Digital Commons Network^™

Reading And Math Outcome Equity Of Students, By Language, Ethnicity, And Gender Conditions, Required To Participate In An Attendance Court Program Based On Excessive School Absences, Kenneth E. Defrank

Student Work

The purpose of this study is to determine the reading and math outcome equity of students, by, language, ethnicity, and gender conditions required to participate in the Grand Island Public Schools Attendance program based on third-grade through eighth grade excessive school absences in the 2010–2011 school year. The data presented in the study indicates that overall the Grand Island Public School Attendance program improved attendance of students who were involved in the attendance program. In the third-grade 77% of students involved in the attendance program improved their attendance. In the fourth-grade 83% of students involved in the attendance program improved …

Educator Mindset: Perceptions Of Economic Inequality And Awareness Of Poverty On Student Potential, Cindy B. Copich

Student Work

Due to growing economic inequality and the increase of child poverty rates within the U.S., teachers today are more likely to work with students and families with increasingly complex and diverse economic needs. This study examines the significance of the relationship between educators’ awareness of poverty, perceptions of economic inequality, and mindset about talent and intelligence. The participants (N = 71) were adult students attending a Midwestern metropolitan public university’s summer educational leadership graduate course. Survey results revealed that only two of the 71 study participants had a growth mindset. Individuals with a growth mindset generally believe that through effort, …

The Impact Of The Gradual Release Of Responsibility On Graduate Teacher Education Candidates’ Self-Efficacy With Ipads, Wendy L. Loewenstein

Student Work

Keeping up with technological innovations is a challenge for educational intuitions as they strive to prepare students to be competitive in a future workforce. This is an overwhelming task for educational leaders that extends beyond which technological device to purchase. This study examines the barriers to iPad integration in education and how the gradual release of responsibility method of instruction can be used to increase participants’ self-efficacy with iPads. The participants (N = 41) were teacher education graduate candidates enrolled in a Children’s Literature course in which they were provided access to iPads. Survey results revealed that candidates’ efficacy prior …

An Exploration Of High School Engagement Factors And Their Relationship To College Completion Rates, Tamela J. Wegener

Student Work

Today our global economy is demanding a work force that is highly educated and skilled; yet many of our students entering college are not college ready despite all the assessments, increased requirements and state standards work this country has undertaken. The bridge between high school and post-secondary education needs to be built in order for this nation to move forward. This research investigates the predictors of college success. The findings indicate five critical components: (1) academic preparation; (2) demographic characteristics; (3) local and total scholarship amounts; (4) parent engagement; and (5) student engagement as measured by high school participation in …

Analyzing Shakespeare’S Plays In A Network Perspective, Vikas Thotakuri

Student Work

Networks are popular models for representing interactions between entities in systems, such as in sociology, bioinformatics, and epidemiology. The entities in the networks are represented as vertices and their pair-wise interactions are represented as edges [1]. Many network metrics such as degree centrality (number of connections of an entity) and betweenness centrality (number of shortest paths passing through the entity) have been developed to rank the entities according to their importance [7] [10].Social networks are generally modeled on only one type of relation. Groups are open-ended, which means the number of participants and the time frame are not finite. Time …

Modeling And Tracking Relative Movement Of Object Parts, Praneeth Talluri

Student Work

Video surveillance systems play an important role in many civilian and military applications, for the purposes of security and surveillance. Object detection is an important component in a video surveillance system, used to identify possible objects of interest and to generate data for tracking and analysis purposes. Not much exploration has been done to track the moving parts of the object which is being tracked. Some of the promising techniques like Kalman Filter, Mean-shift algorithm, Matching Eigen Space, Discrete Wavelet Transform, Curvelet Transform, Distance Metric Learning have shown good performance for keeping track of moving object.

Most of this work …

The Effects Of A Language Arts Academic Pullout Program For Middle School “Academic Bubble” Students, Carrie L. Rath

Student Work

High stakes testing warrants a lot of pressure on students in today’s classrooms. Students are continually preparing for yet another assessment or pre-assessment monthly so data can be readily collected and analyzed. Schools are always under the academic microscope and are expected to perform despite all obstacles they may face. What is a school district to do, and how does a school district tackle raising the academic bar for all students despite the obstacles? Small group pullout programs have been used in education for many years to help all types of students, ranging from students with disabilities to students with …

The Effect Of Public School Preschool, Private School Preschool, And No Preschool Attendance On Kindergarten Students’ Academic Achievement As Measured By Fall, Winter, And Spring Map Scores, Matthew W. Fenster

Student Work

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effect of public school preschool, private school preschool, and no preschool attendance on kindergarten students’ academic achievement as measured by fall, winter, and spring Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) Test scores. The independent variable conditions for the study were the research district’s kindergarten students who attended the research district’s school-wide preschool program, who attend a formal private preschool program and who did not attend a preschool program. The studies dependent variables are academic achievement. Achievement data was analyzed using the following dependent measures: reading skills, math skills, as measured on the …

The Impact Of A Kindergarten Intervention Program On Student Reading Achievement In Primary Grades, Tammy S. Voisin

Student Work

One of the biggest issues in education today is that no common structure exists to serve students before they reach their fifth birthday. There exists opportunities for children to receive social, emotional and educational instruction, but there are no requirements to participate. Commonly, parents of children that have the financial means take advantage of pre-Kindergarten opportunities, but not every family has that benefit. Researchers have discovered this to be the most critical time in terms of social, psychological and intellectual development in young children. For some students, waiting until they enter Kindergarten to intervene is too late. The purpose of …

Identifying The Impact Of Universal College Testing On State Academic Testing At The Eleventh Grade, Kristi N. Thompson-Gibbs

Student Work

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of the Universal American College Test (ACT) administration as part of a required high school assessment program on eleventh-grade students’ achievement on state level assessments. The study focused on four groups of eleventh-grade students. The first group, eleventh-graders who scored met on the 2010 NeSA Reading assessment and did not participate in the district implementation of the Universal ACT but took the 2010 ACT (n = 103). The second group, eleventh-graders who scored exceed on the 2010 NeSA Reading assessment and did not participate in the district implementation of the …

Sustained Effects Of Intensive Reading Intervention: Can Intensive Intervention Gains Made In Primary Grades Be Maintained Through The End Of Elementary School?, Jolene J. Johnson

Student Work

The purpose of this research study was to determine the effects of an intensive reading intervention provided to students in primary grades (kindergarten-second grade). A cohort of 400 students was followed from kindergarten through fifth grade to determine reading achievement effects as students progressed through school. Scores from third and fifth grade reading assessments were used to evaluate the short-term and long-term effects of a district-developed program. Effects of the program were examined as they related to students who exited the intervention successfully, those who failed to exit the intervention and for those never needing intervention.

The Quasigroup Block Cipher And Its Analysis, Matthew J. Battey

Student Work

This thesis discusses the Quasigroup Block Cipher (QGBC) and its analysis. We first present the basic form of the QGBC and then follow with improvements in memory consumption and security. As a means of analyzing the system, we utilize tools such as the NIST Statistical Test Suite, auto and crosscorrelation, then linear and algebraic cryptanalysis. Finally, as we review the results of these analyses, we propose improvements and suggest an algorithm suitable for low-cost FPGA implementation.

Elementary And Secondary Teachers’ Attitudes Towards The Education Of English Language Learners In The Mainstream Classroom In Rural Schools, Adam N. Sempek

Student Work

This study sought to examine the attitudes of elementary and secondary teachers towards the education of English Language Learners within the mainstream classroom. Attitudes towards the inclusion of ELL students, professional development concerning the education of ELL students, modification of class work for ELL students, all within the mainstream classroom, along with teachers understanding of language acquisition were the focuses of the study. These four focuses were examined in two rural school districts in the Midwest, through the use of the questionnaire, English-as-a-second-language (ESL) Students in Mainstream Classrooms: A Survey of Teachers (Reeves, 2006). This study examined and attempted to …

The Application Of Graph Theory To Access Control Systems, Eric Brown

Student Work

Computer systems contain vital information that must be protected. One of the crucial aspects of protection is access control. A review of some of the research into ways in which access to the information in computers can be controlled focuses on a question about safety. The safety question asks, “Can a user ever gain access to a resource for which he is not authorized?” This question cannot be answered in general because of the unbounded, unrestricted nature of a general-purpose access control system. It can be answered only for systems that are specifically designed to restrict the actions that can …

Automated Oracle Generation Via Denotational Semantics, Liang Cao

Student Work

Software failure detection is typically done by comparing the running behaviors from a software under test (SUT) against its expected behaviors, called test oracles. In this paper, we present a formal approach to specifying test oracles in denotational semantics for systems with structured inputs. The approach introduces formal semantic evaluation rules, based on the denotational semantics methodology, defined on each productive grammar rule. We extend our grammar-based test generator, GENA, with automated test oracle generation. We provide three case studies of software testing: (i) a benchmark of Java programs on arithmetic calculations, (ii) an open source software on license identification, …

Program Comprehension Of Aspect-Oriented Programs, Jeffrey Steenbock

Student Work

The aim of aspect-oriented development has been to address the issue of software reuse outside the domain of established object-oriented techniques within the challenging realm of similar cross-cutting concerns. By decoupling the concerns from the core functionality, aspect-oriented developed software results in a smaller code base and reduced code duplication. This decoupling though presents new challenges to the software development process. The process of separating concerns impacts the developers established engineering inclinations as well as existing, established notations, such as UML, that developers are familiar with utilizing for both designing and understanding the implemented software systems. This thesis will study …

Test-Driven Learning In High School Computer Science, Ryan Stejskal

Student Work

Test-driven development is a style of software development that emphasizes writing tests first and running them frequently with the aid of automated testing tools. This development style is widely used in the software development industry to improve the rate of development while reducing software defects. Some computer science educators are adopting the test-driven development approach to help improve student understanding and performance on programming projects. Several studies have examined the benefits of teaching test-driven programming techniques to undergraduate student programmers, with generally positive results. However, the usage of test-driven learning at the high school level has not been studied to …

Multi-Robot Coverage With Dynamic Coverage Information Compression, Zachary L. Wilson

Student Work

This work considers the problem of coverage of an initially unknown environment by a set of autonomous robots. A crucial aspect in multi-robot coverage involves robots sharing information about the regions they have already covered at certain intervals, so that multiple robots can avoid repeated coverage of the same area. However, sharing the coverage information between robots imposes considerable communication and computation overhead on each robot, which increases the robots’ battery usage and overall coverage time. To address this problem, we explore a novel coverage technique where robots use an information compression algorithm before sharing their coverage maps with each …

Achievement Outcomes Of Sixth-Grade Students With A Military Parent Deployed To A War Zone Or A Military Parent Not Deployed Compared To Same School Students Whose Parents Have No Military Affiliation, Robert L. Ingram Iii

Student Work

The need for accurate information about the achievement of students whose military parents are deployed to a war zone or whose military parents are eligible although not currently deployed to a war zone is important in order to ensure that we are providing for the educational wellbeing of these children as their parents defend our nations freedoms. The purpose of this posttest-only comparative efficacy study was to determine the achievement outcomes of sixth-grade students with a military parent deployed to a war zone (n = 10) or sixth-grade students with a military parent not deployed to a war zone (n …