Digital Commons Network^™

Writing With Ai: University Students’ Use Of Chatgpt, Nikola Crcek, Jakob Patekar

Articles

Background: ChatGPT, a chatbot based on a large language model, captured global attention toward the end of 2022. With its potential to generate comprehensive texts of a variety of genres based on a string of straightforward prompts, it was soon perceived as a threat by many in various fields, including – and in particular – education. Schools across the world began banning its use as instructors started to receive suspiciously well-written essays and assignments from their students.

Aim: This study aimed to investigate the prevalence of use of ChatGPT among university students for written assignments, explore the ways students utilize …

Playing To Grow. Roundtable Interview On Games, Education, And Character, Owen Gottlieb, Matthew Farber, Paul Darvasi

Articles

In this roundtable interview moderated by Paul Darvasi, lecturer at the University of Toronto and co-founder of Gold Bug Interactive, Owen Gottlieb and Matthew Farber discuss research and practice at the intersection of religion, character education, and games in schools. Gottlieb is an associate professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, founder and lead faculty at the Initiative in Religion, Culture, and Policy at the MAGIC center, and founder and director of the Interaction, Media, and Learning Lab at RIT, where he specializes in interactive media, learning, religion, and culture. Farber is an associate professor of educational technology and coordinator …

Up To Code: Lessons Learned In Evaluating And Improving Legacy Irs, Frances Chang Andreu

Articles

Not all repositories are created under ideal circumstances, and inheriting an institutional repository can present challenges distinct from building one from scratch. Changes in institutional vision, policies, and priorities can lead to inconsistent content and limited metadata. Lack of documentation and loss of institutional memory can result in uncertainty about previous decisions. This case study examines the process of auditing a legacy institutional repository in order to ensure the content best reflects the institution’s current goals and policies.

A Primer On The Legendre Transformation, Steven J. Kilner, David L. Farnsworth

Articles

Guidance is offered for understanding and using the Legendre transformation and its associated duality among functions and curves. The genesis of this paper was encounters with colleagues and students asking about the transformation. A main feature is simplicity of exposition, while keeping in mind the purpose or application for using the transformation.

Probability Distributions Arising In Connection With The Inspection Paradox For Bernoulli Trials., James E. Marengo, Anne Marino Himes, W. Cade Reinberger, David L. Farnsworth

Articles

In renewal theory, the Inspection Paradox refers to the fact that an interarrival period in a renewal process which contains a fixed inspection time tends to be longer than one for the corresponding uninspected process. We focus on the paradox for Bernoulli trials. Probability distributions and moments for the lengths of the interarrival periods are derived for the inspected process, and we compare them to those for the uninspected case.

The State Of Accessibility In Blackboard: Survey And User Reviews Case Study, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Wajdi Aljedaani, Stephanie Ludi, Mohammed Alkahtani, Marcelo M. Eler, Marouane Kessentini, Ali Ouni

Articles

Context: Nowadays, mobile applications (or apps) have become vital in our daily life, particularly within education. Many institutions increasingly rely on mobile apps to provide access to all their students. However, many education mobile apps remain inaccessible to users with disabilities who need to utilize accessibility features like talkback or screen reader features. Accessibility features have to be considered in mobile apps to foster equity and inclusion in the educational environment allowing to use of such apps without limitations. Gaps in the accessibility to educational systems persist.

Objective: In this paper, we focus on the accessibility of the Blackboard mobile …

Enhanced Internal Coating Structure And Light Reflectance Of Coated Papers: A Sludge Valorization Process, Bilge N. Altay, Anamika Huq, Burak Aksoy, Richard Hailstone, Muslum Demir, Cem Aydemir, Arif Karademir, Scott Williams

Articles

Paper mill sludge (PMS) is a high-volume waste of the pulppapermaking industry, containing cellulose fibers. This paper introduces cellulose nanofibers extracted from PMS (CNFsPMS) and their application in paper coatings using a wire-wound coating method to enhance internal and optical properties of paper. Three factors were investigated: (i) CNFsPMS amount, (ii) number of layers, and (iii) surface treatment via a 4 × 2 × 2 factorial design. The experimental responses were tracked by fundamentally important internal properties including porosity, air permeability, thickness, roughness, and optical properties of brightness, gloss, and CIE L*a*b* color coordination. The results showed that CNFPMS enhances …

Probability Distributions Arising In Connection With The Inspection Paradox For The Poisson Process, James E. Marengo, Anne Marino Himes, David L. Farnsworth, W. Cade Reinberger

Articles

The Inspection Paradox refers to the fact that in a Renewal Process, the length of the interarrival period which contains a fixed time is stochastically larger than the length of a typical interarrival period. To provide a more complete understanding of this phenomenon, conditioning arguments are used to obtain the distributions and moments of the lengths of the interarrival periods other than the one containing this fixed time for the case of the time-homogeneous Poisson Process. Distributions of the waiting times for events that occur both before and after this fixed time are derived. This provides a fairly complete probabilistic …

Modeling And Fitting Two-Way Tables Containing Outliers, David L. Farnsworth

Articles

A model is proposed for two-way tables of measurement data containing outliers. The two independent variables are categorical and error free. Neither missing values nor replication are present. The model consists of the sum of a customary additive part that can be fit using least squares and a part that is composed of outliers. Recommendations are made for methods for identifying cells containing outliers and for fitting the model. A graph of the observations is used to determine the outliers’ locations. For all cells containing an outlier, replacement values are determined simultaneously using a classical missing-data tool. The result is …

Visual Literacy Of Molecular Biology Revealed Through A Card-Sorting Task, Dina L. Newman, Hannah Spector, Anna Neuenschwander, Anna J. Miller, Lauren Trumpore, Leslie Kate Wright

Articles

Visual literacy, which is the ability to effectively identify, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media, is an important aspect of science literacy. As molecular processes are not directly observable, researchers and educators rely on visual representations (e.g., drawings) to communicate ideas in biology. How learners interpret and organize those numerous diagrams is related to their underlying knowledge about biology and their skills in visual literacy. Furthermore, it is not always obvious how and why learners interpret diagrams in the way they do (especially if their interpretations are unexpected), as it is not possible to “see” inside the …

An Alternative To Hapke’S Macroscopic Roughness Correction, Dylan J. Shiltz, Charles M. Bachmann

Articles

In this paper, we present an alternative to Hapke’s correction for the photometric effect of macroscopic roughness of planetary surfaces (Hapke, 1984). Our model includes the effects of both single-facet scattering and multi-facet scattering. The single-facet scattering model is derived directly from the definition of bidirectional reflectance of a rough surface. We model projected shadowing by adopting an approximation published elsewhere in the literature. Monte Carlo simulations of single-facet scattering demonstrate very good agreement with the single-facet scattering component of our model. Using 3D printed molds with known roughness statistics, we prepared rough mineral surfaces consisting of quartz and olivine …

A Mathematical Model Of Juvenile Delinquency In The New York State, Oluwasegun Micheal Ibrahim

Articles

This report presents a mathematical model of juvenile delinquency in the New York State. In particular, we develop a juvenile delinquency system of non-linear differential equations using the mathematical epidemiology framework. In constructing this model, we assume that juvenile delinquency can be studied as a socially infectious disease. The stability of the juvenile delinquency-free equilibrium of the model is examined using the standard non-linear dynamical systems theory technique. We carried out a data fitting based on real-life data from the New York State Criminal Justice Services. The research result reveals that the formulated model conforms with the available data and …