Scholarship & Research
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Item Representations of dyslexia in children's fiction picture books: a critical content analysis(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Education, Health & Human Development, 2023) Green, Elizabeth Ann; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Sarah PenningtonThe purpose of this mixed methods critical content analysis was to examine the depiction of dyslexia and dyslexic characters in children's fiction picture books published between 2004 and 2022. Examining the data through the lens of critical neurodiversity studies and transactional theory concentrated the data collection and analysis on identifying the types of messages and values about dyslexia that are transmitted to the reader through the text. A mixed method critical content analysis approach was utilized, which involved categorizing texts, text passages, and thematic analysis as a qualitative step, followed by frequency analysis as a quantitative step. The use of mixed methods enabled the collection of descriptive statistics, frequency distributions, and specific data on the books. Multiple rounds of coding were utilized to discover and analyze themes and descriptive statistics found in the fifty-nine texts which met the criteria for inclusion. Results were described, analyzed, and interpreted. Finally, implications for practice and suggestions for future research were discussed.Item Misalignment with values and practices: a content analysis on how one school district is implementing the science of reading(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Education, Health & Human Development, 2023) Fassbender, Christina Jordan; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Allison Wynhoff OlsenThe term "Science of Reading" (SOR) has gained increased awareness over the past couple of years and has garnered the attention of researchers, teachers, and other educational stakeholders. As a result, the definition and implementation of the Science of Reading has led to misunderstandings between research and practice. This project uses content analysis to examine how one school district defines and implements SOR using a scripted curriculum and other outsourced curricular materials despite the research behind SOR. Relying on curriculum theory as an analytic lens, this paper also examines the impacts of SOR within the studied school district to analyze whose interests are being served and silenced. By presenting first a historical account of the past reading wars, I focus on the arguments for and against SOR. Next, artifacts in the form of district and teacher communications, teacher worksheets, websites, and responses from teacher interviews are used to identify mis/alignment with the pedagogical foundations purported by leading SOR scholars. Finally, a discussion and implications are offered to detail the impact that conflicting curricular values may have on young readers as well as current and future teaching practice of reading teachers in the focal district.Item The motif of meeting: a content analysis of multi-voiced young adult novels(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Education, Health & Human Development, 2019) Stolp, Susan Hardy; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Joyce Herbeck; Ann Ewbank (co-chair)The purpose of this study was to discover, through content analysis, polyphonic narrative strategies used in a small sample of multi-voiced young adult novels. The objective was to trace the paths of the individual narrators toward eventual meeting with or understanding of each other, looking for trends, commonalities, and unique qualities that characterize the polyphonic fugue described by McCallum (1999) and Bakhtin (1981). I envisioned these points of meeting as Bahktin's (1981) units of narrative analysis known as the chronotope, perfect alignments in time and space, functioning as connectors among strands within multi-voiced narratives. In Vivo Coding, springing from the actual language of participants, and Emotion Coding, making inferences about narrators' subjective experiences, were the guiding qualitative methodologies used in this content analysis. The combination of In Vivo and Emotion Codes provided the data that was used to analyze and interpret narrators' emotional journeys as well as their interactions with one another. The content analysis revealed a complexity of emotions among the ten individual narrators from the three novels studied. Patterns in their emotional journeys were determined and displayed using artistic representation. Points of meeting between and among narrators proved to be the impetus for individual change and growth. In terms of the fugue, the voices are independent of one another but also have shape and meaning in conjunction with one another (McCallum, 1999), and through analysis and interpretation of narrators' emotional arcs, these shapes and meanings emerged. In terms of significance, this content analysis provided evidence for the use of multi-voiced young adult literature to be a means by which to read with a critical literacy lens, for adolescents to realize their existence as part of a greater whole, and to imagine literature as a catalyst toward personal growth.Item A content analysis of realism in elementary school basal reading textbooks(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Education, Health & Human Development, 1984) Reyhner, Jon AllanItem Interpersonal trust measurements from social interactions in Facebook(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 2014) Li, Xiaoming; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Qing YangInterpersonal trust is widely cited as an important component in several network systems such as peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, e-commerce and semantic web. However, there has been less research on measuring interpersonal trust due to the difficulty of collecting data that accurately reflects interpersonal trust. To address this issue, we quantify interpersonal trust by analyzing the social interactions between users and their friends on Facebook. Currently, friends of a user in almost all online social networks (OSN) are indistinguishable, i.e. there is no explicit indication of the strength of trust between a user and her close friends, as opposed to acquaintances. Existing research on estimating interpersonal trust in OSN faces two fundamental problems: the lacks of established dataset and a convincing evaluation method. In this thesis, we consider bidirectional interacting data in OSN to deconstruct a user's social behavior, and apply Principle Component Analysis (PCA) to estimate the interpersonal trust. A Facebook app, itrust, is developed to collect interaction data and calculate interpersonal trust. Moreover, we adopt the Kendall's tau and Generalized Kendall's tau methods to evaluate the accuracy of ranking list generated by itrust. Results show that itrust achieves more accurate interpersonal trust measurements than existing methods.Item Cognitive presence among mathematics teachers : an analysis of tasks and discussions in an asynchronous online graduate course(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2008) Colt, Diana Lynn; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Jennifer LuebeckHigher order learning, in terms of both process and outcome, is frequently cited as the goal of higher education (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000). However, the adoption of computer mediated communication in higher education has far outpaced our understanding of how this medium can best be used to promote higher order learning (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2004). Researchers have examined quantitative components of computer mediated communication, but little work has been done to examine the cognitive aspects of online discussion. Those studies that do exist demonstrate inconsistent evidence of higher order learning in online discussions (Kanuka & Anderson, 1998; Littleton & Whitelock, 2005; McLoughlin & Luca, 2000; Meyer, 2003). Researchers conjecture that this could be due to the nature of the tasks that instructors implement for discussion purposes (Arnold & Ducate, 2006; Meyer, 2004; Murphy, 2004; Vonderwell, 2003). This study explored whether one component of instruction, the tasks assigned to students, had an effect on the level of cognitive presence that existed in the mathematical discussions of practicing mathematics teachers enrolled in an online graduate course. Through the method of content analysis, discussion transcripts were analyzed to look for evidence of higher-order learning based on the cognitive presence coding protocol developed by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2001). Seventeen students in a History of Mathematics course form the primary sample for this study. The results of the content analysis were triangulated with qualitative data from a questionnaire on student backgrounds and demographics and a post-course survey assessing student perceptions of their learning experiences. The researcher concluded that the MATH 500 course discussions did provide evidence of higher order learning in terms of cognitive presence. Task type, as defined in this study, was not directly related to the levels of cognitive presence achieved in the course. This finding does not negate the possibility of such a relationship, but in this study the effects of task type could not be isolated from other features of the course structure and assignments.