Education Commons^™

Minimization And Eulerian Formulation Of Differential Geometry Based Nonpolar Multiscale Solvation Models, Zhan Chen

Department of Mathematical Sciences Faculty Publications

In this work, the existence of a global minimizer for the previous Lagrangian formulation of nonpolar solvation model proposed in [1] has been proved. One of the proofs involves a construction of a phase field model that converges to the Lagrangian formulation. Moreover, an Eulerian formulation of nonpolar solvation model is proposed and implemented under a similar parameterization scheme to that in [1]. By doing so, the connection, similarity and difference between the Eulerian formulation and its Lagrangian counterpart can be analyzed. It turns out that both of them have a great potential in solvation prediction for nonpolar molecules, while …

Gender Bias In It Hiring Practices: An Ethical Analysis, Harmony L. Alford

Student Scholarship – Computer Science

With the current movement to increase the number of women in STEM-related careers, modified IT hiring practices may be considered debatably unethical. Studies cited in this work have asserted that female representation in STEM fields is integral not only to encouraging continued progression toward gender equality in the workplace but also to creating more inclusive products. In turn, some argue that when faced with reasonably comparable female and male candidates, a hiring manager should select the female candidate in order to increase the female representation in the company and provide a female perspective. However, it is simultaneously debatably unethical and …

Extension Groups For Dg Modules, Saeed Nasseh, Sean Sather-Wagstaff

Department of Mathematical Sciences Faculty Publications

Let M and N be differential graded (DG) modules over a positively graded commutative DG algebra A. We show that the Ext-groups ExtiA(M,N) defined in terms of semi-projective resolutions are not in general isomorphic to the Yoneda Ext-groups YExtiA(M,N) given in terms of equivalence classes of extensions. On the other hand, we show that these groups are isomorphic when the first DG module is semi-projective.

In-Class Versus At-Home Quizzes: Which Is Better? A Flipped Learning Study In A Two-Site Synchronously-Broadcast Organic Chemistry Course, Michael A. Christensen, Alyssia M. Lambert, Louis S. Nadelson, Kami M. Dupree, Trish A. Kingsford

Chemistry and Biochemistry Faculty Publications

We recently shared our design of a two-semester flipped organic chemistry course, in which we gave students in-class quizzes to incentivize attendance and watching the lecture videos in advance. With a second iteration, we planned to make the video-watching experience more engaging. We accordingly hypothesized that if students completed short at-home quizzes while watching the videos, then attentiveness, engagement, and learning would increase. We tested this with a later section of the course, dividing the material into 13 units. For units 1-6, we gave in-class quizzes; for 7-13, quizzes were at home. Although units 1-6 and 7-13 covered different material, …

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Fall 2016, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Part of every UNLV engineering student’s academic experience, the senior design project stimulates engineering innovation and entrepreneurship. Each student in their senior year chooses, plans, designs, and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. A capstone to the student’s educational career, the senior design project encourages the student to use everything learned in the engineering program to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge. The senior design competition helps focus the senior students in increasing the quality and potential for commercial application for their design projects. Judges from local industry evaluate the projects on …

Student Lifestyle Choices And Perceptions Of Stress Based On Majors, Nathan Robinson, Seth Andrews, Benjamin E. Yoder

Exercise Science Senior Research Projects

College students are often experience many stressors. This study was designed to look at perceived-stress and health habits with relation to academic department of undergraduate students at Cedarville University. The results of this study have implications for the Physical Activity and the Christian Life (PACL) class, offered on the Cedarville campus, in assessing its current curriculum and making potential future adjustments to the course. The objective of this study was to answer the question: “Do perceived stress levels within different academic departments affect health habits in Cedarville University undergraduate students?”

The study was conducted with a campus-wide, 27 question survey …

Exploration Of Student Biodiversity Knowledge And Decision-Making For A Wildlife Conservation Socioscientific Issue, Ashley R. Alred

School of Natural Resources: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Global biodiversity, a foundation for ecosystem function, is diminishing at a rate unprecedented in the last 50 years. Biodiversity loss and ecosystem services deterioration is linked to increased food insecurity, reduced water quality and availability, decreased energy security, higher economic losses and human suffering (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). Consequently, educators should invest in supporting students in their development of ecological understanding and formal decision-making skills so they are equipped with meaningful tools they can use as scientifically literate citizens. To contribute to that mission, this study seeks to explore student 1) comprehension and explanation of biodiversity concepts and 2) decision-making …

Sustainable Dorm Display, Salix Sampson, Jaclyn Ermoyan, Teresa Huynh, Jessyca Stoepker, Amber Tillman

Environmental and Sustainability Studies Undergraduate Projects

No abstract provided.

Geosciences Newsletter - 2016, Department Of Geosciences

Geological and Environmental Sciences News

Vol. 8, No. 2

• Greetings from the Chair
• Faculty & Staff
• Michigan Geological Survey
• MGRRE
• CoreKids
• Geosciences Advisory Council
• 2016 Distinguished Alumni Award
• Endowments and Donors
• Department Publications
• Student Scholarships & Awards
• Our Students
• Student Organizations

Grading That Takes Into Account The Need To Learn From Mistakes, Francisco Zapata, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

It is well known that the best way to learn the new material is to try it, to make mistakes, and to learn from these mistakes. However, the current grading scheme, in which the overall grade is a weighted average of the grades for all the assignments, exams, etc., does not encourage mistakes: any mistake decreases the grade on the corresponding assignment and thus, decreases the overall grade for the class. It is therefore desirable to modify the usual grading scheme, so that it will take into account -- and encourage -- learning by mistakes. Such a modification is proposed …

Food And Energy For All, Bradley Stevens, Stephen Rybczynski, Deborah Herrington

Peer Reviewed Articles

When asked what plants need for photosynthesis, many students can correctly recall the reaction equation and state that plants require CO2, H2O, and light. Many students, however, do not understand that these reactants are the raw materials plants use to make sugars and instead believe that they are food for plants. Moreover, when questioned further, students often voice the idea that plants get their food from the soil (Kestler 2014). This is consistent with findings that fewer than half of current middle and high school students have a correct understanding of the process of photosynthesis (AAAS 2015). We developed this …

Teaching Android Security Through Examples: A Publicly Available Database Of Vulnerable Apps, Daniel E. Krutz, Samuel A. Malachowsky

Articles

Security is hard, and teaching security can be even harder. Here we describe a public educational activity to assist in the instruction of both students and developers in creating secure Android apps. Our set of activities includes example vulnerable applications, information about each vulnerability, steps on how to repair the vulnerabilities, and information about how to confirm that the vulnerability has been properly repaired. Our primary goal is to make these activities available to other instructors for use in their classrooms ranging from the K-12 to university settings. A secondary goal of this project is to foster interest in security …

Coursenetworking And Community: Linking Online Discussion Networks And Course Success, Adrienne L. Traxler, Andrew Gavrin, Rebecca Lindell

Physics Faculty Publications

Large introductory science courses are isolating for many students, and reducing this isolation is an important factor for student retention in college. Active learning courses often build community among students as an explicit goal, but many commuter or non-traditional students have limited on-campus time. Online discussion forums provide one tool for engaging students with each other outside of class time. This study uses social network analysis with forum data from an introductory physics course to examine students' positions in the class discussion network and link it to their final course grades. We find that, contrary to expectations, there is no …

Semi-Automated Tool For Providing Effective Feedback On Programming Assignments, Min Yan Beh, Swapna Gottipati, David Lo, Venky Shankararaman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Human grading of introductory programming assignments is tedious and error-prone, hence researchers have attempted to develop tools that support automatic assessment of programming code. However, most such efforts often focus only on scoring solutions, rather than assessing whether students correctly understand the problems. To aid the students improve programming skills, effective feedback on programming assignments plays an important role. Individual feedback generation is tedious and painstaking process. We present a tool that not only automatically generates the static and dynamic program analysis outcomes, but also clusters similar code submissions to provide scalable and effective feedback to the students. We studied …

Going For Gold In The International Math Olympiad, Queena N. Lee-Chua

Mathematics Faculty Publications

In July 2016, two high school students in the Philippine team garnered gold at the 57th International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO) in Hong Kong, capping a three-decade long quest for the top prize in the most prestigious high school math competition in the world. The four other team members also brought home honors, boosting our country to its highest rank ever, 17th out of 109 countries. This article discusses the history of the Philippine participation in the IMO, and examines the critical factors that have led to the victory. For Philippine team participants in general, these include: institutionalized and refined search …

Evolution And Rationale For United States Department Of Defense Electromagnetic Pulse Protection Standard, George H. Baker Iii

Department of Integrated Science and Technology - Faculty Scholarship

The United States (US) Department of Defense (DoD) Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) protection standard offers a solid basis for protecting commercial communication, data, and control facilities. Because of the standard’s shielded barrier and test requirements, it is not surprising that there is a strong temptation within industry and government to dismiss the MIL-STD 188-125 approach in favor of less rigorous protection methods. It is important to understand that US DoD EMP protection standard for fixed facilities, MIL-STD-188-125, reflects an evolution by trial and error that spanned a period of decades beginning with the acquisition of the Minuteman Missile System in the …

‘Tweetboard’ – A Case Study Of Developing A Micro-Blogging Platform For Higher Education, Shao Cheh Joyce Hsu, Gan, Benjamin, Jin Lee, Shu Hui Sheryl Lim, Xie Yan Jeremy Lim, Thomas Menkhoff, Si Xian Sherman Tan, Charles Jason Woodard, Qiu Cheng Yap

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper reports experiences made at an Asian university in developing a social media platform based on Twitter in the context of a final year capstone project where information systems management students get an opportunity to solve ‘a real-world problem for a real client’. In this case study, the challenge was provided by a faculty member’s request for an interactive social media application which engages less outspoken students in class via a social medium they are familiar with: Twitter. We reconstruct the project’s evolution; describe the main features of the application called ‘TweetBoard’ and share lessons learned in developing a …

Connecting Self-Efficacy And Views About Nature Of Science In Undergraduate Research Experiences, Gina Quan, Andrew Elby

Faculty Publications

Undergraduate research can support students’ more central participation in physics. We analyze markers of two coupled shifts in participation: changes in students’ views about the nature of science coupled to shifts in self-efficacy toward physics research. Students in the study worked with faculty and graduate student mentors on research projects while also participating in a seminar where they learned about research and reflected on their experiences. In classroom discussions and in clinical interviews, students described gaining more nuanced views about the nature of science, specifically related to who can participate in research and what participation in research looks like. This …

Race, Space, And The Conflict Inside Us, Francis Su

All HMC Faculty Publications and Research

Talking about race is hard. Our nation is wrestling with some open wounds about race. These sores have been around a while, but they have been brought to light recently by technology, politics, and an increasingly diverse population. And regardless of the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, we will all need to work at healing these sores, not just in our personal lives, but in our classrooms and in our profession.

Exploring Connections Between Advanced And Secondary Mathematics, Erin E. Baldinger, Eileen Murray, Diana White, Shawn Broderick, Nicholas Wasserman

Department of Mathematics Facuty Scholarship and Creative Works

The second meeting of this Working Group continues to explore questions about the connections between abstract algebra and school mathematics. Our goal is to focus in on questions around the way in which teachers’ practice might be influenced based on their understanding of such connections. In particular, we will gather interested individuals in an effort to deepen our understanding of existing connections between abstract algebra and secondary mathematics and which of these connections are important for secondary teachers to know and understand. Moreover, we aim to further research in this area by first considering connections between abstract algebra and school …

Life After Calculus: 20 Years Later, Darren B. Glass

Math Faculty Publications

In 1996 Math Horizons interviewed a group of students at the Joint Mathematics Meetings; now, 20 years later, one of those students, Darren Glass, interviews another group of students.

Identification Of The Emergent Leaders Within A Cse Professional Development Program, Tracie Evans Reding, Brian Dorn, Neal Grandgenett, Harvey Siy, Jon Youn, Qiuming Zhu, Carol A. Engelmann

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The need for high quality, sustainable Computer Science Education (CSE) professional development (PD) at the grades K-12 level is essential to the success of the global CSE initiatives. This study investigates the use of Social Network Analysis (SNA) to identify emergent teacher leaders within a high quality CSE PD program. The CSE PD program was designed and implemented through collaboration between the computer science and teacher education units at a Midwestern metropolitan university in North America. A unique feature of this specific program is in the intentional development of a social network. This study discusses the importance of social networks, …

Role Of Students’ Participation On Learning Physics In Active Learning Classes, Binod Nainabasti

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Students’ interactions can be an influential component of students’ success in an interactive learning environment. From a participation perspective, learning is viewed in terms of how students transform their participation. However, many of the seminal papers discussing the participationist framework are vague on specific details about what student participation really looks like on a fine-grained scale. As part of a large project to understand the role of student participation in learning, this study gathered data that quantified students’ participation in three broad areas of two student-centered introductory calculus-based physics classes structured around the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) philosophy. These …

Neilson Library Final Charter, Smith College

The New Neilson Library

Final charter for the New Neilson Library project.

Rank Of Submatrices Of The Pascal Matrix, Scott N. Kersey

Department of Mathematical Sciences Faculty Publications

In a previous paper, we derived necessary and sufficient conditions for the invertibility of square submatrices of the Pascal upper triangular matrix. To do so, we established a connection with the two-point Birkhoff interpolation problem. In this paper, we extend this result by deriving a formula for the rank of submatrices of the Pascal matrix. Our formula works for both square and non-square submatrices. We also provide bases for the row and column spaces of these submatrices. Further, we apply our result to one-point lacunary polynomial approximation.

Weights And Balances: Integrating Models For Prevention And Response To Southern California Offshore Oil Spills, Carmen Watts Clayton, Amoret Bunn

STAR Program Research Presentations

Licensing offshore oil and gas reserves in the United States waters are overseen by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Safety and Enforcement (BSEE). The licensing application includes planning for any worst-case oil spill scenario between BSEE and the applicant based on lessons learned from historic offshore spills such as the Deepwater Horizon (2010), Exxon Valdez (1989), and the Union Oil Platform Blowout (1969). The process for planning to respond to oil spills involves coordination with multiple agencies, trustees, and stakeholders to ensure that oil spill responses consider multiple factors, including ecologically sensitive species, commercial transportation and fisheries, …

How We’Ll Fight The Next Deadly Virus Ted Talk Annotated Resource List, Susie Roy

Undergraduate Research Award

No abstract provided.

Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are Ted Talk Annotated Resource List, Elizabeth Hurm

Undergraduate Research Award

No abstract provided.

Faith Connections In The Math Classroom, Valorie L. Zonnefeld, Ryan G. Zonnefeld

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

Looking for ways to make faith connections in your math classroom? The Zonnefelds present a framework, developed in collaboration with local teachers, that synthesizes faith connections, the TfT framework, and Common Core standards.

Standards-Based Assessment In A Developmental Math Course, Valorie L. Zonnefeld, Michal Huizenga, Aaron Van Beek, Kate Van Weelden

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

Learn why we decided to try standards-based instruction in an undergraduate, developmental algebra course and what we learned in the process.