The purpose of this study was to explore how elementary school teachers think about equity in relation to their goals in their computer science instruction, and to explore the strategies they articulated to make their practice more equitable. States are mandating computer science standards and instruction and requiring schools to teach the content (2020 State of CS). Parents want students to be taught the content, and students in affluent and predominantly white communities have greater access to computer science opportunities than their low-SES and minority counterparts (Margolis, 2020). In addition, teachers are not formally trained or prepared to teach computer science (2020 State of CS). This study adds to the limited body of research that focuses on computer science instruction at the elementary school level. The current study used documents and interviews of 20 respondents. These respondents self-identified as elementary school teachers that teach computer science in some capacity. This sample of 20 teachers included teachers across the United States, as they self-selected to participate in the study through snowball sampling. The focus of this study was to explore computer science education at the elementary school level. The study explored the two questions:1. How do elementary CS teachers think about equity in relation to their goals for their computer science instruction? 2. What strategies do elementary computer science teachers articulate to make their practice equitable? This study found that elementary computer science teachers think about equity in two ways: opportunity and differentiation, and listed their goals as: providing access to opportunity, promoting positive identification with computer science, empowering students to use computer science for social change, as well as increasing academic achievement, and provided strategies for making their practices more equitable. This study added to the growing body of research on the topic of elementary computer science education, and supported and extended extant research. From these conclusions, recommendations for current implementation and practice and future research were shared. These recommendations included providing teachers training in integrating ideas around who holds the power in technology, expanding teachers's views on what constitutes equity in computer science education, and supporting teachers in leveraging computer science instruction to promote academic achievement. Teachers in this study expressed their interest in supporting students to acquire computer science skills and create equitable computer science educational pathways.

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Veterans’ Perceptions of Mattering and Marginalization on Community College Campuses

by

Robert SambranoDoctor of Education University of California, Los Angeles, 2021 Professor William A. Sandoval, Chair

With troop withdrawals in Iraq and the recent U.S. peace treaty with the Taliban in Afghanistan, community colleges can expect more veterans on their campuses in the near future. Many institutions are eager to serve these students but are not certain how to meet their needs. Veteran students contend with a range of issues, from the bureaucracy of veterans’ benefits to physical and emotional disabilities. The goal of this study was to understand the experiences and needs of student-veterans as they transition from military service to postsecondary education. The findings are derived from structured interviews with 20 student-veterans attending an urban, mid-sized, California community college. Questions explored how well the school’s veterans resource center (VRC) was meeting the needs of the student-veteran participants, what gaps existed between these needs and what the VRC (and campus) offered, what would increase their sense of mattering, and what factors contributed to their marginalization.

The VRC was cited as a helpful resource by a majority of study participants, but most also mentioned limitations, including a lack of veteran-specific resources, deficiencies in general campus resources, and lack of help with the military-to-college transition. Most participants spoke of at least one aspect of their college that made them feel that they mattered, but the same number shared experiences of how they felt marginalized on campus. Belonging was the greatest contributor to feelings of mattering. While some veterans found belonging among faculty, staff, administration, and the general student population, most derived this sense from other veterans on campus. Perceived marginalization came from encounters with the college at large, reacclimating to school, feeling (or being) excluded, and feeling different from other students.

From these findings, institutions can glean the needs of today’s college veterans and better understand how to support students who have made the transition from military service to college. The findings add to the currently very limited body of knowledge concerning veterans attending community colleges. As such, they will help VRCs and community college campuses as a whole to more effectively utilize their resources and ensure the success of this important student population.

Engaging science in everyday life often means not advancing knowledge or making new claims, but evaluating given claims with available evidence. In everyday situations, evidence is usually presented in some type of inscription (e.g. tables, diagrams, and other images). This study explores elementary students’ use of inscriptions as evidence in written arguments about socioscientific issues and how a school year of science instruction may play a role in that use.

Three science teachers and their 102 students in 5th and 6th grades at a progressive urban K-6 school participated in this study. I administered a written argument task at the beginning and the end of the 2013–2014 school year, in which students were asked to justify their personal decisions about either alternative energy use or genetically modified organisms. Throughout the year, I worked closely with the teachers to organize classroom instruction towards promoting argumentation and coordination between claims and evidence, and videotaped their science lessons.

Content analysis on students’ written arguments reveals that photos were cited the most in students’ written arguments, while tables were cited the least. Students tended to merely point to an inscription without articulate its relation to a particular claim, or to assert that an inscription “shows” a claim without saying how. They were also likely to credit inscriptions that aligned with their own position rather than discount those that supported counterclaims. From pre to post, these patterns did not change significantly. Analysis on science instruction further shows that the contestability of the claims students encountered in the classroom was low, meaning that they were not framed in arguable ways. The resources available to students for resolving these claims were also limited. The classroom discourse was not open enough for productive argumentation. These patterns may potentially account for the lack of change in students’ use of inscriptions in their written arguments.

This study extends previous research on what children think counts as evidence in arguing about everyday science. Findings suggest that while students learn to evaluate scientific explanations in school, they are put in a different position of having to justify their decisions when facing everyday science. School science should explicitly link the two tasks. Further, we need to frame the learning of science as stabilizing legitimately contestable claims, and provide relevant resources for students to argue with. Classroom discourse, lastly, should be open to argumentation and integrative with disciplinary and epistemic aspects of scientific practices.

This study investigated whether collaboration between science teachers and ELD teachers would result in changes to teachers' perceptions about their role and responsibility to support English Learners in their science classes and whether professional learning opportunities provided would result in planned implementation of strategies and practices to support those students. Science teachers of English Learners benefitted from professional learning opportunities that engage science teachers and English Language Development teachers in the process of working together to help revise lesson plans to better support English Learners. This Professional Learning intervention engaged science and ELD teachers in 10 sessions conducted over the course of 5 weeks. Using a qualitative research design, data from pre and post interviews, observations from professional learning sessions, reflections from learning sessions and teacher created activities and lesson plans revealed that science teachers benefit from learning about California’s expectations for teaching English Learners, the typologies, proficiency levels and capabilities of students at different proficiency levels and opportunities to practice implementing strategies and practices that support English Learners in their Science classes with coaching from ELD teachers.

Evidence and explanatory mechanism are central to scientific practices. Using such information could also inform decisions about issues in which science can play some role, from policy issues like climate change to personal issues like vaccination. While research suggests that people tend to focus on non-science considerations when making science-related decisions, there is also evidence that people can reason very productively with evidence and mechanism. This study examines how the goals participants pursue when reading a science report influences how they attend to information about causal mechanism and evidence.

Two hundred and seventeen high school students were asked either to evaluate the truth

of a scientific claim, to make a personal decision based on the claim, or to make a social policy decision based on the claim using an online task-based survey. All three groups of participants attended to evidence and mechanism, but participants with different goals requested different types of information and were influenced by evidence and mechanism for different reasons. The findings suggest that goals influence how participants use evidence and mechanism.

This qualitative study examined teachers’ described and observed classroom instruction around the science and engineering practices in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Seven secondary science teachers were surveyed and interviewed about their understanding and use of the science and engineering practices in their classroom teaching and then were observed to document their actual use of these practices. This study sought to describe (1) the variety of goals that teachers pursue in their classroom instruction and (2) the variety of instructional strategies teachers use to pursue those goals. Findings suggest that there were varying degrees of alignment between the teachers’ described and observed classroom instruction and between their classroom instruction and the goals of the NGSS. For example, it was easier for many teachers to describe instruction around the science and engineering practices that aligned with the goals of the NGSS than it was to enact instruction that aligned with the NGSS. I suggest that the difficulty teachers experienced with enacting these practices emerged from teachers’ misunderstanding of and misalignment with the goals of the NGSS. In order to address the challenges teachers faced in incorporating the science and engineering practices into their classroom instruction, I recommend some key features of professional development that may support teachers in refining their understanding, goals, and classroom instruction around these practices.

This paper presents the results of a study focused on physics and chemistry teachers at independent schools in the United States which employ a "Physics First" approach to high school science course sequencing. Data was collected via interviews, during which information was gathered regarding pedagogical practices and teachers' transitions to Physics First. Findings suggest that the implementation of inquiry-oriented pedagogy is influenced by teacher and department philosophy, but not necessarily by the Physics First approach. Further, teachers recognize the affordances of Physics First, but largely do not leverage these to create more coherent and connected science programs.