Matching Items (3)
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Education
Description
The purpose of this study is to portray kindergarten teachers' developmentally appropriate practices in order to authenticate the essential component of play. Recently, student achievement has been the primary focus in Early Childhood Education, and play is seen as an action that precludes academic learning. This is a qualitative study of teachers' perceptions and teaching practices through observations, interviews, surveys, and journal reflections. The study found that participant kindergarten teachers: (1) have a developing understanding of the positive impact play has on student development, yet they are not aware of how to successfully implement play in their classroom; (2) tend to be more work driven than play driven in their daily activities; and (3) perceive play occurrs when manipulatives are made available for student use, however, the activities are largely teacher-directed in contrast to student initiated play. In summary, participant kindergarten teachers were found to be hesitant to let their control shift to child-initiated learning. There are gaps between teacher knowledge of how child initiated play impacts learning and the actual classroom implementation of child initiated play. Teachers need further development to understand how to use materials to integrate play into daily lessons. It is important to widely disseminate and support the use of Early Childhood National Board Standards regarding play in kindergarten classrooms. Kindergarten teachers require professional development that permits the integration of knowledge of play and the implementation of play in an increasingly accountability driven environment. Keywords: Play; Perceptions of play; Learner-Centered; Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP); National Board Certification National Board Certified Teacher (NBCT); National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS); English Language Learners (ELL); English Language Development (ELD)
ContributorsRiley, Shannon (Author) / Surbeck, Elaine (Thesis advisor) / Ganesh, Tirupalavanam G. (Thesis advisor) / Christie, James (Committee member) / Stahlman, Rebecca (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Although open access publishing has been available since 1998, we know little regarding scholars' perceptions and practices toward publishing in open access outlets, especially in the social science community. Open access publishing has been slow to penetrate the field of education, yet the potential impact of open access could make this publishing method an important innovation for understanding how to support the publishing needs of education scholars. To discover these perceptions and practices that education scholars have toward open access publishing, a 51-item web-based survey was provided to scholars with known investment in open access publishing. Participants had either (1) a publication in one of 34 United States education-based open access journals or (2) a manuscript submitted for peer review in one of those 34 journals. The survey contained subscales focusing on contemporary open access themes--issues identified through a comprehensive analysis of the major outlets for scholarly news in education. Through open and axial coding, several themes were extracted. They included rights and ease of access, ease of publishing, costs, support from colleagues and administrators, and perceived quality of open access outlets. The survey showed moderate to high reliability using Cronbach's alpha. Correlation and MANOVA testing showed significant results in scholars' teaching status and peer review status of manuscripts. Additional findings indicated that non-tenured education scholars responded more strongly than tenured scholars to issues related to rights and ease of access, promotion, and quality. Scholars with manuscripts currently in peer review felt strongly about themes of rights and ease of access, cost, and promotion. The results imply the following: (1) If scholars want their research read by a wider audience, they should publish in open access journals. (2) Pro-open access policies and procedures could gain more support by ensuring open access is promoted to non-tenured scholars seeking to publish. (3) More research, forums, discussions, and education about open access need to occur in greater abundance to continue to ameliorate scholars' views about the benefits of open access publishing. (4) Institutions and departments can offer their unconditional support for open access publishing as a method of meeting promotion/tenure requirements.
ContributorsEllingford, Lori Michelle (Author) / Brem, Sarah K. (Thesis advisor) / Husman, Jenefer (Committee member) / Ganesh, Tirupalavanam G. (Committee member) / Duggan, Mary Anne (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
There is a serious need for early childhood intervention practices for children who are living at or below the poverty line. Since 1965 Head Start has provided a federally funded, free preschool program for children in this population. The City of Phoenix Head Start program consists of nine delegate agencies, seven of which reside in school districts. These agencies are currently not conducting local longitudinal evaluations of their preschool graduates. The purpose of this study was to recommend initial steps the City of Phoenix grantee and the delegate agencies can take to begin a longitudinal evaluation process of their Head Start programs. Seven City of Phoenix Head Start agency directors were interviewed. These interviews provided information about the attitudes of the directors when considering longitudinal evaluations and how Head Start already evaluates their programs through internal assessments. The researcher also took notes on the Third Grade Follow-Up to the Head Start Executive Summary in order to make recommendations to the City of Phoenix Head Start programs about the best practices for longitudinal student evaluations.
ContributorsArmfield, Jessica Ann (Author) / Duggan, Mary Anne (Thesis director) / Dumka, Larry (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor)
Created2014-05