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Rural school teachers' attitudes toward the use of technology in classroom assessments
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Education, Health & Human Development, 2024) Boateng, Samuel Kwaku Basoah; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Gilbert Kalonde
This study explored the attitudes of rural schoolteachers toward integrating technology into classroom assessments. Despite significant investments in educational technology infrastructure, the utilization of instructional devices for assessments in rural schools remains limited. The study employed a sequential explanatory mixed methods to address five key research questions, investigating rural school teachers' attitudes towards technology-based assessments, frequencies of technology use by rural, strategies employed by rural school teachers, challenges faced by rural school teachers in tech-based assessments, and the alignment of quantitative and qualitative data. The study relied on a questionnaire and focus group interviews and opened questions for data collection from 80 teachers randomly selected from the Belgrade School District in Montana. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and qualitative thematic analysis. The study revealed a positive attitude among rural teachers toward technology integration in classroom assessments. Teachers were willing to use tools like Google Classroom and digital assessments, aligning with broader trends indicating a growing acceptance of technology in education. The study further indicated that teachers in rural schools employ technology regularly for various assessments, utilizing tools like Google Classroom, forms, checklists, and online quizzes. This aligns with the increasing reliance on technology for formative and summative assessments, allowing for real-time data collection and effective student performance tracking. Teachers reported diverse strategies for integrating technology, including digital assessments, online platforms, and technology tools. These approaches align with previous studies emphasizing technology's role in enhancing assessment practices, promoting student engagement, and supporting differentiated instruction. The study also found that rural teachers face challenges such as unreliable internet connectivity, outdated hardware, and insufficient training, highlighting the need for targeted interventions and support mechanisms. The study recommends four strategies to improve rural education: addressing infrastructure gaps, providing professional development for teachers, establishing collaborative networks, and collaborating with policymakers to ensure equitable access to technology resources. These measures aim to create dynamic learning environments, enhance teachers' capabilities, foster a supportive community, and bridge the rural-urban educational divide. The study concludes by highlighting actionable insights for improving technology integration in rural classrooms, emphasizing tailored professional development and flexible implementation strategies.
Enhancing students' engineering identities and attitudes towards engineering and technology through place-conscious engineering activities
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Education, Health & Human Development, 2024) Moonga, Miracle; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Rebekah Hammack; Nick Lux (co-chair)
Students' engineering identities and attitudes toward engineering are important because they can determine if students will pursue engineering careers. However, a dearth of research focuses on how participating in place-conscious engineering affects students' engineering identities and attitudes towards engineering and technology. This explanatory sequential mixed methods study investigated the effect of engaging elementary students in place-conscious engineering activities on their engineering identities and attitudes towards engineering and technology. Students completed two place-conscious engineering activities: (1) following a local wildfire, students designed and built air filters to prevent smoke from entering the homes of affected families residing in a nearby community, and (2) after the state issued several warnings about eminent floods due to ice-jams on a local river, students designed flood prevention strategies. Quantitative data about students' engineering identities were collected using pre and post surveys of the two subscales of the Engineering Identity Development Scale (EIDS): (1) academic subscale and (2) engineering career subscale. Quantitative data regarding students' attitudes toward engineering and technology were collected using pre and post surveys of the engineering and technology subscale of the Students' Attitudes Toward Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM). Finally, to explain the trends observed in the quantitative data, qualitative data were collected through semi-structured focus group interviews. Findings suggested that students' academic identities and attitudes towards engineering and technology improved as a result of participating in place-conscious engineering activities. The study recommends exposing elementary students to place-conscious engineering activities to improve their engineering identities and attitudes towards engineering and technology.
Rare earth doped crystals for classical and quantum information
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2021) Woodburn, Philip Joseph 'Tino'; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Rufus L. Cone; This is a manuscript style paper that includes co-authored chapters.
High-quality rare-earth-ion (REI) doped materials are a prerequisite for many applications such as quantum memories, ultra-high-resolution photonic signal processing, and quantum-limited sensing. Realization of practical solid-state photonic technologies critically depends on finding materials that offer necessary combinations of optical and spin-state coherence, spectral multiplexing capacity, transition wavelengths, and many other key properties. To realize these advances, we continue to improve the fundamental understanding and control of physical processes that govern ion-ion, ion-spin, and ion-lattice interactions. Furthermore, exploring the role of material chemistry and fabrication in determining the observed properties is crucial. With these motivations, we study a range of rare-earth-doped optical materials using powders and single crystals to understand and optimize the properties relevant to quantum memory, quantum transduction, photonic signal processing, and optical cooling applications. In addition to producing, measuring, and analysing spectroscopic and coherence properties of promising material systems, we highlight the engineering of lattice defects to manipulate both static and dynamic disorder. This work spans nine different REI doped materials: four single crystals, Tm 3+:Y 3Ga 5O 12, Yb 3+:YVO 4, Er 3+:Y 3Al 5O 12, and Er 3+:Y 2SiO 5, and five crystalline powders, Er 3+:LiNbO 3, Tm 3+:Y 3Al 5O 12, Tb 3+:Y 3Al 5O 12, Yb 3+:YAG, and Eu 3+:CaCO 3. These choices are based on material properties unique to each system, need for investigation, or potential for systematic comparison of fabrication methods and stoichiometry. Spectral hole burning (SHB), optical and spin coherence measurement techniques are sensitive quantitative characterization tools, complementing traditional optical, chemical, and structural analysis. We find that coherence and spin lifetimes are especially sensitive to low levels of strain and defects in the crystal, undetected by other methods. Properties of REI doped materials are found to vary by orders of magnitude depending on the source, synthesis, and implementation of the materials. Even mild mechanical processing producing large variations in spin lifetimes and SHB properties. These variations are attributed to low levels of glass-like dynamics in the crystalline lattice introduced by inhomogeneous strain and chemical defects, which can be reduced or eliminated by annealing or improved fabrication. Overall, these studies reveal that SHB or coherence measurements are needed to identify material dynamics and guide the fabrication process to reach the true fundamental capabilities of REI materials.
Navigating in the synthetic void: a hardboiled investigation
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2022) Pomarico, Thomas John; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Rollin Beamish
Society is in the midst of a rapid and drastic shift of ontological perception. Technological advancements in connectivity have altered the rhythm and scale of life due to media saturation, social media, and surveillance. The success of these viral technologies has many obvious benefits; however, they also harbor malicious tendencies when left unchecked. Prescience visions of dystopia by authors George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and David Foster Wallace, once seemingly outlandish, have now become apparent. Shosana Zuboff's 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism' published in 2018 would have read as science fiction 25 years ago. As a temporary panacea to the pace of technological engagement, I offer the creative process as a way to alter duration. Using 1940s and 1950s film noir as a metaphor for the environment and challenges of the modern artist. Through this examination a code of conduct emerges to navigate the disruptive pitfalls of media addiction. Construction of the art object involves a multistep conceptual and physical practice guiding behavior away from excessive technological encroachment. My research paper aims to elucidate this process and its potential benefits to an outside observer.
K-8 preservice teachers's preparedness for technology integration in mathematics: examining perspectives, anticipated practices, and abilities
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Education, Health & Human Development, 2022) Meyerink, Monte Shane; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Fenqjen Luo; This is a manuscript style paper that includes co-authored chapters.
Research on the use of technological resources--such as virtual manipulatives and mathematical games--in kindergarten through eighth-grade mathematics has highlighted numerous benefits to students' achievement in and attitudes toward mathematics. However, studies have also highlighted preservice teachers' lack of preparedness to integrate technology into their future classrooms. Thus, the purpose of this dissertation is to examine kindergarten through eighth-grade preservice teachers' preparedness to integrate technology into mathematics by analyzing their perspectives on technology integration, their anticipated technology integration practices, and their technology integration abilities. In this three-manuscript dissertation, qualitative analyses employed a social constructivist paradigm and utilized an ethnographic approach to examine preservice teachers' preparedness to integrate technology. By using the PICRAT model as a guiding theoretical framework in each study, preservice teachers' perspectives and abilities were examined in relation to how their anticipated uses of technology would impact mathematics instruction in respect to both students' learning and teachers' pedagogical practices. Findings showed that preservice teachers' tended to report a lack of knowledge in relation to technology integration and both ask questions and express concerns related to how to appropriately integrate technology into mathematics. Nevertheless, preservice teachers also reported an intent to integrate technology into their future classrooms at a relatively frequent basis. When examining preservice teachers' abilities to either evaluate an existing geometry activity or create a geometry activity that utilizes a technological resource, preservice teachers tended to evaluate or create activities that integrated technology in a way that both enabled interactive learning on behalf of the students and amplified teachers' pedagogical practices. Activities that used technological resources to either promote students' passive learning or replace teachers' practices were less frequent, and activities that used technology to either foster students' creative learning or transform teachers' practices were rare. Additionally, preservice teachers' activities tended to align with PICRAT levels that are associated with higher degrees of impact on mathematics instruction when preservice teachers evaluated activities rather than created activities. To conclude, implications for teacher education programs and areas of future research are presented and discussed.
A turbulent upriver flow: steamboat narratives of nature, technology, and humans in Montana Territory
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2019) Kelly, Evan Graham; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Mark Fiege
For a 25 year period in the second half of the 19th century, steamboat travel was a critically important transportation technology which influenced the material, social, and cultural existence of people and landscapes in the Montana region. Building on methodological approaches developed in New Western History and Environmental History, this study argues that steamboats in Montana played a significant role in shaping cultural, demographic, and environmental changes in the area. Steamboats and their crews shaped the dynamic exchange of cultures, materials, and energy between people, landscapes, and technologies. This project stresses that the changes in human-environment relationships in the region influenced people in different ways depending on their race, class, gender, and ethnicity. This thesis argues that steamboats and their crews tapped-into and altered existing systems of material and energy exchange, reshaping energy regimes and augmenting environmental realities in the region. At the same time, steamboats influenced human actions and perceptions of the world around them. The layout of this project begins with an introduction chapter articulating methodological approaches and frameworks used in this analysis. The second chapter provides background on the changing natural and human geographies of the region, while the third chapter provides a history of steamboat technology as well as an overview of the labor, materials, and auxiliary technologies required to operate steamboats. Chapters four through seven present four chronologically organized case-studies and these narratives are used as lenses through which the broader implications of steamboat transportation in the region are examined. The final chapter briefly examines the steamboat Montana and the decline of steamboat travel in the early 1880s before offering a summary and conclusion of findings.
Instructor usage of learning management systems utilizing a technology acceptance model
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Education, Health & Human Development, 2017) Brown, Lisa Ann; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Arthur W. Bangert
Limited research exists on the factors that influence an instructor's choice to use a learning management system. The purpose of the current study is to explore how task technology fit constructs relate to the other constructs that comprise Davis' Technology Acceptance mode. The technology acceptance model is widely used as an indicator of actual use of a technology system. A sample of 284 instructors completed a survey consisting of demographic questions, open ended questions about their reasons for choosing to choose to utilize a learning management system, and Likert scale questions about six constructs of the research model including task technology fit, ease of use, usefulness, attitude, intent to use, and actual use. The relationships between TAM model constructs and Task Technology Fit were analyzed using a partial least squares structural equation model method with SMART- PLS. The relationship between task technology fit and actual use was mediated by ease of use, usefulness, attitude, and intent to use. To evaluate the constructs in the model, an exploratory factor analysis was conducted and the factor structure for online and face-to-face instructors were different. Two models were developed, one for face-to-face instructors, and one for online instructors to account for this difference. The research models were evaluated for face-to-face instructors and online instructors. The study found significant relationships between all the TAM constructs and Task Technology Fit for face-to-face instructors. The relationship between attitude and intent to use was not significant for online instructors. This research supports the need for more research into the differences between online and face-to-face instructor's perceptions of technology use. The differing instructional needs of face-to-face and online instructors have implications on the training and support an institution should provide to increase usage of learning management systems.
The effect of transitioning to paperless assessment in a high school biology course
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2017) Aakre, Harrison Taylor; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Greg Francis
Technology and education are becoming more intertwined each school year. Technology is replacing how we deliver content and perform assessments. Many of these changes are occurring before they have been determined to be effective. This research compares individuals who received the same instruction over a unit and took the same test, but in different formats. Overall, the students performed significantly better in a paper format over digital. However, the most significant finding hinged on low achieving students (GPA < 2.0). Low achieving students performed significantly worse on digital assessments compared to paper assessment.
Virtual reality and adult entertainment: the next high-tech symbiosis
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2016) Almklov, Erik Rochner; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Dennis Aig
Technology and pornography have a longstanding symbiotic relationship. Pornographers have historically relied on technology to distribute personalized sexual experiences to consumers. Emergent communication technologies have similarly found commercial success through the adult industry in the 20th and 21st centuries. A mutually beneficial sex-tech relationship now endures as the modern adult industry exerts significant influence over the fate of new communication technologies. In this paper, I examine the historical role that pornography has played in the mainstream integration of modern communication technologies. I next apply this analysis to one of the most discussed technologies on the market to date, Virtual Reality (VR), to argue that its mainstream adoption is similarly being influenced by porn. The adult industry's early monetization of 360° content, and relevant immersive innovations, are early indications that VR porn may be the next high-tech symbiosis.
A survey of expatriate employees of the Higher Colleges of Technology to evaluate the pre-arrival orientation package
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Business, 1992) Teja, Nasir; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Norman L. Millikin
The major purpose of this paper was to evaluate the pre-arrival orientation package that all new expatriates receive from the orientation committees at the Higher colleges of Technology. To collect the data for the study, questionnaire packets were sent to each of the six campuses. Each packet was addressed to the Executive Assistant to the Director who had been instructed to distributed them only to the expatriate employees. Of the 118 questionnaires distributed, 85 were returned. Nineteen (19) of the 85 were disqualified because they had been hired locally without any orientation, giving 66 or a total return of 55.9 percent. The findings of the study showed that the majority of the respondents thought that the pre-arrival orientation package was generally acceptable. The majority also stated that for the most part, the pre-arrival orientation package portrayed an accurate picture of the Higher Colleges of Technology and life in the Emirates. Most respondents thought that the Emirates was a lot more Westernized than they expected. There were some mixed views about the status of women in the UAE and also about the clarity of the contract. Most people were able to bring appropriate clothing based on information in the orientation package. The respondents thought that the information on furnishing and housing could have been much better. All respondents would have liked a college calendar showing what career vocations are taught and the courses the they would have to teach. Knowing what they know now, most respondents would have accepted the job and would also recommend the job to their friends. Based on the findings of the study, the writer recommends that the Higher Colleges of Technology set up orientation committees at each city, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Al Ain, that oversees the orientation package. The information needed to be kept current by performing ongoing surveys on new employees. The committee should also provide feedback to Central Services who provides information on contract and housing.

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