Curriculum and Instruction
Teaching Teachers to Teach with Technology
This workshop integrated teaching methodology, technology, and science content. Teachers received 2 CD-ROMS, software and hardware to provide internet access, e-mail addresses, professional multimedia authoring software and HTML textbooks. A system was established to provide computer-mediated-communication (CMC) among teachers, workshop facilitators, and other university faculty for continued use. The OSU-Eisenhower Multimedia Workshop page on the WWW was developed and is being maintained by the project directors and participants.
Sponsor: Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education
PIs: Kate Baird
John Gelder (Chemistry)
Don French (Zoology)
The Humanities and Higher Education: Strategies for Interdisciplinary Development
This project began in 1994 with a four-week faculty institute/seminar. The program directors conducted three interdisciplinary clusters of courses, each with an accompanying pedagogy seminar. In 1995, a second four-week seminar was presented, while in the following academic year, two interdisciplinary clusters were conducted. The goal of the program components was to broaden understanding of and interaction between the humanities and education.
Sponsor: National Endowment for the Humanities
PI: Carolyn Bauer
Character Education: Teaching Caring, Responsibility, and Good Judgment in Elementary and Middle Schools
The next millennium will bring many perplexing problems associated with changing family structures, an aging population, and protecting the environment. Addressing all of these problems with care and understanding is the challenge of character education. The product of this research is to be an integrated character education model that focuses on the whole child and pervades the child's total environment with home, school, and community as vital partners. Service learning is a strong component of the partnership.
PI: Carolyn Bauer
Consolidated: Center for Environmental Education
The Center for Environmental Education (CEE) serves to satisfy the growing demand for community and school environmental awareness and knowledge. The CEE makes available curriculum materials and resource personnel to public school teachers and administrators, higher education faculty, special interest groups, and the general public. The Center is committed to enhancing communication and the coordination of environmental education activities within the College of Education; among local, state, and federal agencies; and between organizations in Oklahoma and the nation. The monies received through these organizations are used by the Center to fund various environmental programs such as Earth Day, the High School Summer Academy for Environmental Science, water ecology courses for Stillwater sixth-graders, environmental curriculum development projects, Project Wild, Project Learning Tree, and water education workshops for pre-service and in-service teachers. Phillips Petroleum Company sponsors the Phillips Environmental Partnerships (PEP) program, a competitive program open nationwide to community and school organizations for the development of projects to enhance environmental awareness within the community or school. The CEE is a member of the Global Network of Environmental Education Centers (GNEEC) and houses the Chair of the South Central Region of the GNEEC.
Sponsors: Harrah Park Promotion Project and Phillips Petroleum Company
PI: Ted Mills
Research Fellow: Tanta University
This grant sponsors a doctoral researcher from Egypt, Mr. Mohammed Kamel Abdelhameed, who is conducting research in partial fulfillment of the requirements of his doctoral degree. His research involves the development of a curriculum model to enhance the communication skills of students in business high schools in Egypt. This partnership project between Tanta University and OSU will last approximately two years and is funded in part by the Egyptian Ministry of Education.
Sponsor: Embassy of the Arab Republic of Egypt
PI: Kouider Mokhtari
OSU Writing Project
An affiliate of the National Writing Project, the OSU Writing Project is a collaborative school-university program dedicated to improving the quality of instruction in elementary and secondary schools through staff development training for teachers. The Project offers training through both summer and school-year programs. The OSU Writing Project hosts an invitational Summer Institute of Writing each summer. Twenty teachers who have demonstrated excellence in the teaching of writing attend the five-week institute. Participants study current theories of teaching writing and share their own best practices. Open institutes are also available during the summer semester. These are non-invitational, more traditional university courses which allow teachers to explore approaches to teaching writing. The 1996 project was the fifth in a row to be funded by the National Writing Project, Berkley, California.
Sponsor: National Writing Project
PIs: David Yellin and Gretchen Schwarz
Richard Batteiger and Joye Alberts (English)
Children's Rule Knowledge in Invented Games
Invented games projects were conducted in adjoining first, second, and third grade classrooms. Games invented by children in these primary classrooms were analyzed for type, complexity, and rule knowledge. Children's game rule knowledge was compared to knowledge of classroom rules as expressed in response to a classroom rule interview. Analysis of rules in the invented games revealed three types: conduct, procedural, and rules for winning indicating that children perceive a need for game rules that not only tell how to play the game but also specify appropriate social behavior toward other game players. The conduct rules resembled classroom rules for appropriate behavior.
PI: Kathryn Castle
Constructed Knowledge through Moon Watching
A project on moon watching similar to one conducted by Eleanor Duckworth (1987) was initiated in three different sections of a graduate class (25 students per section each year for three years) as a means for understanding constructivist theory. Students kept moon journals of recorded observations, questions, and reflections and discussed in class what they were learning. Students were encouraged to interview children on their ideas about the moon and to conduct moon projects in classrooms with their own students. At the end of a three month observation period, students wrote summary papers on what they had learned with implications for teaching. Theme analysis of students' papers and discussions revealed seven essential themes relating to constructing knowledge and teaching. Essential themes were interest, disequilibrium, social interaction, questioning, making sense, thinking about thinking, and reflecting on teaching. Implications for early childhood teacher education include actively engaging students in constructing knowledge and encouraging them to reflect on children's construction of knowledge as a way to promote understanding of constructivism.
PI: Kathryn Castle
Oklahoma State University Academic Bowl
The nationally-regarded Academic Bowl was started in 1984 by the College of Education. Its purpose is to provide an opportunity for academically talented high school students, many of whom are National Merit Scholars or finalists, to compete with their peers for annual scholarships. This fast-paced, exciting single elimination academic tournament allows some of Oklahoma's best and brightest students to showcase their knowledge. Statewide television exposure through the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority promotes excellence in education by focusing attention on the student leaders. It dramatically allows teachers who coach the players to serve as mentors to the students on the teams. It is also unique because it gives high school students the opportunity to participate in a higher education event. The interaction among the students, teachers, and professors associated with the competition encourages students to continue their education in Oklahoma.
PI: William Segall
The Simple View of Reading-Revised: Implications for Differential Diagnosis and Remediation
This study assessed decoding, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension skills of 192 subjects and found that there are three broad categories of reading disabilities: one caused by poor decoding, another caused by poor comprehension, and yet a third attributable to a combination of the two. A second study was conducted in which in addition to decoding and comprehension, tests of orthographic processing, reading speed, and vocabulary were administered to 139 children from grades 3, 4, and 6. A principal component analysis of the performance of the entire group of children yielded two factors--word recognition and comprehension. The factor analysis conducted for each grade separately indicated that orthographic skill and processing speed could interact to produce yet another type of reading disability. This expectation was confirmed by a profile analysis of poor readers. However, the orthographic-speed factor emerged as important only in later grades and not in early elementary grades because the factor structure of the reading process changes only as children move through the grades.
PIs: R. Malatesha Joshi
P.G. Aaron (Indiana State University)
Kay Williams (Langston University)
Word Knowledge and Word Recognition as Confounding Factors of Spelling
To what extent does word familiarity function as a confounding factor of spelling? An attempt to answer this question was made by asking students from grades 2 through 6 to read aloud lists of "regular words," "exception words," "unique words," and "morpho-phonemic words." Subsequently each word was read by the experimenters and the students were asked the meaning of the word. Finally the subjects were administered the four lists of words as a spelling test. The spelling performance of these subjects was evaluated in three ways: (1) by counting all the words the children had misspelled, (2) by counting only those words the children were able to read aloud but could not spell correctly, and (3) by counting only those words they could explain but could not spell correctly. The data were analyzed to obtain answers to the following questions: (1) does familiarity (i.e., knowing word meaning) act as a confounding factor of spelling performance of children; (2) does the ability to pronounce a word act as a confounding factor of the spelling skill; (3) do "familiarity" and "pronunciation ability" interact with the different types of words (regular, exception, unique, and morphophonemic) and affect spelling performance; and (4) is a developmental trend apparent in the influence of these factors?
PIs: R. Malatesha Joshi
P.G. Aaron (Indiana State University)
Assessing Reading and Spelling Skills
Fluent reading consists of two independent components--word recognition and word comprehension. Word recognition can be accomplished by either of two processes--decoding or sight-word reading. Comprehension is a process common to both reading and listening. Ideal ways of assessing these components of reading as indicated by available research are presented. Formal and informal reading achievement and reading diagnostic tests were reviewed and evaluated to see how these tests measure reading and spelling abilities within the framework of the component-view of reading. Recent attempts to develop alternate reading assessments are also discussed. It is concluded that school psychologists and reading specialists should be familiar with these evaluation procedures and know their relative strengths and weaknesses.
PI: R. Malatesha Joshi
Jigsaw III = Jigsaw II + Cooperative Test Review: Applications to the Science Classroom
Cooperative test review involves reconvening cooperative learning home teams and providing them with review tasks that focus on the specific science concepts and skills to be evaluated in a chapter or unit test. Functions of cooperative test review teams include locating and re-reviewing responses to questions in the textbooks, re-reviewing the content and skills derived from expert sheets, clarifying concepts and skills through discussion, coaching each home-team member to answer specific items, providing extra guided practice with feedback, and clarifying interrelationships among the science content and skills. This was published as "Chapter 7" in Cooperative Learning in Science: A Handbook for Teachers.
PIs: John Steinbrink
Robert Jones (University of Houston, Clear Lake)
Robert Stahl (Arizona State University)