Matching Items (4)
Description
Legislative changes and discussions about the United States falling further and further behind other nations in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) achievement are growing. As they grow, STEM instruction in elementary school has earned its place as a national area of interest in education. In the case of Ivory School District, teachers are being asked to radically change their daily practices by consistently implementing inquiry-based STEM experiences in their classrooms. As such, teachers are being asked to scale a divide between the district expectations and their knowledge and experience. Many fourth grade educators are teachers who have been trained as generalists and typically do not have specific background or experience in the philosophy, instructional strategies, or content associated with STEM. Using a prototype approach, this study aims to understand how such teachers conceptualize STEM instruction and the relationship between their experience and conceptions.
ContributorsKenney, Meghan (Author) / Fischman, Gustavo (Thesis advisor) / Powers, Jeanne (Committee member) / Rasch, Katherine D (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Collaborative learning is a common teaching strategy in classrooms across age groups and content areas. It is important to measure and understand the cognitive process involved during collaboration to improve teaching methods involving interactive activities. This research attempted to answer the question: why do students learn more in collaborative settings? Using three measurement tools, 142 participants from seven different biology courses at a community college and at a university were tested before and after collaborating about the biological process of natural selection. Three factors were analyzed to measure their effect on learning at the individual level and the group level. The three factors were: difference in prior knowledge, sex and religious beliefs. Gender and religious beliefs both had a significant effect on post-test scores.
ContributorsTouchman, Stephanie (Author) / Baker, Dale (Thesis advisor) / Rosenberg, Michael (Committee member) / Ganesh, Tirupalavanam G. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Recent research within the field of natural resource management has been devoted to studying the cognitive structures, called mental models, that guide people’s thoughts, actions, and decision-making. Artificial lighting threatens the sustainability of pristine night skies around the world and is growing worldwide at an average rate of six-percent per year. Despite these trends, stakeholders’ mental models of night skies have been unexplored. This study will address this gap by eliciting stakeholders’ mental models of dark skies. Scenario planning has become a pervasive tool across diverse sectors to analyze complex systems for making decisions under uncertainty. The theory of scenario planning hypothesizes that scenario planning contributes to learning and improves upon participants’ mental models. However, there have been scant empirical studies attempting to investigate these two claims. Stakeholders’ mental models of dark skies were mapped while simultaneously testing the hypotheses that participation in scenario planning results in more complex mental models and alters environmental attitudes. Twenty-one Arizona stakeholders participated in one of two workshops during September 2016. Three identical surveys were given to measure knowledge, environmental attitudes and mental model change during the workshops. Knowledge gain peaked during the introductory lecture and continued to increase during the workshop. Scenario planning increased participants’ environmental attitudes from anthropocentric to nature-centered and was found to have a significant positive impact on dark sky advocates’ change in mental model complexity. The most prominent drivers affecting dark skies were identified using social network analysis of the pre and post mental models. The most prominent concepts were altered significantly from pre to post workshop suggesting that scenario planning may aid practitioners in understanding exogenous factors to their area of expertise. These findings have critical theoretical and managerial implications of mental model alteration, environmental attitudes, and the future of Arizona’s night skies. A revised theoretical framework is offered to include environmental attitudes into the theory of scenario planning and a conceptual framework was created to illustrate the most salient drivers affecting or being affected by dark skies.
ContributorsHobbins, Robert J (Author) / Nyaupane, Gyan P (Thesis advisor) / Budruk, Megha (Committee member) / Iwaniec, David M (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
ABSTRACT
The cold and the flu are two of the most prevalent diseases in the world. Many over the counter (OTC) medications have been created to combat the symptoms of these illnesses. Some medications take a holistic approach by claiming to alleviate a wide range of symptoms, while others target a specific symptom. As these medications become more ubiquitous within the United State of America (USA), consumers form associations and mental models about the cold/flu field. The goal of Study 1 was to build a Pathfinder network based on the associations consumers make between cold/flu symptoms and medications. 100 participants, 18 years or older, fluent in English, and residing in the USA, completed a survey about the relatedness of cold/flu symptoms to OTC medications. They rated the relatedness on a scale of 1 (highly unrelated) to 7 (highly related) and those rankings were used to build a Pathfinder network that represented the average of those associations. Study 2 was conducted to validate the Pathfinder network. A different set of 90 participants with the same restrictions as those in Study 1 completed a matching associations test. They were prompted to match symptoms and medications they associated closely with each other. Results showered a significant negative correlation between the geodetic distance (the number of links between objects in the Pathfinder network) separating symptoms and medications and frequency of pairing symptoms with medication. This provides evidence of the validity of the Pathfinder network. It was also seen that, higher the relatedness rating between symptoms and medications in Study 1, higher the frequency of pairing symptom to medication in Study 2, and the more directly linked those symptoms and medications were in the Pathfinder network. This network can inform pharmaceutical companies about which symptoms they most closely associate with, who their competitors are, what symptoms they can dominate, and how to market their medications more effectively.
The cold and the flu are two of the most prevalent diseases in the world. Many over the counter (OTC) medications have been created to combat the symptoms of these illnesses. Some medications take a holistic approach by claiming to alleviate a wide range of symptoms, while others target a specific symptom. As these medications become more ubiquitous within the United State of America (USA), consumers form associations and mental models about the cold/flu field. The goal of Study 1 was to build a Pathfinder network based on the associations consumers make between cold/flu symptoms and medications. 100 participants, 18 years or older, fluent in English, and residing in the USA, completed a survey about the relatedness of cold/flu symptoms to OTC medications. They rated the relatedness on a scale of 1 (highly unrelated) to 7 (highly related) and those rankings were used to build a Pathfinder network that represented the average of those associations. Study 2 was conducted to validate the Pathfinder network. A different set of 90 participants with the same restrictions as those in Study 1 completed a matching associations test. They were prompted to match symptoms and medications they associated closely with each other. Results showered a significant negative correlation between the geodetic distance (the number of links between objects in the Pathfinder network) separating symptoms and medications and frequency of pairing symptoms with medication. This provides evidence of the validity of the Pathfinder network. It was also seen that, higher the relatedness rating between symptoms and medications in Study 1, higher the frequency of pairing symptom to medication in Study 2, and the more directly linked those symptoms and medications were in the Pathfinder network. This network can inform pharmaceutical companies about which symptoms they most closely associate with, who their competitors are, what symptoms they can dominate, and how to market their medications more effectively.
ContributorsTendolkar, Tanvi Gopal (Author) / Branaghan, Russell (Thesis advisor) / Chiou, Erin (Committee member) / Craig, Scotty (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020