to educator's perceptions and actions as well as school level factors including socio-economic, demographic and student academic achievement data. This research was designed to provide recommendations for secondary school principals about teacher to parent communication. Secondary educators in four district school boards were surveyed about their beliefs and actions when they communicated with parents. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to analyze the survey data with teacher responses as the first level, nested within principal responses and school data at the second level. The results showed that secondary educators believed communication with parents was important to academic success and that principals could influence teachers' perceptions. The variance within schools was due to teacher level factors. Experienced teachers and those in support roles reported higher perceptions of the importance of communication with parents. Secondary school teachers communicated with parents about negative issues on average two to three times a semester. Contact about information items was only once or twice a year. Several teacher level factors related to frequency as those in support roles, those with more experience and teachers with younger students reported more frequent contact. When the school contacted all parents on a regular basis this was associated with less frequent individual teacher contact. Analysis of the relationship between teacher to parent contact and school level factors such as socio-economic data, demographics and student achievement did not show any significance. The recommendations for principals from the research include enlisting the aid of more experienced teachers to promote teacher to parent contact to staff and limiting the frequency of mass communication from the school in order to encourage teacher to parent contact that is more frequent and individualized at the secondary school level.

Keywords: Educational Administration
Hierarchical Linear Modeling
Parent Communication
Principal Leadership
Secondary Education
Advisor: Anderson, Stephen E
Engaging Student Singers: Developing Reflection and Collaboration in a Technology-enhanced Learning Environment

This thesis explores the integration of a wiki technology tool to support collaboration and reflection in a secondary school music context. The wiki intervention also allows the examination of students' development of self-regulated learning processes, as well as the impact of such an approach on the role of the teacher within the classroom. The vocal wiki was integrated in a school setting, analyzed, and developed using a design-based methodology. The study began with a pilot phase, followed by two iteration cycles. At the end of each cycle, data was collected and analyzed to inform changes to the design of the wiki tool for the following iteration. Study participants involved 50 secondary music students as well as the teacher/researcher. The student-created content of the vocal wiki, which encompassed individual reflections, collaborative discussion, vocal recordings, and student-selected photos, as well as focus group interviews and the teacher/researcher journal, provided data for the design evaluation. Data analysis included coding and descriptive summaries of student wiki contributions in the various design iterations, as well as three case studies intended to provide a deeper narrative exploration into individual student experiences of engaging with the vocal wiki tool. The data was analyzed according to three dimensions that represented different aspects of the design, enactment, and overall impact of the vocal wiki tool: collaboration, reflection and performance. Study findings support the interpretation that there was an improved level of student agency and self-regulated learning that resulted from the process of reflection on performance as well as collaborative dialogue and peer interaction. By engaging in reflection on their own musical experiences, students gained efficacy in monitoring their own musical progress, and set more realistic musical goals. Through the development of self-regulated learning skills, my work suggests that students become more independent as musicians, and further develop their musical identities, when they began to think differently about their own singing and their contributions to the ensemble. This work supports a pedagogical shift concerning the role of the music teacher in performance-based classrooms, from the traditional conductor-centered view to a more student-centered approach with a focus on reflection and collaboration.

Keywords: Action research
Design-based research
Learning sciences
Music Education
Singing
Technology
Advisor: Slotta, James D
Canadian Arctic Policy and Program Development and Inuit Recognition: A Neoliberal Governmentality Analysis of Canada's Northern Strategy and "The Missing Piece"

In 2007, the Canadian government announced its commitment to the development of the Canadian North through launching Canada's Northern Strategy. The purpose of the Strategy was to address the issue of climate change and its associated effects of increased natural resource extraction and shipping activity in the Canadian Arctic region. Different from past federal government policy and program development initiatives in the Canadian Arctic, this Strategy appeared to make central Inuit voices by way of involving them in the four pillars that constituted the Strategy: Exercising our Arctic sovereignty, promoting social and economic development, protecting our environmental heritage, and improving and devolving northern governance. As the Strategy began to unfold, however, responses from Inuit communities suggested otherwise. Current literature in regards to this issue agrees that Inuit have been placed on the periphery of Canada's Northern Strategy. Instead of asking how this took place, focus has been placed on ways to better insert Inuit voices into the Strategy as it moves forward. As a consequence, this issue does not get fully resolved. My dissertation examines the question: How do Inuit get positioned on the periphery of Canada's Northern Strategy in the first place? I posit that it is in illuminating the political rationale that underpins the Strategy where this question can be addressed. Using a neoliberal governmentality framework, I examine three case studies from Canada's Northern Strategy that are all in their beginning stages of development, in order to reveal how a neoliberal political rationale is operating within each of these projects and, consequently, how it defines the way in which Inuit communities are able to participate. The intention of this analysis is to illuminate both the objective and associated technologies that are responsible for placing Inuit communities on the periphery, in order to be able to reconsider how these aspects influence the Strategy and its relationship with Inuit communities moving forward.

Keywords: Canada's Northern Strategy
Canadian Arctic Policy and Program Development
Inuit Recognition
Neoliberal Governmentality
Advisor: Sawchuk, Peter
Transcription as an Initiator of Noticing Language Form and Use: An EFL Longitudinal Study

When second language learners speak, do they know if they are making mistakes? And what would they do if they knew? This research investigates noticing in relation to speaking. Noticing is an important first step in the process of second language learning. Many research studies have shown that different instructional approaches can draw learner attention to particular forms so that they can become noticed. However, why a learner chooses to attend to certain input and not others remains little understood. In this longitudinal study, transcription was used as a means to initiate noticing. Twenty-four Hong Kong ESL senior secondary school students transcribed the oral presentations they had done as part of a mock exam practice. With the aid of the transcripts, they reflected on their oral production with a classmate or on their own, after which they were twice given time to prepare a revision and then repeat their performance. Stimulated recalls provided additional opportunities for noticing. Learners underwent the procedure three times over the course of one school semester. I found that participants were able to discover their own grammar and pronunciation errors through their transcripts, and were able to correct most of their mistakes at the next opportunity. The main difference was in how collaborative pairs evolved in their process of noticing over time. The study found that the task itself had an impact on how the participants prioritized and acted on what they noticed. I conclude that transcription is a useful activity that leads students to notice their own speech production, while collaborative dialogue should have a significant place in the language classroom as shown in the qualitative, but not the quantitative, data.

Keywords: EFL
Hong Kong
Longitudinal
Noticing
Secondary school
Transcription
Advisor: Swain, Merrill
Referential Tensions: Inheritance as Cultural Practice

This dissertation theorizes inheritance as a cultural practice by examining interpretive scenes set up by art works that re-tell recognizable historical events. I draw on the work of Hannah Arendt, specifically her concept of natality, into order to demonstrate the importance of approaching inheritance as a cultural practice, rather than a natural or automatic phenomenon. As such, inheritance is sensible as situated and relational, a set of enactments of appearances of the past as well as responses to such appearances. The historical re-tellings I address, such as The Black Audio Film Collective's Handsworth Songs and Bracha Ettinger's Eurydice series, are shown to take on and to re-cite fragments of existing historical representations whereby images, sounds, and textual fragments are de-contextualized and placed into new arrangements. Through the analysis of art works, I explore the expression of natality time and the opening of an interpretive space between being given a history and coming to act on that history. I show how the art works studied here insert themselves between a given event and the eventuality of its meaning, becoming performative interactions for practicing encounters with the past. Arriving late at the scene of the histories they reference, I argue that these art works take on what history gives as an end and artfully transform it into a beginning. Throughout, it is encounters with art that provide opportunities to practice the forms of attention and imagination that are central to inheritance, and I show how the urgency of such practice is related to the present's immersion in a deterministic time. I critique determinism and the sense of time it prescribes, arguing that determinism reduces the capacity for creative response. Determinism constructs human activities (including inheritance) as necessary and automatic processes that are determined in advance and naturalized rather than as uncertain practices that take place between people in the present. Returning to Arendt's conception of natality, I propose a new temporal ground for inheritance, one that values uncertainty and contingency as fundamental aspects of human freedom.

Keywords: Arendt
art
cultural studies
historical memory studies
Advisor: Titchkosky, Tanya
Japanese Female and `Trans' Athletes: Negotiating Subjectivity and Media Constructions of Gender, Sexuality, and Nation

The focus of this thesis is twofold: 1) the construction of Japanese female athletes in `masculine' sports by Japanese media in terms of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and nation; and 2) Japanese female and `trans' athletes' negotiation with Japanese gender and sexuality norms in the formation of their gendered subjectivities. A theoretical framework informed by feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories is used to analyze the discursive constructions and constitution of subjectivities of Japanese female and `trans' athletes in the `masculine' sports of soccer and wrestling. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) was employed to analyze Japanese mainstream newspaper and magazines published between 2001 and 2012 and in-depth interviews with twelve Japanese female and `trans' athletes in wrestling and soccer. The result of the media analysis illustrates that Japanese mainstream media used multiple normative and normalizing discursive tactics to construct Japanese female athletes within patriarchal, sexist, and heterosexist gender and sexual norms. These discourses were also mobilized in the reporting of international competitions in which the success of Japanese female athletes was appropriated to construct Japanese national identity in order to recuperate Japanese masculinity. The analysis of interviews with female and `trans' athletes illustrates their intricate processes of negotiation with male domination of their sport, Japanese gender and sexual norms, the conflicting demands of athletic careers, and the medicalized discourse of `Gender Identity Disorder (GID)'. The discursive fissures opened up by these conflicting and oppressive discourses, however, provided a `third' gender space in which `female sporting masculinity' is recognized as the `norm' and not as `queerness'. Although this `third' space may be temporary, it provided female and `trans' athletes a space to negotiate heterosexist and cisgenderist Japanese sporting spaces and the society at large.

Keywords: colonialism
gender
Japan
LGBT
nationalism
sexuality
Advisor: Sykes, Heather
A Quantitative Study of the Developmental Theory of Embodiment: Implications to Health and Well-Being

This study involved the first quantitative testing of the Developmental Theory of Embodiment (DTE), developed by Piran and colleagues, through the Embodiment Scales for Women (ESW). The ESW includes one scale that assesses the quality of a woman's experience of inhabiting her body as she engaged with the world, namely: the Experience of Embodiment (EE) scale, as well as three scales of social experiences theorized to impact embodiment: Physical Freedom (PF), Mental Freedom (MF) and Social Power (SP). Social experience scales involved a retrospective rating for Childhood and Adolescence, as well as an Adulthood rating, and EE was assessed only for Adulthood. A sample of 412 women, aged 18-45 years, completed the study. Exploratory factor analyses (EFA) were conducted to assess the dimensionality of the scales and correlation and regression analyses were conducted to assess the relationship and relative contribution of the social domain scales to EE. Reliability, in terms of internal consistency, as well as construct validity of the ESW was also assessed to further provide evidence of the scale's psychometric properties. As predicted, EFA for all scales demonstrated the multi-dimensional nature of the ESW, with factors similar to domains produced in previous qualitative work on the DTE. Further, as predicted, correlations between social domain scales, and each social domain scale with EE, were significant. Simultaneous multiple regression analyses found that, when each social domain scale was assessed independently by developmental periods, only the Adult scale was a significant predictor of EE. Further, as predicted, when each social domain Adult scale was assessed together in a simultaneous multiple regression, all were significant predictors of EE. Cronbach's alpha and Pearson correlations with additional measures of well-being supported the ESW's reliability and construct validity. Taken together, results generally support predictions made by the DTE. Theoretical innovations and clinical implications are discussed.

Keywords: Body connection
Disembodiment
Embodiment
Women's Health
Women' Well-Being
Advisor: Piran, Niva
Errorless Classroom Management: Success-focused Proactive Intervention for Students with Challenging Behavior

The current study investigated the use of Errorless Classroom Management (ECM), a proactive, success-focused approach to managing student challenging behavior. With this approach, we trained classroom staff in strategies for building two classroom management skill sets: on-task behavior (involving students' ability to remain focused on and complete academic work) and acquiescent behavior (involving students' ability to give in to the will of a peer when it is appropriate to do so as a means of enhancing peer relations). These behaviors were used as the focus of the intervention because they are considered keystone skills that can lead to broad improvements in other classroom behaviors that are not targeted during intervention. Three teachers from two general classrooms and one special education classroom participated. They were observed throughout baseline and after training to determine whether their classroom management skills changed as a result of the training. As a means of evaluating the effects of the intervention on child behavior, we observed 9 students who exhibited significant behavioral and learning difficulties. Baseline observations of student and teacher behavior began simultaneously for all three classrooms. Using a multiple baseline research design, the training intervention was introduced in a time-lagged manner such that intervention began first for Classroom 1, followed by Classroom 2, then by Classroom 3. Teachers were trained individually through a 1-hour workshop with performance feedback techniques and subsequent feedback sessions on a weekly basis. By the end of intervention, teachers' use of reinforcement (i.e., praise, tangible rewards) and reactive approaches (i.e., reprimands) improved; however, no changes were evident in teachers' use of antecedent approaches (i.e., building rapport, priming). All 9 students demonstrated substantial improvement in on-task and acquiescent behavior. Covariant improvement in student compliance to teacher requests was also evident. Follow-up at 3 months indicated that student treatment gains were maintained. Improvements in teachers' use of reinforcement and reactive approaches were also sustained during follow-up at 3 months.

Keywords: behavior problems
classroom management
errorless approaches
Advisor: Ducharme, Joseph
Advancing Sustainability Research Using Mathematical Programming Techniques

The central thesis of this dissertation is that mathematical programming techniques can be successfully applied to gain novel insight into problems in the energy sector related to building assessment systems and wind farms. We focus on the novel application of mathematical programming to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system, and wind farm layout optimization (WFLO). In the first part of this dissertation, we use an inverse optimization technique to assess and propose improvements to the LEED rating system for buildings. Due to the large dimensionality of the inverse optimization problem, we develop an approximation to improve tractability, and provide numerical evidence to validate the approximation method. Based on the results from our inverse model, we perform a statistical analysis and determine that some of the valuation of LEED credits by building designers may be based on specific building attributes not previously considered. Second, we develop a new mathematical programming approach for wind farm layout optimization. We use Jensen's wake decay model to represent multi-turbine wake effect, develop mixed-integer linear and quadratic optimization formulations, and apply our formulations to several example layouts cases. Compared to previous approaches, our models generate layouts that are more symmetric and produce more power. We also develop a heuristic bounding policy for a special class of quadratic integer programs to speed up computational times, useful in this case, and potentially other applications. Finally, in the last part of this dissertation, we develop a comprehensive WFLO framework that simultaneously takes into account wake effect, sound regulations, turbine infrastructure, and landowner compensation. A financial analysis is performed to determine a common measure of comparison for these different factors, and we develop various mixed-integer linear formulations by combinations of specific factors. We perform six different experiments using our formulations to demonstrate the value of our framework, and from the results we determine the factors impact on the optimal positioning of turbines, infrastructure, and landowner compensation.

Advisor: Chan, Timothy C.Y.