Digital Commons Network^™

Predicting Students’ Performance By Learning Analytics, Sandeep Subhash Madnaik

Master's Projects

The field of Learning Analytics (LA) has many applications in today’s technology and online driven education. Learning Analytics is a multidisciplinary topic for learn- ing purposes that uses machine learning, statistic, and visualization techniques [1]. We can harness academic performance data of various components in a course, along with the data background of each student (learner), and other features that might affect his/her academic performance. This collected data then can be fed to a sys- tem with the task to predict the final academic performance of the student, e.g., the final grade. Moreover, it allows students to monitor and self-assess …

Using Machine Learning To Optimize Predictive Models Used For Big Data Analytics In Various Sports Events, Akhil Kumar Gour

Master's Projects

In today’s world, data is growing in huge volume and type day by day. Historical data can hence be leveraged to predict the likelihood of the events which are to occur in the future. This process of using statistical or any other form of data to predict future outcomes is commonly termed as predictive modelling. Predictive modelling is becoming more and more important and is trending because of several reasons. But mainly, it enables businesses or individual users to gain accurate insights and allows to decide suitable actions for a profitable outcome.

Machine learning techniques are generally used in order …

The Role Of Socioeconomic Status And Prior Industry Exposure On The Attitudes, Career Goals, And Career Decision Self-Efficacy Of Undergraduates Studying Hospitality And Tourism Management, Laura Mckenzie Shroder

Dissertations

The hospitality and tourism industry struggles with high employee turnover, and many hospitality management students graduate and subsequently leave or choose not to enter the industry. Scholars have found it beneficial to study students’ industry attitudes, career goals, demographics, and career decision self-efficacy to further understand how these variables influence students’ perceptions, engagement, and retention. This quantitative study measured these variables as well as prior industry exposure, which is based on the Social Cognitive Career Theory. Results of an online survey of hospitality students in the Western United States (n = 315; response rate 79.9%) suggested that students’ prior industry …

Word Embedding Techniques For Malware Classification, Aniket Chandak

Master's Projects

Word embeddings are often used in natural language processing as a means to quantify relationships between words. More generally, these same word embedding techniques can be used to quantify relationships between features. In this paper, we conduct a series of experiments that are designed to determine the effectiveness of word embedding in the context of malware classification. First, we conduct experiments where hidden Markov models (HMM) are directly applied to opcode sequences. These results serve to establish a baseline for comparison with our subsequent word embedding experiments. We then experiment with word embedding vectors derived from HMMs— a technique that …

Ai Quantification Of Language Puzzle To Language Learning Generalization, Harita Shroff

Master's Projects

Online language learning applications provide users multiple ways/games to learn a new language. Some of the ways include rearranging words in the foreign language sentences, filling in the blanks, providing flashcards, and many more. Primarily this research focused on quantifying the effectiveness of these games in learning a new language. Secondarily my goal for this project was to measure the effectiveness of exercises for transfer learning in machine translation. Currently, very little research has been done in this field except for the research conducted by the online platforms to provide assurance to their users [12]. Machine learning has been used …

Using Deep Learning And Linguistic Analysis To Predict Fake News Within Text, John Nguyen

Master's Projects

The spread of information about current events is a way for everybody in the world to learn and understand what is happening in the world. In essence, the news is an important and powerful tool that could be used by various groups of people to spread awareness and facts for the good of mankind. However, as information becomes easily and readily available for public access, the rise of deceptive news becomes an increasing concern. The reason is due to the fact that it will cause people to be misled and thus could affect the livelihood of themselves or others. The …

Sentiment Analysis For Troll Activity Detection On Sina Weibo, Zidong Jiang

Master's Projects

The impact of social media on the modern world is difficult to overstate. Virtually all companies and public figures have social media accounts on popular platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. In China, the micro-blogging service provider Sina Weibo is the most popular such service. To overcome negative publicity, Weibo trolls the so called Water Army can be hired to post deceptive comments.

In recent years, troll detection and sentiment analysis have been studied, but we are not aware of any research that considers troll detection based on sentiment analysis. In this research, we focus on troll detection via sentiment …

Walker, Ethel Louise Pitts, San Jose State University

Emeritus and Retired Faculty Biographies

University of Missouri - Columbia, Theatre, 1975 Ph.D.

University of Colorado, Speech and Drama, 1965 M.A.

Lincoln University (Missouri), Education in Speech and Drama, 1964 B.S.

Booker T. Washington High School, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1960

An Examination Of Garden-Based Education Impacts On Title 1 Elementary School Students’ Environmental Literacy In San José, California, Alexandra Dahl

Master's Theses

The objective of this research was to assess garden-based pedagogy as an effective strategy to increase environmental literacy in elementary-aged students. With severe environmental issues facing children today and into the future, environmental literacy is a desired outcome of environmental education programs. Such interventions create environmentally responsible citizens who understand how humans impact the natural environment and thereby act sustainably. Currently, little research exists on garden education’s influence on students’ environmental literacy, especially in underrepresented communities. Using a nonequivalent control group study design, this project investigated the impact of a garden education program in Central San José, CA in an …

The Impact Of The Language Of Instruction On Second-Grade Latinx Emergent Bilinguals’ Understanding Of Place Value In Two Spanish-English Transitional Bilingual Classrooms: An Exploratory Study, Angela Maria Rengifo

Dissertations

The relationship between mathematics learning and the language of instruction in bilingual settings has been observed and analyzed widely in educational research. As Latinx Emergent Bilingual students start developing their mathematics knowledge and skills in elementary classrooms, the role that language plays in the process has been studied as a key aspect of classroom practice. A convergent parallel mixed-method approach was used to examine fourteen second-grade Latinx Emergent Bilingual students’ understanding of the concept of place value and whether this process was related to the language of instruction chosen in each of the two Spanish-English transitional bilingual classrooms. Findings from …

Developing Teachers Technological, Pedagogical, And Content Knowledge (Tpack) Through Design Thinking And Community Of Practice, Jennifer Gee Huei Wang

Dissertations

Current professional development programs have been ineffective in developing teachers’ technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPaCK). Development of teachers’ TPaCK is fundamental for 21st-century student-learning. After a series of professional development workshops with the design thinking process, this study examined whether and how the self-selected K-5 teachers in a suburban elementary school in California demonstrated TPaCK in the integration of instructional technologies when they engage in a community of practice (CoP) structured around design thinking. Data was collected by online TPaCK surveys, exit slips after the CoP, audio recordings and field notes from the CoP and focus group interview. This …

Understanding The Barriers, Bridges And Bases To Inclusion Instruction For Secondary Students With Mild To Moderate Disabilities, Angela Renee Lyte Crowther

Dissertations

Inclusion is the practice of educating students with disabilities and students without disabilities in the same learning environment. For secondary students with mild/moderate disabilities, inclusion is rooted in the philosophical mindset of social justice, equity, and legislation. Inclusion is a complex and sometimes controversial topic few educational systems want to tackle. The purpose of this multi-method research was to gather and analyze secondary site administrators' and teachers’ opinions on the barriers, bridges, and bases needed for the furtherance of inclusion practices and the elimination of the segregated classrooms for students with mild-moderate disabilities. A plethora of research on this topic …

Expanding And Improving High-Quality Early Care And Education In California: Is There Alignment Between Policymakers And The Public?, Heidi Schmidt Emberling

Dissertations

Although there is widespread agreement about the life-long benefits of high-quality childcare and preschool, access for all children in California is limited. The negative effects of this inadequate landscape are borne predominantly by children living in poverty, and middle-income families who do not qualify for subsidies and cannot afford full-fee care. This mixed-methods study examines specific factors that impede expansion and improvement of childcare/preschool in California, from the perspective of five diverse policymakers. Findings reveal a variety of policy solutions in the areas of funding, teacher workforce, quality of care, policy development, and public perception of the importance of high-quality …

All Things Come To Pass, Brandon Luu

Master's Theses

All Things Come to Pass is a poetry collection consisting of 36 poems that revolve around the themes of impermanence, death, and memory. It is divided into three sections: Crisis, Melancholy, and Acceptance, inspired by the five stages of grief by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. The poems are written primarily in free-verse and include genres such as elegy, pastoral, and narrative. The collection contemplates whether given the finite nature of life, in an existence where nothing lasts forever and everything seems ultimately inconsequential, what is it that should be considered important?

Whiteness: An Ideology Of Violence And Power As Represented In Chesnutt's The Marrow Of Tradition, Schuyler's Black No More And Larsen's Passing, Keith Giles

Master's Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the representations of whiteness found in three pieces of literature. The thesis not only teases out the nuances of whiteness, but specifically analyzes the violence that whiteness inflicts upon the black body. To begin, I define what whiteness and whiteness ideology is in relation to race. After introducing the idea and functions of whiteness, I dive into the investigation by analyzing three major novels written by African American authors during the early twentieth century. While analyzing the instances of white violence in one of the three novels, the other two novels will …

Life Between The Bridges: A Personal History Of San Francisco, Eli Hansen

Master's Theses

Life Between the Bridges: A Personal History of San Francisco is a hybrid work of history, memoir, and travel writing in which I seek to examine the city of San Francisco through a variety of lenses. The prologue provides an overview of experiences a newcomer to San Francisco might expect. The first chapter examines the current state of the city and addresses the pressing issue of high housing costs. This chapter also introduces the theme of optimism, a unifying concept throughout my thesis. I then provide a brief biography of my childhood and outline the events that led me to …

E-Learning Research In Asia During 1996-2018 And The Four Country Indicators, Abdul Syahid

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This study views the Asian research performance in e-learning during 1996-2018 from the number of documents, citable documents, citations, and self-citations along with the citations per document and Hirsch index. It also measures the correlation between the six research indicators and the four country indicators commonly associated with research performance of some countries, i.e. the Gross Domestic Product per capita, Research and Development expenditure along with the numbers of university and internationally indexed journals. The data on the six research indicators and journals were obtained from the SCImago Journal and Country Rank. Whereas those on the first two country indicators …

Comparison Of Word2vec With Hash2vec For Machine Translation, Neha Gaikwad

Master's Projects

Machine Translation is the study of computer translation of a text written in one human language into text in a different language. Within this field, a word embedding is a mapping from terms in a language into small dimensional vectors which can be processed using mathematical operations. Two traditional word embedding approaches are word2vec, which uses a Neural Network, and hash2vec, which is based on a simpler hashing algorithm. In this project, we have explored the relative suitability of each approach to sequence to sequence text translation using a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). We also carried out experiments to test …

Improved Chinese Language Processing For An Open Source Search Engine, Xianghong Sun

Master's Projects

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the process of computers analyzing on human languages. There are also many areas in NLP. Some of the areas include speech recognition, natural language understanding, and natural language generation.

Information retrieval and natural language processing for Asians languages has its own unique set of challenges not present for Indo-European languages. Some of these are text segmentation, named entity recognition in unsegmented text, and part of speech tagging. In this report, we describe our implementation of and experiments with improving the Chinese language processing sub-component of an open source search engine, Yioop. In particular, we rewrote …

Program Evaluation Of Affordable Housing Projects For Educators: Pathways To Success, Giulia C. Seminatore

Master's Projects

Research was conducted to answer the question, what are the successful pathways to the creation of school district-driven affordable housing projects to enhance recruitment and retention of teachers and other school district staff? This research is based on a program evaluation of four current housing developments for educators and school district staff, and describes successful models for implementation that can be followed by other interested school districts or organizations. For the purpose of this research, successful is defined as projects that were able to secure land, funding and public support during the planning phase, and house district workforce upon implementation. …

Co-Authorship Visualization Of Research On Covid-19 From Web Of Science Data Using Bibliometric Analysis, Akbar Iskandar, Firman Azis, Riskha Dora Candra Dewi, R. Rusli, Ansari Saleh Ahmar

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Bibliometric analysis is one of the research approaches that utilizes quantitative and mathematical data to address problems posed in the context of visualization to see patterns in the field of science. In fact, bibliometric analysis may also include a wider overview of the names of the most influential writers in the area of science. This data analysis would discuss the co-authorship of COVID-19 research covering author productivity and author collaboration. The data was collected on 11th May 2020 of Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection database. The literature review was conducted using the keyword: TOPIC: ("covid") AND YEAR PUBLISHED: (2020). …

Intercultural Competence For Community College Librarians, Phyllis Pistorino

School of Information Student Research Journal

As populations grow more diverse and different cultural identities become increasingly prevalent, intercultural competence will be a requirement for successful communication and cultural harmony. Community colleges host the most diverse population of students in the United States, often considered a reflection of the communities they serve. As centers of institutional learning, libraries at community colleges have a responsibility and an opportunity to provide service grounded in the tenets of intercultural competence. These service standards are having and following a diversity policy; providing a welcoming and accessible environment; offering services and materials that match students needs and backgrounds; communicating in a …

Collection Development Challenges In Slavic & East European Libraries: A Literature Review, Sebastian C. Galbo

School of Information Student Research Journal

The purpose of this paper (a literature review) is threefold. First, it seeks to understand the current landscape of collection development practices within the contexts of academic Slavic and Eastern Europe (SEE) collections. Second, this paper aims to grasp the challenges that impact how librarians devise collection development policies for academic SEE holdings. Third, by drawing on current field research, it investigates how SEE collections are addressing these challenges and sustaining user services. It asks, for example, what tools/resources SEE collections employ to remain vital, relevant, and accessible. Based on these three foci, this paper provides an assessment of the …

African-American Mental Health Community: Information Needs, Barriers, And Gaps, Stephanie Jackson

School of Information Student Research Journal

This paper articulates the importance of African Americans regarding mental health: how they obtain information, lack of available resources, internal and external pressures of receiving help, and the gathering of their information from non-traditional sources in comparison to traditional. Historically, the community has faced stereotypical pressures, which they actively fight against to be viewed as equal. After segregation being abolished and many sources and organizations offering support for many different races, there is still an imbalance in what is offered and available for African Americans. A mix of current and dated studies and texts will be highlighted to discover findings, …

Understanding Impact Of Twitter Feed On Bitcoin Price And Trading Patterns, Ashrit Deebadi

Master's Projects

‘‘Cryptocurrency trading was one of the most exciting jobs of 2017’’. ‘‘Bit- coin’’,‘‘Blockchain’’, ‘‘Bitcoin Trading’’ were the most searched words in Google during 2017. High return on investment has attracted many people towards this crypto market. Existing research has shown that the trading price is completely based on speculation, and its trading volume is highly impacted by news media. This paper discusses the existing work to evaluate the sentiment and price of the cryptocurrency, the issues with the current trading models. It builds possible solutions to understand better the semantic orientation of text by comparing different machine learning techniques and …

Associations Between Recent Intimate Partner Violence And Receipt And Quality Of Perinatal Health Services In Uttar Pradesh, Jay G. Silverman, Ruvani W. Fonseka, Nabamallika Dehingia, Sabrina C. Boyce, Dharmendra Chandurkar, Kultar Singh, Katherine Hay, Yamini Atmavilas, Anita Raj

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Background
India suffers some of the highest maternal and neonatal mortality rates in the world. Intimate partner violence (IPV) can be a barrier to utilization of perinatal care, and has been associated with poor maternal and neonatal health outcomes. However, studies that assess the relationship between IPV and perinatal health care often focus solely on receipt of services, and not the quality of the services received.
Methods and findings
Data were collected in 2016–2017 from a representative sample of women (15-49yrs) in Uttar Pradesh, India who had given birth within the previous 12 months (N = 5020), including use of …

Growth Of Herpes Research In The 21st Century: A Scientometric Analysis, Sivankalai S

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The virus coined in chimpanzees, flying interested in humans a few million years back. Around two-thirds of the human people are diseased through on minimum single herpes simplex virus. Now this research, we aimed to make a complete scientometric analysis of herpes collected works. We collected data by using four databases provided by Web of Science using the keywords “Herpes”. The study is informative in categorizing and sympathetic trends, including core study areas, author, type of documents, journals, institutions, and countries, and just how these are related, within the existing body of collected works on herpes. A total of 8012 …

Quality Assessment Of Nuclear Physics Journals By Comparing Bibliometrics Indicators, Md.Safiqur Rahaman, Khadeeja M.N Ansari, Shakil Ahmad, Dr. Hashem Hussein Al-Attas, Rahman Md Rafiqur

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Purpose: The present study aimed to assess and review the quality of journals from the field of nuclear physics based on some selected high-quality bibliometrics indicators, namely Journal Impact Factor (JIF), Eigenfactor Score (ES), SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) and H5-index.

Methodology: Nineteen (19) nuclear physics journals from the Web of science core collection and Scopus database have been retrieved and tabulated under each mentioned indicator as per the ranks and values for the analysis. The analysis has done by using IBM SPSS (21.0).

Findings: Bivariate correlation coefficient have been considered, a high Pearson’s (r) observed between JIF and …

Google Scholar Versions: Errors And Implications, Daniel S. Dotson

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Google Scholar combines versions of what should be the same item into a single record with multiple versions listed and a common citation rate for all versions. However, these versions are not always the same document. A study on the citations of theses and dissertations found unusually high citation rates for some titles. On closer examination, these titles had versions that were other formats, sometimes with additional authors. A close examination of highly cited theses and dissertations revealed that nearly half of the titles were considered versions of other different formats, often much shorter and sometimes multi-authored journal articles.

Bibliometric Analysis Of The Literature In The Field Of Coronavirus, Jagannathan Ramakrishnan Dr, Govindan Ravi Sankar Dr, Kotti Thavamani Dr

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of the literature in the field of Coronavirus in MEDLINE data which has been covered in PubMed. The study period has been selected from the year 2000 to 2019. It is noticed that 10700 records available in the field of Coronavirus. It has been found that 41.71% of records are Research Support, Non U.S. Gov't, and 30.18% are Journal Articles. The United States is the major publisher in the field of Coronavirus followed by England, Netherlands, China, etc. It shows that 95.14% of the total records were in the English language. Relative Growth Rate …