Browsing by Subject "practice"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Cultivating Everyday Life: Yards, Nature and Time in the City
    (2015-09) Lang, Ursula
    This dissertation focuses on everyday practices in residential yards, in the context of recent shifts towards urban sustainability policies and projects. Yards, and the variegated access to these private landscapes, are deeply political, and shaped by fundamentally racialized histories of home ownership and urbanization in US cities and suburbs. Yards are also an arena in which people are confronted with an array of contemporary social and environmental issues. Through qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork with residents in three diverse Minneapolis neighborhoods, I studied how yards are inhabited, experienced, and cultivated. I also analyzed municipal sustainability policies and environmental advocacy projects, to situate residents’ experiences within regimes of urban governance. I found yards are experienced and understood by residents in much more diverse and complex ways than is generally considered from scholarly and policy perspectives. Engagement with yards often involves decades of maintenance, cultivation, and care. I have found a surprisingly diverse range of informal property arrangements and sharing economies, with varying forms and meanings across and within study areas. Engagement with yards also depends on embodied skills, socioeconomic positions, and capacities to pause and attune to more-than-human rhythms. I argue yards and yard practices contribute to the reinforcement of certain fundamental urban logics such as private property and the production of a discrete and manageable nature. But everyday yard practices also provide disruptions to these logics and create the conditions for new social relations to emerge, such as urban commons in variegated forms. Furthermore, cultivating yards entail affective attunements between human practice and encounters with more-than-human organisms, within the context of sociopolitical relations at multiple scales. Thus, the research contributes to debates about urban environmentalisms by considering sustainability in terms of experiential and affective registers beyond best practices and measure. The research also reveals diverse and collective practices of property ownership and stewardship, in the midst of what is often considered the most iconic landscape of American private property – neighborhoods of single family houses. Finally, the research contributes to recent calls within geography about the possibilities and limitations of a renovated phenomenology in the ways geographers study and represent diverse human experiences.
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    ESL Teachers’ Knowledge of and Experience with Written Corrective Feedback
    (2017-04) Cao, Peihong
    ABSTRACT Written Corrective Feedback (WCF) in writing classes is fundamental to interactions between teachers and students about students’ writing and to help students further improve their writing. As one of the main feedback sources, teachers’ cognition (e.g., teachers’ thoughts, knowledge, and beliefs) needs to be probed to properly understand teachers and their teaching (Borg, 2006). Currently, there is little research regarding teachers’ cognition and their practice of offering WCF in mainland China. The purpose of this study was to explore ESL teachers’ knowledge of, experience with and practice of WCF, and to investigate the connection among these aspects. The participants were teachers of English from a major normal university. The phenomenological methodology was used to explore teachers’ cognition and practice of WCF when teaching writing to undergraduate and graduate students. The study employed a triangulated approach that included a questionnaire administered to 55 teachers, interviews with two teachers and a study of the two teachers’ feedback responses to 68 students’ papers/journal entries, which were collected to further explore the interviewees’ practice of WCF. Questionnaire data was statistically aggregated and tabulated. The interview data was analyzed using Hycner’s 15 steps. The teachers’ responses on students’ papers were analyzed according to WCF types (direct CF, indirect CF, metalinguistic, focus of feedback, electronic CF, and reformulation) and error types (organizational errors, stylistic errors, and linguistic errors) and the results were tabulated. Findings indicated that ESL teachers possessed different levels of knowledge concerning WCF and used a varying number of WCF types to target error types. Most teachers were not well trained or provided with opportunities to be equipped with the necessary skills, to further improve their cognition and practice of providing feedback. Differences existed between teachers’ perceptions of the employment of WCF and their actual practice of it. The findings are an indication that administrators should consider employing multiple strategies to better equip teachers of writing to teach and provide feedback more effectively and efficiently. The future of providing WCF on writing in mainland China is dependent upon a workforce that excels in feedback cognition and practice.
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    Examination Of Three Practice Schedules for Single Digit Math
    (2019-09) Wagner, Kyle
    The primary goal of this project is to expand and generalize the literature base for interleaved practice. This study compares interleaved practice to repetitive practice and incremental rehearsal within the context of learning single digit math facts. Third grade (n = 34) and fourth grade (n = 40) students learned target single digit math facts in one of three practice schedules. Using a within-subjects counterbalanced and crossed design, students were exposed to three different learning conditions. Comparisons were made regarding accuracy of responses during acquisition trials and retention trials, as well as learning efficiency. Results indicated very few differences between practice conditions regarding acquisition accuracy, increased accuracy during retention trials for interleaved and incremental rehearsal practice, and higher learning efficiency for interleaved practice when compared to incremental rehearsal. Student pretest accuracy moderated effects of practice schedule and opportunities to practice resulting in different outcomes for students with different levels of mastery at the outset of the intervention. This study is the first comparison of interleaved and incremental rehearsal practice, and the results suggest that interleaved practice is the most efficient schedule for drilling math facts.
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    Homework Research and Policy: A Review of the Literature
    (Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement, 1994) Cooper, Harris
    Data show that homework accounts for about 20 percent of the total time the typical American student spends on academic tasks . . . considering this fact, it is surprising how little attention is paid to the topic of homework in teacher education. This literature review looks at the role of research in improving homework practices.