ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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Description
Mentor teachers have a significant impact on pre-service teachers. Unfortunately, mentors are often underprepared for their role, and thus, the potential learning from a student teaching experience is not maximized. Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University provides training to mentors who host pre-service teachers during their student teaching experience. Training is delivered in two formats: online prior to the start of the semester and face-to-face each month throughout the semester. This action research study looked at how training contributes to mentor understanding and actions in supporting teacher candidates and how mentor support impacts teacher candidate performance. The study included two mentor/teacher candidate dyads and one university site coordinator. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected from a variety of sources including observations of mentor trainings, teacher candidate lessons, and coaching conversations. Additional data sources included semi-structured interviews with mentors, teacher candidates, and the site coordinator. Analysis of data found that training may contribute to mentor understanding, but other factors matter too. The data also indicated that current training is insufficient at producing all desired mentor behaviors. With respect to the ways that mentors support teacher candidates, this study found that mentors play a multifaceted role, provide ongoing feedback, and employ various strategies during coaching conversations. This study found mentors help teacher candidates see their performance through the eyes of an experienced educator. Modeling and coaching helped teacher candidates improve. This study also suggests a positive, professional relationship between mentor/mentee and certain teacher candidate characteristics such as openness to feedback facilitate learning from a mentor.
ContributorsBorden, Ryen (Author) / Carlson, David (Thesis advisor) / Barnard, Wendy (Committee member) / Rojas, Michelle (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This action research study examined the influence of teacher educator collaboration using portfolios. The participants in this study were teacher educators in a university. The study was designed to combat the limited ways in which teacher educators receive feedback on their teaching. Teacher educator collaboration using portfolios enabled teacher educators to engage in professional learning around the teacher educator pedagogy of rehearsal, receive feedback in multiple ways over one semester, and utilize the feedback to make changes in their instruction. Because the process was cyclical, the measures enabled them to set goals, apply new learning, and engage in continual reflection and growth. A qualitative methods study was employed to investigate: (a) how teacher educators engaged in the collaborative portfolio process, (b) ways in which they found value in the process, and (c) ways in which they made changes to their teaching as a result of the feedback. Data were collected through pre-and post-intervention interviews, observations, and peer triad feedback forms. The study design aligned with two theoretical frameworks: situated learning theory and adult learning theory. Participants filmed themselves teaching twice, administered two teacher candidate feedback surveys, collaborated with their peers to examine their teaching together, and applied the feedback they received in order to strengthen their teaching. Throughout the study and at the conclusion, teacher educators used feedback from their students and peers to reflect on their own practices as teacher educators. The results of this study indicated that the participants found value in the pedagogy of rehearsal, watching their peers teach, and receiving feedback from both their peers and students. The data also showed that the teacher educators made changes to their instruction. Lastly, the participants valued the time to collaborate with peers. Future research should include making modifications to the current collaborative portfolio process to involve evidence of teacher candidate learning, allowing teacher educators to investigate how their practices influence teacher candidate learning.
ContributorsBeal, Sarah (Author) / Rotherham-Fuller, Erin (Thesis advisor) / Carlson, David (Committee member) / Rojas, Michelle (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
While the literacy narrative genre has been studied in first-year composition and methods of teaching courses, investigations of the literacy narrative as a multimodal project for pre-service teachers (PSTs) of English Language Arts remain scarce. This research shares a qualitative classroom-based case study that focuses on a literacy narrative project, redesigned as a Multimodal Writing History Memoir (see Appendix 1), the first assignment in a required writing methods course in a teacher training program for English Language Arts (ELA) teachers at a large public university in the southwest. The study took place during the fall semester of 2019 with 15 ELA undergraduate pre-service English Education or Secondary Education majors. The study described here examined the implementation and outcomes of the multimodal writing history memoir with goals of better understanding how ELA PSTs design and compose multimodally, of understanding the topics and content they included in their memoirs, to discover how this project reflected PSTs’ ideas about teaching writing in their future classrooms. The memoir project invited pre-service teachers to infuse written, audio, and visual text while making use of at least four different mediums of their choice. Through combined theoretical frames, I explored semiotics, as well as pre-service teachers’ use of multiliteracies as they examined their conceptions of what it means to compose. In this qualitative analysis, I collected students’ memoirs and writing samples associated with the assignment, a demographics survey, and individual mid-semester interviews. The writing activities associated with the memoir included a series of quick writes (Kittle, 2009), responses to questions about writing and teachers’ responsibilities when it comes to teaching composition, and letters students wrote to one another during a peer review workshop. Additionally, my final data source included the handwritten notes I took during the presentations students gave to share their memoirs. Some discoveries I made center on the nuanced impact of acts of personal writing for PSTs, some of the specific teaching strategies and areas of teaching focus participants relayed, and specifically, how participants worked with and thought about teaching multimodal composition.
ContributorsHope, Kate (Author) / Early, Jessica (Thesis advisor) / Saidy, Christina (Committee member) / Durand, Sybil (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
This qualitative classroom-based study investigates the writing practices, choices and reflections of Latinx high school students during an instructional unit on writing testimonio. The study is grounded in a sociocultural theory of writing and draws from LatCrit and Testimonio to understand how writing about self as testimonio shapes the writing practices of ethnically and linguistically diverse student populations, specifically Latinx, urban youth. The study took place in the researcher’s eleventh grade class at an urban charter school in a major urban center in the southwest. Data collection included collection of writing samples, interviews of a subsection of the students within the class, and participant observer memos and field notes. Analysis was conducted through a testimonio and narrative analysis lens and afforded the opportunity for researcher and participant to co-construct the knowledge gained from the data corpus. Findings focus on the ways participants interacted with the unit of study, how participants used navigational capital to navigate the in-between spaces in their lives, including between cultures, school and home, and linguistic situations. Further, these findings reveal the purposes for which participants wrote their testimonios and on the ways the participants found agency as writers, pride in their writing, and ownership of the narratives of their communities.
ContributorsBaldonado-Ruiz, Monica (Author) / Early, Jessica (Thesis advisor) / Saidy, Christina (Committee member) / Bebout, Lee (Committee member) / Durand, Sybil (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021