Contributions from elementary education to the practice and reality of critical thinking are rare, largely because attempts in basic education to elucidate a concept of critical thinking have a hard time breaking through the elusiveness and indeterminacy that characterize the history and reality of the concept. This situation is due to, and a consequence of, the difficulty of delimiting critical thinking from related fields, such as metacognition, higher-order-thinking, problem solving, informal logic, reasoning skills, and decision making, to name a few. Texas school authorities designed and put into practice a battery of tools to evaluate critical thinking through the assessment programs TAKS and STAAR, without taking a position regarding the indeterminacy problems of the content of critical thinking. The purpose of this study was to reconstruct the pieces of the critical thinking model imparted to Texas elementary school children since 1999 and continues today. The findings indicate that the critical thinking model implemented in Texas elementary schools is a particular version of a skills-only approach of critical thinking that follows the classical logical paradigm, consisting of two sets of complementary skills. This model acquaints students with the components and structure of five types of arguments while it fails to substantiate …

Undergraduate thesis building on Feagan's (2007) analysis of ideas of community and place, and Kloppenburg et al.'s (1996) concept of foodsheds, and a modified form of drive-time polygons, termed 'marketsheds' that demarcate the consumer-draw area for farmers' markets. Specifically, the research analyzes the spatial distribution of local food communities in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex (DFW) in Texas and links the foodshed concept to elements of community and sense of place. Two questions guide this study: 1) What are the characteristics of the DFW local foods movement? 2) How do local food producers create and conceptualize community and place?

Undergraduate thesis investigating the rate of vertical transmission that takes place in wild Culex quinquefasciatus populations by testing samples of emergent Culex quinquefasciatus adults to see what number of mosquitos test positive for West Nile Virus (WNv) throughout the summer and fall, and thus estimate the rate of vertical transmission of the virus in wild mosquitos.