Date of Award

2018

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Education, Ed.D.

Department

Education

First Advisor

Nicole Ralston

Second Advisor

Ellyn Arwood

Third Advisor

Kimberly Ilosvay

LC Subjects

Kindergarten--Penmanship--United States; Kindergarten--Methods and manuals

Abstract

American elementary schools are seeing the lowest literacy rates to date across grade-levels. As this literacy rate has dropped across our nation, reading and writing standards have simultaneously increased in difficulty through Common Core State Standards. Kindergarten writing standards have drastically changed in the last decade in our American schools, yet many of our youngest learners are not reaching the new standards. Most commonly seen in our nation’s schools is a psycholinguistic approach to reading and writing instruction. Through this instruction, students are being left behind. The purpose of this case study was to explore an alternation method to writing instruction in a kindergarten classroom; this approach was founded by neuroeducation-based methods influenced by Arwood’s neuroeducation model. This study examined the extent to which six kindergarten students made advancements in their language function level and characteristics during an eight-week period of time at the beginning of their kindergarten academic year. The participants were assessed through four language samples; one oral and one written language sample at the beginning of the study and one oral and one written language sample after six weeks of neuroeducation-based writing instruction. The researcher found that the participants all remained at the same language function level of pre-language level; however improvements were made in language function characteristics. The results of this study suggest that neuroeducation-based writing instruction may provide educators with a new method to instruct writing in early elementary classrooms.

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Copyright for this work is retained by the author.

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