Vitae
Goal Statment
Program of Study
Research Experience
Dissertation Plans
General Culture Reflections: EDUC 800, EDUC 805 Fall 07, and EDUC 805 Spring 08
Research Method Reflections: EDUC 811, and EDRS 812
Concentration Courses Reflections: EDEP 822, EDEP 821, EDEP 653, and EDUC 870
Research Methodology Reflections: EDUC 797
Reflections by semesters: Fall 2007, Spring 2008, and Summer 2008
Class
Reflections
EDEP 822:
Advanced Learning, Motivation, and Self-Regulation (A)
The purpose of the advanced learning,
motivation, and self-regulation as stated by the course catalog is to “examine the development of self-regulatory and motivational
processes as they relate to educational practice. Emphasizes how processes
influence students’ self-motivation and achievement in various domains.” In
this course I composed a research proposal and presented in a poster format at
the end of the semester, compared motivation and self-regulated learning
theoretical perspectives, a self-change project, and article critiques. This course
used the book Self-regulated learning:
From teaching to self-reflective practice by Schunk and Zimmerman, but was
also supplement with numerous recent journal articles.
The
self-change project was fun way to use self-regulation consciously. For my
self-change project I wanted to get back into running more, because I have
neglect that area since starting the Ph.D. program. This project gave me the reason
and motivation to make my running a priority. To monitor my progress I made a calendar
of the day that I was going to run and at the gym I recorded the information of
my runs that the treadmills give you at the end. For example I recorded the
duration of my run, miles ran, and at what pace I ran. My hope from this
project is that I would run more regularly and increase my running stats to run
a 5K Turkey Trot. My goal for the Turkey Trot was to complete the race with the
feeling good about the race and not feeling like I was not ready or prepared
for the race. My self-change project was successful in getting me to run more consistently
to be ready to run the 5K Turkey Trot, which was also a success.
The
research proposal and poster presentation was very useful and practical to what
would be expected at a conference presentation of your research, dissertation,
or meta-analysis. For my project I researched what had been done on
self-regulation with college athletes because this is an interested I have and
have experienced myself. College athletes have to self-regulation in order to
be successful in their academics, their sport, their job, and their friendships.
A brief summary of my proposal is that I found an instrument that was composed
and only tested by the person that composed. The instrument was tested with
university athletes at a university. Therefore I proposed to replicate the
study that was done to test the instrument in order to help validate the
instrument. For specifics of my proposal see Nancy’s
EDEP 822 Proposal.
An area
of self-regulation that we focused on and learned a lot about is the three
phase model of self-regulation by Zimmerman. His model is cyclical in nature which
means you continue I the cycle until you achieve your goal and exit the model.
The first phase of his model is the forethought phase which contains
task-analysis, strategy planning, self-monitoring beliefs, self-efficacy, outcome
expectations, task interest and value, and goal orientation. This phase is
followed by the performance phase which contains self-control,
self-instruction, imagery, attention focusing, task strategies,
self-observation, metacognitive monitoring, and self-recording. The third and
final phase of this model is the self-reflection phase which is composed of
self-judgment, self-evaluation, causal attribution, self-reaction,
self-satisfaction and affect, and adaptive and defensive. This helped to
illustrate how complex the self-regulation process is and that it is a process
that keeps going until the individual meet the outcome they set.
In
conclusion this course was enlightening and a pleasure to take. If I had to
take this course again I would and I probably would still learning something
new about self-regulation, motivation, and learning. This course has so much to
offer myself and other students.
EDUC 800:
Ways of Knowing (A)
The
purpose of the ways of knowing course as stated by the course catalog is to “provide
an understanding of characteristic ways of knowing in various liberal arts
disciplines while examining subject matter, scope, key concepts, principles,
methods, and theories. Analyzes philosophical traditions underlying educational
practice and research. Required course during first spring semester of study in
the program.” Throughout this semester I had to
complete the readings, five journals, a film collaborative project, work with
critical friends, a way of knowing paper, and participated in class
discussions, these activities have helped me to understand the ways of know
course. This course has impacted and broadened my thinking and multiplied the
lens that I see the world of knowing through.
My
initial impression of the Ways of Knowing course is that I thought it would be
about how we come to know information. I thought of the way of know as being
the psychology of we come to know things. I see now that I was thinking more in
terms of a psychologist as in the cognitive aspect of how we know specific
information and it is stored, retrieved, and recalled from the brain. The
psychologist part of me comes from my undergraduate course work as a psychology
major and learning all about the intricate parts and functions of the human
brain.
In creating critical friends in this course it helped to
get to know a few people more in-depth from the class. My critical friends each
brought in something different to offer the group. One individual brought in
her technology specials and her special education background while the other
brought in another culture and her own special education background. I brought
in my knowledge of research including APA format and the non educator aspect.
These are only a few of the things my group was able to bring to the table to
help each other during the course. My critical friends grow into friendships
through the semester. This allowed us to talk more openly about how each of us
sees things differently than the other one does.
After the first day of class I didn’t think I would end up
like the course since I was not a philosophy person. To me philosophy was not
my thing and therefore I wanted to have nothing to do with it, but in this
class I had not choice but to become acquainted with some philosophy. The course
has changed my mind about philosophy a bit but I still think and know parts are
hard to chew and swallow or comprehend. But in the end I feel I have succeeded
with the philosophy we read since we had all the in class discussions about
what we read which make it easy for me to comprehend. This course has also
opened my eyes wider to look at how I know things from numerous people’s shoes.
Looking at my papers from multiple angle and to get feedback from other in
order to create the best product possible because their way of know will tell
me what needs clarification and elaboration. I will carry away from this class
my wider perspective of knowing, my critical friends, my experiences, our class
discussion, and my new found understanding for philosophy.
EDUC 805 :
(A)
The
purpose of the doctoral seminar as stated by the course catalog is to “cover
selected topics in education. Students, faculty members, and scholars discuss
current research interests and ideas.” Through this seminar we heard numerous
professors here at George Mason University come and speak about how they got to
were they currently are and about their current research. This course exposed
students to the professors in the Education department and how they got to were
they are now and what research they are currently working on. Below is my
reflection for the doctoral seminar that I completed for the midterm.
In seeing and thinking
about the prompt for this paper, if I knew I could not fail I would… this is
hard sentence for me finish, since I tend not to see things as pass or fail but
as what I have gained.
I think Dr. Bemak would
possibly agree with me because if at risk student saw they were always failing
they would not bother doing anything because what would be the point since they
would fail, which would ultimately lead to them dropping out of school. These
failing students do need more resources to help turn things around especially
their thinking which I would recommend attribution training. I would hope the
attribution train would teach the students their fail is in their control and
they have the ability to change this by doing homework, studying, asking for
help, paying attention in class, and taking notes, just to name a few things
they do have control over.
Dr. Barcher would say
the only way you could fail at a grant is not summiting your proposal to get
the grant. But even if you summit your proposal for the grant doesn’t mean you
are going to get the grant because the grant competition is highly competitive.
Each grant writing proposal is a learning experience and you’ll be better at
marketing your big idea in the first paragraph and eventually one will successfully
earn you a grant.
In my finial thought
about this prompt failing doesn’t fit in the Ph.D. program because we are all
here to learn and expanding our knowledge we’re succeeding. I feel our
discussion groups helped and expanded the learning experience because it allows
us to relate to the speaker and one another even though we all have very
different interests and focuses. So, I believe failing is all in the
individual’s perspective and instead of focusing on the negative (i.e.
failing); I try to look at what was gained out of the experience.
EDUC 870:
Education Policy: Process/Context/Politics (B+)
The
purpose of this education policy course as stated by the course catalog is to
“examines public policy decision-making in education at local, state, and
national levels, and its impact on education institutions, students, and
public. Focuses on government entities’ authority over education
decision-making, and resolution of competing policy arguments in political
arena (Course Catalog, 2008).” Class assignments show the complexity and scope
of education policy, through readings from both books (Kozel, 1991; What Johnny
shouldn’t read) and news articles, attending a policy event, examine court
cases and decisions, using bureau and census data to plan for a new school,
learn about education governances, and examine the candidates positions and
elections issues.
I took this course with the belief that policy dictates
education decisions, like determining the direction educational research goes.
This course opened my eyes to how much falls under educational policy, how
complex it all is, and how to think abstractly to fix issues at the local,
state, and federal levels. Before this course I didn’t know anything about
policy and from this course I learned so much, from the governances like SCHEV
to how to think and plan for the future from census data. Every class we did an
“in the news” which every student brought a current article from within the
last week to analysis of the policy implication’s of the article.
A few assignments still stick out in this course for me.
The first assignment for this course was to read Kozel’s (1991) book Savage inequalities children in America’s
schools and then to describe in broad policy terms the problems in the book
and suggest one or more policy option to address the problems, level of
implementation, and other implications of your proposed fix. Another assignment
that sticks out is we had six years to set up a new K-12 school and I had to
tell where it should be, why, what will the demographic profile of the students
be, what should the focus or foci of the high school curriculum, and what kind
of teachers will you need and will they be available. These assignments had
both a concrete and abstract aspect to them. The abstract thinking required
creativity to develop or fix the issues in the policy arena.
In closing I am really happy I took this course even
though I didn’t choose this area for my secondary concentration. I had
originally thought about policy as a secondary concentration option. Yet, I
still feel that everyone in education should know the basics about policy
because this area has effects on all of us, has implications on all of us, and
we all have to comply with these policies.
Spring 2008 Course Reflections
EDUC 805:
Doctoral Seminar (A)
The
purpose of the doctoral seminar as stated by the course catalog is to “cover selected
topics in education. Students, faculty members, and scholars discuss current
research interests and ideas.” Through this seminar we heard numerous
professors here at George Mason University come and speak about how they got to
were they currently are and about their current research. This semester was
identical to last semester except that different professor can and spoke to the
class. This semester we had the opportunity to hear from: Dr. Clark, Dr.
Earley, Dr. Haley, Dr. Kayler, Dr. Taboada, Dr. Isenberg, Dr.
Shaklee, Dr. Behrmann, Dr. White, Dr. Fox, and Dr. Kitsantas. Both for the
midterm and final we had to compose one page reflection on the course. You’ll
find one of my reflections below.
I
notice that a number of the professors spoke about motivation and offered
advice about completing your dissertation. Professors also spoke about
motivation, in reference to motivating students, in some way either external
motivation was mention in reference to playing video games or internal
motivation in reference to learning for the sake of learning.
Professors
offered their insight about dissertation topics and what they recommend
students to do. Dr. Peters talked about finding your interests and connecting
them or find reoccurring themes you focus on throughout your program for your
dissertation topic. She recommended this because this is what you are
interested in, focused on, what you already know, and that’s why you should
focus on that topic. She also recommended reading up on the research in the
area and finding the gaps in the literature which goes back to Dr. Mastropieri
who spoke about replicate and extend to existing research.
Also
a reoccurring theme I notice is professors talking about motivation. Maybe I
notice this theme more so than other people would, since my area of
concentration is Educational Psychology which is an interest I have along with
research. The first professor, Dr. Clark, talked about his work trying to create
video games that kids are motivated to play. Through play the video game kids
would learn the educational information contained on the video game like vetch
that created v.smile which teaches letters, numbers, colors, reading, math, and
science concepts. Dr. Haley’s research focuses on a portion of motivation, but
I can’t currently find the specific area she focuses on. Even Dr. Taboada’s research on ESOL students
looks at these students motivation levels that used the different reading
strategies. Motivation research is very diverse as it flow’s into all subject
area, focuses, and numerous research areas.
EDEP 653:
Culture and Intelligence (A)
The
purpose of the culture and intelligence course as stated by the course catalog
is to “explore different theoretical perspectives on intelligence as they
relate to individual and cultural differences. Examines issues related to
heritability and measures of intelligence, and intelligence in the cultural
context.” This course directly explores social and cultural differences in individual
beliefs about the development of intelligence, what is intelligence, what is
valued as intelligence, and what theories are believe about intelligence. In
this course we also explored what we believe happiness and creativity is along
with intelligence is.
We learned what other countries/cultures believe to be
intelligence, what theories about intelligence they believe, and what they
value as intelligence. I really find this area fascinating to learn about. We
examined the United States, Soviet or Russian, Turkish, Indian, Nordic,
Japanese, French and French-speaking countries, Chinese, German and
German-speaking countries, Zimbabwean, and Latin perspectives on intelligences.
Then our project had us look at the Anglo-American perspective on intelligence
and examine how practices in difference countries/cultures influenced the
Anglo-American perspective of intelligence. I found this to be like research
were an individual is influenced and impacted by past research, and
interactions with other countries, and migration of individuals. (http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/intelmap.pdf)
EDEP 821:
Sociocultural Processes in Learning, Instruction, and Motivation (B)
The purpose of the course sociocultural
processes in learning, instruction, and motivation as stated by the course
catalog is to “examine processes by
which social, cultural, and linguistic variables influence human behavior.
Focuses on differences within and between cultural groups related to student’s
learning and achievement in educational settings.” This course illustrates the
complexity of individuals and what they bring with them into the educational arena.
Similar to Bronfenbrenner’s model shows all the influences that play in one student’s
life (picture from 
Bronfenbrenner Lecture notes http://www3.uakron.edu/schulze/610/lec_bronf.htm).
This
course showed the complexity of every classroom in America. Each child brings
with them their ethnicity, gender, SES, family structure, values, culture,
morals, and experiences just to name a few things. These children compose
classrooms with their own unique classroom environments, that collectively
compose schools and creates the school environment, and yet both of these
environments are influenced by the child’s families, community environment, and
any other environment that the child is apart of.
These
dynamics effect what I am doing with the research I am doing for the grant with
Dr. Mastropieri
EDRS 812:
Qualitative Methods in Educational Research (B-)
The purpose of this
qualitative methods class in educational research as stated by the course
catalog is to provide “teaches how to
apply qualitative data collection and analysis procedures in educational
research, including ethnographic and other field-based methods, and unobtrusive
measures. Emphases vary depending on student interests and needs.” During the
semester we read four different books about qualitative research describing
different characteristics, techniques, and analysis to conduct such research. We
further learned about the methodology behind qualitative research in order to
evaluate it, reflect on it, and produce it with quality. Everyone did this through individual small
scale qualitative project during the semester. From prior course work in my
masters and undergraduate programs I know going into the course how time
consuming, flexible, and changing nature of qualitative research. Also, from
prior experience I was not looking forward to taking this course, so I decide
to take it early and get it over with.
For
this project I had to conduct a small scale qualitative study on a topic of my
choice in this we had to complete numerous memos, HRSB forms, at least three
hours of interview or observations to collect data, write up the qualitative
project, and reflect on the whole process. I was told I was not a qualitative
person, whom I can agree with, but I do see the relevance and importance of
qualitative research. Through my educational psychology background the research
tends to be quantitative in nature, but may have qualitative aspects to them.
This is were I can see myself utilizing the qualitative methodology in relation
to quantitative studies to explain the findings better, also known as mixed
methods.
Summer 2008 Course Reflections
EDRS 811:
Quantitative Methods in Educational Research (A)
The purpose of the
quantitative methods in education course is to provide “emphasize advanced
methods of conducting research using quantitative methods of data collection,
and analysis appropriate for research in education. Includes design of
experimental and quasi-experimental research studies, and methods of analysis
appropriate to these studies, including analyzing variance and multiple linear regressions.”
EDRS
811 is very similar to the EDRS 620 course I took for my masters program in
educational psychology at
More
specifically in EDRS 811 summer 2008 course I reviewed statistical procedures
from my previous statistics courses. The review went from descriptive
statistics to ANOVA’s and multiple regressions. I was hoping that this course
would go beyond my scope of statistics in order for me to grow as a researcher
in statistics. I pasted this course with an A, but felt if I had put effort
into this course I could of easily walked out with an A+. On the exam I missed
what I would say were easy questions due to simple mistakes on my part. In
closing I really enjoy quantitative methods, but want to grow in this area and
learning more. I am looking forward to taking advanced statistics in the spring
of 2009, but do not know if this course reviewed enough for me to be ready for
advance statistics.
EDUC 797:
Structural Equation Modeling which is an Advanced Topic in Education (A)
Structural
equation modeling (SEM) I know very little about going into this course. My
previous exposure to SEM has only been reading research studies that have used
SEM for their analyses In the few studies that I had read that used SEM I did
not understand: how to do, understand what they did or what they found, or
interpret the study’s results. This left me frustrated as a researcher not
being able to truly understanding the research that I was reading. Therefore
when a course on SEM was being offered I had to take it.
The
beginning of this course started with linear regressions and multiple
regressions in dealing with path analysis. If this is what SEM was I know I
could do this! Later we were told that doing the path analysis was for our
conceptual understanding of SEM. There were days the Greek went right over my
head and I though, “Oh boy hopefully all this will make sense soon!” I
literally had to learn more of the Greek alphabet and symbols to keep up, such
as beta, sigma, lambda, eta, zeta, tau, alpha, gamma, and nu.
The
big overall objectives I learned in this course were to do an exploratory
factor analysis/ confirmatory factor analysis, parallel analysis, test for invariance,
compute effect sizes, and structure equation model analysis, these concepts
analyses were done using Mplus with a
little SPSS. To further explain what was learned to test for invariance in a
model using Mplus: testing initial
model (model 0), then model 1 for invariance of regression coefficients or
factor loadings nested within model 0, followed by model 2 that imposes
restrictions on model 1 therefore model 2 is nested within model 1 and if
significant the assumption of equal intercepts and slopes are invariant across
the two groups being tested. To accomplish above tasks the program Mplus had to be learned to know and
understand the codes that were needed in order to tell the computer what to do
in order to run the above analyses.
Everything
from this class really came together towards the end of the course. Here all
the puzzle pieces started to fit together for me and form a whole picture for
me. The project for this course was vital piece of the puzzle because without
this I would not have seen nor understood the big picture of SEM and how it
works. In conclusion this course has a step learning curve and I would have to
say, “Wow, my classmates and I learn a whole lot in five weeks!” See project to see first hand what I learn and did in my courses in Summer 2008 .