UVicSpace | Institutional Repository
UVicSpace is the University of Victoria’s open access scholarship and learning repository. It preserves and provides access to the digital scholarly works of UVic faculty, students, staff, and partners. Items in UVicSpace are organized into collections, each belonging to a community.
For more information about depositing items, see the Submission Guidelines.
Recent Submissions
Perceptions of reading: kindergarten children and their teachers
(1999) Swan, Sandra J.; Mayfield, Margie
Though researchers have been attempting to solve the mystery of beginning to read, few studies have explored early literacy and reading from the perspective of the child. The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the attitudes and perceptions of kindergarten children and kindergarten teachers about reading. It was a partial replication of a study of grade one children by Dr. P. Michels (1988, 1994).
Participant interviews with 20 kindergarten children and five kindergarten teachers were the basis for data collection. Kindergarten teachers were interviewed in order to examine how children's perceptions of learning to read fit together with instructional strategies. The research clearly indicated that children understood the process of learning to read. When asked how they would define reading, they ref erred to the process by making a direct reference to learning phonics and sounding out words. These insights into reading clearly paralleled the teachers' instructional practices. The teachers defined reading primarily as a decoding process. The study provided evidence that kindergarten children did indeed understand the status of membership in various reading groups. The importance of parental and family involvement in the process of early literacy development surf aced throughout the study.
It is evident from this study that further research on children's attitudes and perceptions of beginning to read is needed. Such investigation may include an examination of the relationship between teachers' instructional practices and students' perceptions, long term longitudinal studies, and additional exploration of children's perceptions of reading.
The concept of suffering in human rights discourse: a response to Richard Rorty's "Human rights, rationality and sentimentality"
(2002) Sutherland, Elizabeth Jane; Magnusson, Warren
This thesis is a response to Richard Rorty's essay entitled, "Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality," in which Rorty suggests that existing approaches to human rights concerns should be discarded in favour of an approach he calls 'sentimental education,' through which people learn about the particularities of others' lives - and particularly their suffering - in order to foster more enriched cross-cultural understanding and action to end violence and oppression. My method entails an analysis of Richard Rorty's writings, theoretical writings on human rights and suffering, and critical analyses of Rorty's writings. I explore the implications of attempting to use the concept of suffering as a foundation for a new approach to human rights problems. I argue that, although Rorty avoids some problems inherent in universalist approaches to human rights and some pitfalls inherent in constructivist discourses, his proposal does not provide a satisfying resolution to the central debates in human rights discourse.
Making sense of photographs in science textbooks and lectures
(2003) Pozzer-Ardenghi, Lilian; Roth, Wolff-Michael
Photographs constitute a major aspect of high school biology textbooks, which dominate current classroom approaches to teaching and learning. However, little is known about how students make sense of and learn from photographs; even less is known about the different resources available for making sense of photographs both in textbooks and in lecture situations. Constituted of three interrelated studies, this thesis is concerned with the use of photographs as pedagogical resources to teach scientific concepts. In the first study I investigate the semiotic resources for interpreting photographs that high school biology textbooks make available to their readers. In the second study, I analyze gestures and body position as semiotic resources made available by lecturers who used photographs as part of their presentations. In my third study [ investigate how students make sense of photographs associated with written texts. The results of my study have implications for textbooks' authors and readers, and for teachers and lecturers.
Speeded discrimination training, fluency and generalization in the laboratory: training fluency and promoting generalization using choice reaction time
(2000) Peters, Chris Deborah; Goldwater, Bram
The primary objectives of the present study were to assess the degree to which generalization would occur to novel, untrained stimulus discriminations following fluency training on a variety of choice reaction time (CRT) tasks. A choice reaction time paradigm and a program called "Speeded Discrimination Training" (SDT), which utilized a computer screen and a two-key response box, were used to deliver the probe and training stimuli to the four female participants who were given alternating probe and training sessions in this study. All participants were trained on various decks in tasks comprising homonym phrases, letter pairs, synonym and antonyms pairs, and sentences for which they received per cent correct and rate correct per minute (RCPM) feedback, upon which goals and monetary reinforcement were set and distributed. This study differs from previous work in the author's laboratory as the tasks and exemplars employed in the present study were more difficult, variable and diverse. The tasks were more difficult in that they required the participants to make grammatical discriminations among the stimuli being presented rather than simply discriminating among highly familiar word categories, letters, or numbers as in studies carried out by Kristofferson (1977) and Pashler and Baylis (1991). Evidence for generalization from trained decks to novel, untrained decks within tasks, as well as from trained tasks to untrained tasks, was revealed upon examination of the various figures produced from the participants' probe and training data. Generalization was demonstrated by participants starting at higher levels on successive training decks, for a particular task, than the decks in previous training sessions; participants requiring less time for successive training decks within and across tasks to reach, or exceed, previous RCPM levels; and participants showing improvement trends across the novel decks in successive probe sessions, as well the tasks that had not yet been trained and only seen in previous probe sessions. Overall, fluency-based training appeared to be successful in promoting generalization within, and in some instances, across speeded discrimination tasks.
A little younger than fire: personal storytelling, drama, and learning
(1999) Nyman, Jennifer L.; Saxton, Juliana
This thesis is a story about story; a story which explores the relationship between personal storytelling and drama as instruments of learning. In providing a thorough, comprehensive analysis of this relationship, this researcher has sought to address the following questions:
1) What is personal storytelling, and how is it different from other forms of narrative?
2) What role does personal storytelling play in one's cognitive and emotional development?
3) How might the utilization of personal storytelling within the curriculum effect school learning?
4) How might personal storytelling be utilized to enhance learning in drama education?
The answers to these question will be addressed within this thesis as I provide a detailed account of the current research which surrounds these issues and of the outcomes of my human subjects research project. The project, conducted during the Summer of 1998, serves to illuminate the reciprocal educative relationship maintained by personal storytelling and drama, how the two may work in tandem as effective pedagogic tools, both within school learning and drama education.