Matching Items (15)
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Education
- Creators: Nelson, Brian
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
- Resource Type: Text
Description
The purpose of this survey study was to collect data from pre-K-12 educators in the U.S. regarding their perceptions of the purpose, conceptions, use, impact, and results of educational research. The survey tool was based on existing questionnaires and case studies in the literature, as well as newly developed items. 3,908 educators in a database developed over 10+ years at the world's largest education company were sent a recruiting email; 400 elementary and secondary teachers in the final sample completed the online survey containing 48 questions over a three-week deployment period in the spring of 2013. Results indicated that overall teachers believe educational research is important, that the most important purpose of research is to increase effectiveness of classroom practice, yet research is not frequently sought out during the course of practice. Teachers perceive results in research journals as the most trustworthy yet also perceive research journals the most difficult to access (relying second-most often for research via in-service trainings). These findings have implications for teachers, administrators, policy-makers, and researchers. Educational researchers should seek to address both the theoretical and the applied aspects of learning. Professional development must make explicit links between research findings and classroom strategies and tactics, and research must be made more readily available to those who are not currently seeking additional credentialing, and therefore do not individually have access to scholarly literature. Further research is needed to expand the survey sample and refine the survey instrument. Similar research with administrators in pre-K-20 settings as well as in-depth interviews would serve to investigate the "why" of many findings.
ContributorsMahoney, Shawn (Author) / Savenye, Wilhelmina (Thesis advisor) / Nelson, Brian (Committee member) / Atkinson, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The gameplay experience can be understood as an interaction between player and game design characteristics. A greater understanding of these characteristics can be gained through empirical means. Subsequently, an enhanced knowledge of these characteristics should enable the creation of games that effectively generate desirable experiences for players. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between gameplay enjoyment and the individual characteristics of gaming goal orientations, game usage, and gender. A total of 301 participants were surveyed and the data were analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). This led to an expanded Gameplay Enjoyment Model (GEM) with 41 game features, an overarching Enjoyment factor, and 9 specific components, including Challenge, Companionship, Discovery, Fantasy, Fidelity, Identity, Multiplayer, Recognition, and Strategy. Furthermore, the 3x2 educational goal orientation framework was successfully applied to a gaming context. The resulting 3x2 Gaming Goal Orientations (GGO) model consists of 18 statements that describe players' motivations for gaming, which are distributed across the six dimensions of Task-Approach, Task-Avoidance, Self-Approach, Self-Avoidance, Other-Approach, and Other-Avoidance. Lastly, players' individual characteristics were used to predict gameplay enjoyment, which resulted in the formation of the GEM-Individual Characteristics (GEM-IC) model. In GEM-IC, the six GGO dimensions were the strongest predictors. Meanwhile, game usage variables like multiplayer, genre, and platform preference, were minimal to moderate predictors. Although commonly appearing in games research, gender and game time commitment variables failed to predict enjoyment. The results of this study enable important work to be conducted involving game experiences and player characteristics. After several empirical iterations, GEM is considered suitable to employ as a research and design tool. In addition, GGO should be useful to researchers interested in how player motivations relate to gameplay experiences. Moreover, GEM-IC points to several variables that may prove useful in future research. Accordingly, it is posited that researchers will derive more meaningful insights on games and players by investigating detailed, context-specific characteristics as compared to general, demographic ones. Ultimately, it is believed that GEM, GGO, and GEM-IC will be useful tools for researchers and designers who seek to create effective gameplay experiences that meet the needs of players.
ContributorsQuick, John (Author) / Atkinson, Robert (Thesis advisor) / McNamara, Danielle (Committee member) / Nelson, Brian (Committee member) / Savenye, Wilhelmina (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The goal of this research was to understand the different kinds of learning that take place in Mod The Sims (MTS), an online Sims gaming community. The study aimed to explore users' experiences and to understand learning practices that are not commonly observed in formal educational settings. To achieve this goal, the researcher conducted a four-year virtual ethnographic study that followed guidelines set forth in Hine (2000). After Hine, the study focused on understanding the complexity of the relationships between technology and social interactions among people, with a particular emphasis on investigating how participants shaped both the culture and structure of the affinity space. The format for the dissertation consists of an introduction, three core chapters that present different sets of findings, and a concluding chapter. Each of the core chapters, which can stand alone as separate studies, applies different theoretical lenses and analytic methods and uses a separate data set. The data corpus includes hundreds of thread posts, member profiles, online interview data obtained through email and personal messaging (PM), numerous screenshots, field notes, and additional artifacts, such as college coursework shared by a participant. Chapter 2 examines thread posts to understand the social support system in MTS and the language learning practices of one member who was a non-English speaker. Chapter 3 analyzes thread posts from administrative staff and users in MTS to identify patterns of interactions, with the goal of ascertaining how users contribute to the ongoing design and redesign of the site. Chapter 4 investigates user-generated tutorials to understand the nature of these instructional texts and how they are adapted to an online context. The final chapter (Chapter 5) presents conclusions about how the analyses overall represent examples of participatory learning practices that expand our understanding of 21st century learning. Finally, the chapter offers theoretical and practical implications, reflections on lessons learned, and suggestions for future research.
ContributorsLee, Yoonhee Naseef (Author) / Hayes, Elisabeth (Thesis advisor) / Gee, James (Committee member) / Nelson, Brian (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
Description
This thesis investigates students' learning behaviors through their interaction with an educational technology, Web Programming Grading Assistant. The technology was developed to facilitate the grading of paper-based examinations in large lecture-based classrooms and to provide richer and more meaningful feedback to students. A classroom study was designed and data was gathered from an undergraduate computer-programming course in the fall of 2016. Analysis of the data revealed that there was a negative correlation between time lag of first review attempt and performance. A survey was developed and disseminated that gave insight into how students felt about the technology and what they normally do to study for programming exams. In conclusion, the knowledge gained in this study aids in the quest to better educate students in computer programming in large in-person classrooms.
ContributorsMurphy, Hannah (Author) / Hsiao, Ihan (Thesis director) / Nelson, Brian (Committee member) / School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering (Contributor) / Department of Supply Chain Management (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
Programming is quickly becoming as ubiquitous a tool as general mathematics. The technology field is progressing at an exponential rate and driving this constantly evolving field forward requires competent software developers. Elementary and high school educational facilities do not currently express the importance of the computer science field. Computer science is not a required course in high school and nearly impossible to find at a middle school level. This lack of exposure to the field at a young age handicaps aspiring developers by not providing them with a foundation to build on when seeking a degree. This paper revolves around the development of a virtual world that encompasses principles of programming in a video game structure. The use of a virtual world-based game was chosen under the hypothesis that embedding programming instruction into a game through problem-based learning is more likely to engage young students than more traditional forms of instruction. Unlike the traditional method of instruction, a virtual world allows us to "deceive" the player into learning concepts by implicitly educating them through fun gameplay mechanics. In order to make our video game robust and self-sufficient, we have developed a predictive recursive descent parser that will validate any user-generated solutions to pre-defined logical platforming puzzles. Programming topics taught with these problems range from binary numbers to while and for loops.
ContributorsWest, Grant (Co-author) / Kury, Nizar (Co-author) / Nelson, Brian (Thesis director) / Kobayashi, Yoshihiro (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Computing and Informatics Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
Learning to program is no easy task, and many students experience their first programming during their university education. Unfortunately, programming classes have a large number of students enrolled, so it is nearly impossible for professors to associate with the students at an individual level and provide the personal attention each student needs. This project aims to provide professors with a tool to quickly respond to the current understanding of the students. This web-based application gives professors the control to quickly ask Java programming questions, and the ability to see the aggregate data on how many of the students have successfully completed the assigned questions. With this system, the students are provided with extra programming practice in a controlled environment, and if there is an error in their program, the system will provide feedback describing what the error means and what steps the student can take to fix it.
ContributorsVillela, Daniel Linus (Author) / Kobayashi, Yoshihiro (Thesis director) / Nelson, Brian (Committee member) / Hsiao, Sharon (Committee member) / Computing and Informatics Program (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
Can a skill taught in a virtual environment be utilized in the physical world? This idea is explored by creating a Virtual Reality game for the HTC Vive to teach users how to play the drums. The game focuses on developing the user's muscle memory, improving the user's ability to play music as they hear it in their head, and refining the user's sense of rhythm. Several different features were included to achieve this such as a score, different levels, a demo feature, and a metronome. The game was tested for its ability to teach and for its overall enjoyability by using a small sample group. Most participants of the sample group noted that they felt as if their sense of rhythm and drumming skill level would improve by playing the game. Through the findings of this project, it can be concluded that while it should not be considered as a complete replacement for traditional instruction, a virtual environment can be successfully used as a learning aid and practicing tool.
ContributorsDinapoli, Allison (Co-author) / Tuznik, Richard (Co-author) / Kobayashi, Yoshihiro (Thesis director) / Nelson, Brian (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Computing and Informatics Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-12
Description
Research suggests there is no significant difference in outcomes for online learners and on-campus learners. Several decades of online learning have also consistently demonstrated online students are less likely to persist than those students attending on campus. The Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework describes social presence, teaching presence, and cognitive presence as components of a quality online learning experience, and research links these three constructs to student retention. Using the lens of the CoI framework, this mixed methods action research study sought to increase social presence and teaching presence in asynchronous online courses at Davenport University using embedded video feedback mechanisms, in support of student persistence and retention. The Community of Inquiry survey instrument was used to quantitatively measure the changes in social presence and teaching presence between courses with and without the video feedback mechanisms. Qualitative research interviews were conducted to probe for meaning and a greater understanding of both student and instructor experiences in the courses. Results of the study indicated small but significant gains in teaching presence, but other quantitative measures showed no changes with the introduction of the videos. Qualitative analysis suggests that students who watched the instructor videos reported higher levels of teaching presence for several subconstructs of teaching presence and social presence. However, the qualitative analysis also suggested that many students did not watch the instructor videos, and thus did not benefit from any increased presence. Student discussion response videos yielded similar results qualitatively, with benefits demonstrated by those students who watched the videos but none by those who abstained.
ContributorsMiller, Brian John-Suydam (Author) / Salik, Steve (Thesis advisor) / Nelson, Brian (Committee member) / Nyambane, Gerald (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022