ethanporcaro/eric-fulltext-meta huggingface dataset:
A Constructivist Study of Middle School Students&apos; Narratives and Ecological Illustrations
Author: Stokrocki, Mary L.
Date: 2010-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Middle School Students,Constructivism (Learning),Participant Observation,Writing (Composition),Writing Assignments,Narration,Data Collection,Notetaking,Questionnaires,Photography,Art,Illustrations,Story Telling,Misconceptions,Peer Evaluation,Literary Genres,Ecology,Instructional Effectiveness,Transformative Learning,Qualitative Research,Content Analysis

Using participant observation, we describe/interpret the results of teaching a constructivist unit that empowered students in narrative writing and illustration. Participant observation methods included daily note taking, pre-post questioning, and photographing artworks. We analyzed students' stories and illustrations with borrowed and emerging categories and included students' criteria from their final peer assessment called Critter Critique. Findings suggest they have misconceptions about the desert (an ugly place or has triangular shaped mountains). When narrating, students showed propensity to use first person narration and humor. They are fascinated with the predator/prey theme and snakes are their dominant desert creatures. When illustrating, some students used expression/projection; all used three or more spatial grounds; and many drew tiny details and secret places. Educators need to discuss with students life cycles in the desert, essential issues such as survival, their place in the preservation of this delicate and quickly disappearing wilderness, and the reasons why they should take care of the desert and its animals.
Performing Thyself: Sparking Imagination and Exploring Ethnic Identity through Singing and Dancing
Author: Tsetsura, Katerina
Date: 2010-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Singing,Dance,Ethnicity,Imagination,Folk Culture,Teaching Methods,Cultural Background,Teacher Background,Multicultural Education

This essay discusses two sets of creative teaching methods: live singing and dancing. The performance by an instructor can set a mode for students to achieve intellectual transformation by exploring issues of identity. The role of music, especially folk singing and dancing, is specifically examined within the intercultural context of communication. Performative dialogue can be used as an effective, novel technique to initiate and develop cultural connections and discussions of culture and identity in the classroom. The author shares her experience of performing folk dancing and singing as examples of Russian cultural musical heritage to illustrate how singing and dancing can help students to learn about themselves and others, about culture, identity, and communication at large.
Visual Arts as a Lever for Social Justice Education: Labor Studies in the High School Art Curriculum
Author: Sosin, Adrienne Andi
Date: 2010-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Visual Arts,Social Justice,Labor Education,Art Education,High School Students,Action Research,Introductory Courses,Urban Education,Realism,Activism,Art Expression,Art Teachers,Schemata (Cognition),Student Needs,English Language Learners,Professional Development,Curriculum,Unions,Knowledge Level,Student Surveys,Student Attitudes,Art Activities

This collaborative action research study of pedagogy examines an introductory high school visual arts curriculum that includes artworks pertinent to labor studies, and their impact on students' understanding of the power of art for social commentary. Urban students with multicultural backgrounds study social realism as an historical artistic movement, consider the value of collective activism for social justice, and learn modes of artistic expression that meet state standards in visual arts. The powerful realistic and fantastical images the students produced express their consciousness of impending workforce participation; images communicate their inner voices and provide insights into their perceptions of working in today's global environment. The art teacher's reflections include recognition of the unique literacy demands of subject area textbooks, the necessity of schema-building to understand social studies content, the accommodation of the special academic needs of English language learners, and the importance of professional development for educators. Outcomes of the study find value in incorporating labor studies content into the visual art curriculum as an engaging and worthwhile avenue toward meeting visual arts standards and promoting social justice awareness among students.
Arts Impact: Lessons from ArtsBridge
Author: Shimshon-Santo, Amy R.
Date: 2010-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Art Education,Program Effectiveness,Participant Observation,Statistical Analysis,Elementary Secondary Education,Urban Schools,Case Studies,Educational Attainment,Poverty,Self Concept,Partnerships in Education,College School Cooperation

Arts Impact summarizes lessons learned at the ArtsBridge Program. It is informed by in-depth participant observation, logic modeling, and quantitative evaluation of program impact on K-12 students in inner city schools and arts students at the University of California Los Angeles over a two year period. The case study frames its analysis through a literary overview of the following social issues: 1) how educational attainment relates to poverty in California; 2) the importance of the creative economy in Los Angeles; and 3) the failure of California to reach federally mandated goals in arts education--particularly for under-resourced neighborhoods. Data finds statistically significant positive impacts on participants' views of self and others. This case study suggests important roles for higher education partnerships with under-resourced K-12 schools, the significance of quality teacher preparation in the arts at the university level, and the positive impact of arts education for empowering student and teacher learning.
Show Me What You See: An Exploration of Learning in Museums and Learning in Theatre
Author: Chou, Amy
Date: 2010-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Museums,Theater Arts,Role Playing,Creative Activities,Educational Strategies,Teaching Methods,Learning Strategies,Story Telling,Learning Processes,Correlation,Drama,Imagery,Exhibits,Elementary School Students,Grade 6,Questionnaires,Pretests Posttests,Coding,Statistical Analysis,Critical Thinking,Scoring Rubrics,Interrater Reliability,Evaluation Criteria,Communities of Practice

The main goal of this research study is to explore the interconnection between museum learning and theatre learning. We will begin this exploratory process by analyzing the functions of role-playing and improvisation as teaching and learning strategies, and we will then expand this analysis to the idea of storytelling as a link between learning in museums and learning in theatre. Subsequently, the study will be established upon the idea that there is a possible correlation between learning in museums and learning in theatre. Furthermore, the study will investigate how storytelling in dramatic forms, such as a group improvisational performance, can affect students' thought processes regarding a series of images and/or objects in a museum exhibit.
Implementing Mapping the Beat in the 8th Grade
Author: Richardson, Ronald Craig
Date: 2010-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Middle Schools,Suburban Schools,Grade 8,Social Studies,Integrated Curriculum,Workshops,Music Education,Geography Instruction,Mixed Methods Research,Middle School Students,Physical Geography,Human Geography,Multiple Choice Tests,Attitude Measures,Focus Groups,Observation

This article is based on a doctoral dissertation study, &quot;Expanding Geographic Understanding in Grade 8 Social Studies Classes through Integration of Geography, Music, and History: A QuasiExperimental Study&quot; that took place in a high-achieving, suburban middle school in Southern California. The study compared learning as a result of nine 90-minute workshops in Grade 8 social studies. Three classes (N = 84) were the control group and four classes (N = 131) were the treatment. 85% of students were assigned by computer to the classes. As much as possible, classes were balanced in terms of gender, ethnicity, and academic proficiency in English. The key question is whether social studies workshops that include music, hands-on geography activities, and cultural studies could result in greater understanding of physical and cultural geography and more positive geography-related attitudes for students in the treatment workshops, as compared to the control group who studied the standard curricula. Quantitative analyses compared baseline and follow-up results on a multiple-choice geography exam and an attitude survey. Four research questions asked if the control or treatment workshops led to greater: (1) geographic understanding, measured by the National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE) Intermediate Standards-Based Geography Test; (2) improvement in geography-related attitudes, measured by the Test of Geography-Related Attitudes (ToGRA); (3) success on the NCGE or the ToGRA, when controlling for sub-groups (English learners, gender, low-achieving, ethnicity); and (4) understanding of connections between geography, history, and culture, measured by qualitative observations, quick-writes, and focus group interviews. Analysis of Questions 1, 2, and 3 suggested statistically significant results. Question 1 analysis was performed on NCGE exam results, including tests for assumption of equal variance, parametric t-tests and the Wilcoxon nonparametric tests. Question 2 analyzed ToGRA results and suggested that treatment workshops resulted in greater improvement in geography-related attitudes. Group comparisons of change scores indicated statistically significant mean differences between control and treatment groups. Question 3 focused on regression results and suggested that the treatment intervention was more successful. For Question 4, qualitative measures included classroom observations, comparisons of quick-writes by students with similar characteristics, and focus group interviews. Qualitative data supported the quantitative results. An unanticipated outcome was greater writing fluency for treatment students. This study also considered the possible impact of interest, motivation and affect on student learning.
Gaining Insight into Cultural Geography through the Study of Musical Instruments
Author: Khalil, Alexander K.
Date: 2010-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Human Geography,Geography Instruction,Music Education,Musical Instruments,Experiential Learning,Case Studies,Charter Schools,Elementary School Curriculum,Cultural Education,Elementary School Students,Writing (Composition),Research Skills,Instructional Effectiveness

At present, the need for an understanding of both physical and cultural geography is increasingly urgent in America's schools. The present study explores using music as focus for the exploration of geography. Not only is music strongly linked to culture and environment but also its study provides an experiential understanding of a given culture in a way that few others can. Instrumental music, unfettered by practical, semantic, or representational constraints of other traditional art forms, can be considered as one of the most direct forms of cultural expression, reflecting primarily the collective imagination of the culture that developed it and the environment in which it developed. Musical instruments are shaped by a culture's aesthetics and made using locally available materials and technologies. The present article takes as a case study a class at the Museum School, a San Diego Unified School District charter school that emphasizes experiential learning and the arts in its daily curriculum. In this case study, 23 children in grades 4-6 focused their attention on the culture and geography of the Island of Bali, Indonesia, through studying its instrumental music, known as &quot;gamelan.&quot; The Museum School has had a Balinese gamelan program as part of its music curriculum since 2000 and thus all of the students approached the subject with substantial experiential knowledge. The course of study, which lasted several weeks, went through four stages of inquiry and discussion. First, the students conducted background research on Balinese music, focusing in particular on organology. Second, the students explored Balinese geography through organology, deducing aspects of the Balinese environment based on the design and construction of the instruments. Third, the students examined Balinese culture through its music, focusing on musical structure. Fourth the students were asked to make connections between Balinese culture and physical geography as seen through music. Finally, the students compared and contrast what they had learned with musics of their own choice, pointing out likely cultural and environmental factors that likely caused the differences and similarities they observed. This course of study helped the students make connections between cultural and physical geography in a nuanced way. Further, although focus on music and art as a subject, the core elements of the class were writing and research skills. Combining these skills with experiential learning not only deepens and nuances understanding of geography but also expands students' cognitive repertoire, providing tools for further exploration.
Interdisciplinarity in Swiss Schools: A Difficult Step into the Future
Author: Ghisla, Gianni
Date: 2010-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Foreign Countries,Interdisciplinary Approach,Definitions,Educational Practices,Educational Change,Educational History,Educational Objectives,Educational Assessment,Alignment (Education),Vocational Education,Bachelors Degrees,Models,Guidelines,Teacher Education,Educational Research,Research Projects,Teacher Attitudes,Attitude Change

Multi- and interdisciplinary education is a major postulate in the Swiss school system and has considerable weight in educational programs and learning objectives, both in compulsory school and at the upper secondary school level. However, materializing this postulate still poses problems at the political and institutional level, where the fragmentation of educational system due to Switzerland's federal structure does not foster wide-scale reform; in certain programs at the secondary school level, where disciplinary logic remains predominant; and in teachers' everyday practice, which is only slowly adopting an interdisciplinary posture. Following a presentation of the specifics of the Swiss educational system and an attempt to define the notion of interdisciplinarity, this contribution will offer an analysis of developments in the discourse surrounding interdisciplinarity in Switzerland from the 1970s onwards and present the most noteworthy initiatives in this field.
Development of Instructional Modules for ICT Enabled Curriculum Transaction for Various Subjects at Secondary Level for Teacher Empowerment and Their Quality Assessment
Author: Gopal, G. V
Date: 2010-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Information Technology,Teacher Empowerment,Educational Assessment,Educational Quality,Teaching Methods,Learning Modules,Workshops,Feedback (Response),Instructional Materials,Comparative Analysis,Computer Software,Foreign Countries,Secondary Schools,Technology Integration

Integrated instructional module in various subject areas at secondary level for Kerala was developed in a workshop mode and a CD was prepared using Linux-base. Training was given to the teachers in the instructional modules prepared by NIIT i.e. ICR and the same have been evaluated through a feedback mechanism. This paper is focusing on the comparison of the instructional materials developed by NIIT i.e. ICR with mostly used software quality models. It was an attempt to find out whether the instructional materials as the application software are having the quality characteristics so that the integration of the same in the teaching learning process makes a meaningful effect and is appreciable.
A Joint Probabilistic Classification Model of Relevant and Irrelevant Sentences in Mathematical Word Problems
Author: Cetintas, Suleyman
Date: 2010-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Probability,Word Problems (Mathematics),Classification,Difficulty Level,Identification,Sentences,Models,Correlation,Intelligent Tutoring Systems,Mathematics Education,Computational Linguistics,Statistical Analysis,Mathematical Formulas,Textbook Content

Estimating the difficulty level of math word problems is an important task for many educational applications. Identification of relevant and irrelevant sentences in math word problems is an important step for calculating the difficulty levels of such problems. This paper addresses a novel application of text categorization to identify two types of sentences in &quot;mathematical word problems&quot;, namely &quot;relevant&quot; and &quot;irrelevant&quot; sentences. A novel joint probabilistic classification model is proposed to estimate the joint probability of classification decisions for all sentences of a math word problem by utilizing the correlation among all sentences along with the correlation between the question sentence and other sentences, and sentence text. The proposed model is compared with (i) a SVM classifier which makes independent classification decisions for individual sentences by only using the sentence text, and (ii) a novel SVM classifier that considers the correlation between the question sentence and other sentences along with the sentence text. An extensive set of experiments demonstrates the effectiveness of the joint probabilistic classification model for identifying relevant and irrelevant sentences, as well as the novel SVM classifier that utilizes the correlation between the question sentence and other sentences. Furthermore, empirical results and analysis show that (i) it is highly beneficial not to remove stopwords, and (ii) utilizing part of speech tagging does not make a significant improvement although it has been shown to be effective for the related task of math word problem type classification.
Mining Collaborative Patterns in Tutorial Dialogues
Author: D'Mello, Sidney
Date: 2010-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Tutors,Interpersonal Communication,Discourse Analysis,Intelligent Tutoring Systems,Markov Processes,Sequential Approach,Science Education,Mathematics Education,Questioning Techniques,Information Retrieval,Probability,Equations (Mathematics),Data Analysis

We present a method to automatically detect collaborative patterns of student and tutor dialogue moves. The method identifies significant two-step excitatory transitions between dialogue moves, integrates the transitions into a directed graph representation, and generates and tests data-driven hypotheses from the directed graph. The method was applied to a large corpus of student-tutor dialogue moves from expert tutoring sessions. An examination of the subset of the corpus consisting of tutor lectures revealed collaborative patterns consistent with information-transmission, information-elicitation, off topic-conversation, and student initiated questions. Sequences of dialogue moves within each of these patterns were also identified. Comparisons of the method to other approaches and applications towards the computational modeling of expert human tutors are discussed.
Students with Autism Participating in Recess
Author: Lucas, Matthew D.
Date: 2010-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Autism,Pervasive Developmental Disorders,Recess Breaks,Student Participation,Inclusion,Definitions,Educational Benefits,Student Characteristics,Symptoms (Individual Disorders),Teaching Methods

The participation of a student with autism in recess can often be both challenging and rewarding for all students and the general education teacher. This paper will address common characteristics of students with autism and present basic solutions to improve the education of these students in the recess setting. Initially the definition, behavioral characteristics, and prevalence of autism will be presented. This will be followed by a brief discussion of autism for an individual in the classroom, and possible benefits, challenges, and solutions for children with autism in the recess setting. Lastly, specific methods of including a student with autism in a basic recess activity will be discussed.
A Snapshot of Science Education in Kindergarten Settings
Author: Campbell, Coral
Date: 2010-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Science Instruction,Preschool Children,Case Studies,Science Activities,Kindergarten,Science Education,Foreign Countries,Research Projects,Preschool Teachers,Teacher Surveys,Play,Observation,Interviews

Across Victoria, early childhood practitioners are incorporating science activities into daily experiences for their children. A small research project, which asked teachers to describe what they did in science and how they did it, has highlighted some interesting differences. This paper will describe case studies of four kindergarten settings and some of the experiences undertaken by the children--both as part of the formal program and through incidental play. It will consider these through a socio-cultural framework, noting how teachers used their understandings of play and language theories, to enhance children's understandings in science.
Alphabet and Phonological Awareness: Can It Be Enhanced in the Early Childhood Setting?
Author: McLachlan, Claire
Date: 2010-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Alphabets,Phonological Awareness,Early Childhood Education,Emergent Literacy,Foreign Countries,Preschool Children,Educational Policy,Faculty Development,Preschool Teachers,Teacher Competencies,Intervention

There is a growing body of evidence that children who possess both alphabetic and phonological awareness on school entry are in a good position to make the transition from emergent to conventional literacy (Nicholson, 2005; Whitehurst &amp; Lonigan, 1998). One of the challenges is how teachers can foster emergent literacy, including alphabetic and phonological awareness, within a holistic curriculum framework, such as New Zealand's early childhood curriculum, Te Whariki. Drawing on our respective research studies into children's literacy (Arrow, 2007; McLachlan et al., 2006), we will discuss the implications for an early childhood intervention project which is aimed at promoting phonological awareness and alphabetic knowledge in children aged 3-5 years, through professional development of teachers. This paper examines the issues involved in challenging teachers' beliefs, the effectiveness of professional development, research with children and teachers and enhancing literacy opportunities in the curriculum.