History Teachers\u27 Perspectives of Time Constraints, Engagement, and Relevance in the Curriculum

Over the last 20 years, many state school administrators have reduced social studies instructional time in favor of time dedicated to reading or math skills due to the pressure of standardized testing. The purpose of this qualitative case study, which was based on constructivist theories about learning and schema theory, was to analyze teachers\u27 perspectives on teaching history lessons, in terms of engagement and relevance, while working within new time constraints. Purposeful sampling was used to select 6 teachers for interviews; all had experience teaching social studies courses at the upper elementary and middle levels in a public school district that has been influenced over the last 20 years by the pressures of standardized testing. Interview data were coded and analyzed for common themes. The teachers reported that the lack of planning time and instructional time, compounded with students\u27 lack of schema, hampered the delivery of engaging and relevant history lessons based on the tenets of constructivism. The results of the data collection were used to design a professional development program that would allow teachers to work with engaging instructional strategies designed to stimulate situational interest, which would ultimately lead to schema development. This study has implications for positive social change in that school leaders and other stakeholders could use the results to make decisions about the allotment of instructional and preparation time to provide teachers adequate opportunities to design and deliver engaging and relevant history lessons to enhance students\u27 learning

Human Factors in Agile Software Development

Through our four years experiments on students' Scrum based agile software development (ASD) process, we have gained deep understanding into the human factors of agile methodology. We designed an agile project management tool - the HASE collaboration development platform to support more than 400 students self-organized into 80 teams to practice ASD. In this thesis, Based on our experiments, simulations and analysis, we contributed a series of solutions and insights in this researches, including 1) a Goal Net based method to enhance goal and requirement management for ASD process, 2) a novel Simple Multi-Agent Real-Time (SMART) approach to enhance intelligent task allocation for ASD process, 3) a Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) based method to enhance emotion and morale management for ASD process, 4) the first large scale in-depth empirical insights on human factors in ASD process which have not yet been well studied by existing research, and 5) the first to identify ASD process as a human-computation system that exploit human efforts to perform tasks that computers are not good at solving. On the other hand, computers can assist human decision making in the ASD process.Comment: Book Draf