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The Spartan Tablet, Spring/Summer 2017, San Jose State University, Department Of English And Comparative Literature

The Spartan Tablet (Department of English and Comparative Literature)

No abstract provided.

What Roles Do Chinese Health Sciences Libraries Play In Their Nation's Cigarette Smoking Public Health Crisis?, Charles J. Greenberg, Lin Wu, Xuyu Zhou, Susan Yutong Feng, Sam Bodong Chen

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Objectives: Cigarette smoking remains a major cause of death in China. Are health sciences libraries in China currently providing awareness, advocacy, or research support for the societal benefits of smoking reduction? Methods: Following institutional review board approval, Library contacts for Chinese schools of medicine, public health, and pharmacy were identified. A bilingual online survey was constructed to obtain respondents’ demographic detail and answers to questions about library resources and services that constitute academic awareness, advocacy, curriculum, or research support about tobacco and smoking. Results: 43% of reporting librarians work on a smoke-free campus. 100% of all reporting libraries work in …

Motivation To Persist: The Role Of Hope, Academic Self-Efficacy, And Sense Of Belonging On First Generation Latinx College Students And Their Intent To Persist, Deanna Peck

Dissertations

The landscape of higher education is changing. More diverse students are attending universities at higher numbers, yet these students are not graduating. This quantitative study uses linear regression, stepwise regression, and then exploratory factor analysis to examine three constructs - hope, academic self-efficacy, and sense of belonging - in first generation Latinx college students to see if these constructs made a difference in their intent to persist. While these constructs were positively statistically significant, their effect sizes were weak and do not explain the all the reasons why first generation Latinx college students intend to persist to graduation. In addition, …

Professional Learning Community (Plc): Technology Integration At A Title I Elementary School, Pamela Lan Cheng

Dissertations

Calls for educational technology integration over more than thirty years have taken on

new urgency in an era of computerized assessments for accountability. As Internet Communication Technology (ICT) becomes more widely available, the digital divide is evolving into a digital use divide, characterized by differences between students’ productive uses of technology to create and communicate compared with passive uses for entertainment or skills practice. A growing body of research points to the important interplay among teachers’ frames of reference, school-level context, and alignment of supports in creating conditions for technology innovation. Meanwhile Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) hold potential as leverage …

Standardized To Student-Centered: A Systemic Approach To Navigating The Transition, Finding Balance And Creating Equitable 21st Century Learning Environments, Betsy Fitch

Dissertations

Components of what has been historically referred to as progressive education have been shown to increase both student achievement and motivation. These historically termed ‘progressive’ approaches are now being reintroduced as systemic and innovative practices in the post No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era of education reform. While progressive education has often been criticized for appealing primarily to the white-middle class, and for an apparent lack of rigor, current research is beginning to tell a different story. This dissertation will summarize the evolution of the Progressive Movement from the late 1800s until today, describe the impacts of a more standardized …

Teachers' Perceptions On Preparedness And Supports To Implement The English Language Arts Common Core State Standards, Maria Clara Fernandez

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to: (1) describe elementary teachers’ perceptions on their preparedness to implement the English Language Arts Common Core State Standards (ELA-CCSS); (2) determine how perceptions influenced changes in instructional practices; and (3) to explore ELA-CCSS implementation challenges and/or barriers in supporting teacher development. This study was conducted using a multi-methods research design involving quantitative data from a survey, and qualitative data from interviews. The conceptual framework for this study centered around a history of the Common Core State Standards, education reform implementation research, understandings about the Common Core State Standards, and reconstructing teacher practice. Results …

Fiscal Transparency In The Era Of California's Local Control Funding Formula: An Analysis Of Funding Levels, Expenditures, And Student Achievement, Blanca Baltazar-Sabbah

Dissertations

This research presents an analysis of California’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) before and after implementation (AY 2013 to AY 2016). Funding allocations, expenditures, and student achievement data were analyzed across nine school districts in Northern California. Findings revealed a significant increase in state and local funding after implementation of LCFF for all districts. Statistical analyses showed larger districts received the greatest increases in funding and per pupil funding increases with the number of students who were eligible for Free and Reduced Lunch (FRL). While these trends were consistent both before and after the implementation of LCFF, the percent of …

Exploring The Role Of Mentor Teaching, Through A Co-Teaching Model, In Secondary Teachers’ Beliefs, Practices, And Self-Efficacy Toward English Learners: A Multiple-Case Study, Terry E. Flora

Dissertations

This dissertation presents the findings of an exploratory, multiple-case study in which eight public secondary school teachers engaged in a professional development (PD) program centered on improving teacher instruction for English learners (ELs). The participants worked as co-teachers with teacher credential candidates, serving as both mentors and collaborators in professional development. The PD program focused on improving participants’ instructional practices with ELs as a way to support the high numbers of ELs enrolled in California public schools. The PD included cycles of inquiry, collaborative dialogue within a professional learning community, working with a university consultant, ongoing reflection, and collaborating with …

In Colbert We Trust: Teenagers And Comedic Persuasion, Peter G. Kistler

Master's Theses

In this study, high school students were exposed to either a comedy or conventional television news editorial segment, and each video’s persuasive effect was compared with the other. The sample consisted of 271 high school students from Valley Christian High School in San Jose, CA, a majority of whom were juniors and seniors. Students were separated into sample groups; one group viewed a Colbert Report editorial and guest interview focused on the concept of net neutrality, while the other group viewed an All In with Chris Hayes editorial and guest interview focused on the same subject. Both sample groups were …

Latino Representation On Primetime Television In English And Spanish Media: A Framing Analysis, Gabriela Arellano

Master's Theses

The purpose of this study was to provide updated data on the Latino portrayals on primetime English and Spanish-language television. Three major contributions of this study are baseline data on the percentage of white actors as well as all racial and ethnic minorities on English-language television, the portrayal of Latinos on both English and Spanish-language television, and the development of five frames that measure the representation of Latino characters. The results of this framing study showed that only 7.4% of the characters in primetime TV on ABC and CBS were Latino. Although the Latino representation in primetime American television was …

Devil In A White Dress: Marie-Antoinette And The Fashioning Of A Scandal, Sarah Lorraine Goodman

Master's Theses

The portrait of Marie-Antoinette by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, known as La Reine en gaulle, has been discussed widely in art history owing to the scandal it provoked when it was exhibited in the Paris Salon in August 1783. Analysis has focused primarily on socio-economic issues of late-ancien regime France as a means of understanding how a relatively benign portrait of the Queen of France could engender so much anger when displayed for public consumption, centering around the queen’s identity as a public figure in contrast to the private individual painted by Vigée-Lebrun. However, very little has been discussed about the clothing …

Affective And Cognitive Effects Of Awe In Predicting Hopelessness And Brooding Rumination, Eldita Tarani

Master's Theses

This study investigated the effects of awe, as a positive emotion, in ameliorating

depressive symptoms such as hopelessness and rumination. Previous research indicates that awe is unique compared to other positive emotions in that is elicited by information rich-stimuli that facilitate shifts in cognition as one attempts to accommodate this new information to their current frame of reference. In addition, awe was found incite a self- diminishing effect that contrast the inflated significance one places on the self, during negative self-referential thinking (e.g. hopelessness). We hypothesized that exposure to an awe stimuli (video) would prompt subjects to feel less hopeless …

Academic Barriers For Migrant Middle School Students In Salinas, California, Alexa Terhorst

Master's Theses

The educational barriers facing migrant students are examined in this research based on the experiences of teachers and Mexican migrant middle school students in Salinas, California. Through the research, I ask if academic barriers for migrant students differ from obstacles of their peers and if so, what are those differences? The barriers to migrant students’ education were explored through a literature review, examining themes of parental involvement, teacher–student relationships, student self-esteem, and the use of educational programs. Through snowball sampling, semi-structured interviews, and surveys, data were collected from four teachers and 18 migrant students to understand how these themes manifested …

Indian Contribution To Open Access Scholarly Publishing In Doaj, Jyotshna Sahoo, Basudev Mohanty, Lilima Priyadarshini Sahoo Ms

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The basic purpose of this study is to provide a comprehensive view of Indian contribution towards open access journal movement, particularly the journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) - a service from Lund University. It seeks to explore the relative position of India among other countries and provides an analysis of the indexed journals from several parameters. A list of 318 Indian OA journals indexed in DOAJ has been served as the data source. The relevant metadata for each indexed journal such as title of the journal, journal URL, ISSN, country of publication, language, year since …

Question Type Recognition Using Natural Language Input, Aishwarya Soni

Master's Projects

Recently, numerous specialists are concentrating on the utilization of Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems in various domains, for example, data extraction and content mining. One of the difficulties with these innovations is building up a precise Question and Answering (QA) System. Question type recognition is the most significant task in a QA system, for example, chat bots. Organization such as National Institute of Standards (NIST) hosts a conference series called as Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) series which keeps a competition every year to encourage and improve the technique of information retrieval from a large corpus of text. When a user …

Slis Student Research Journal, Vol.7, Iss.1

School of Information Student Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Classification Methods In Context At Theological Libraries: A Case Study, Chloe G. Noland

School of Information Student Research Journal

This case study explores issues of interoperability and shared collection management between two libraries – one community and one academic – located within the American Jewish University (AJU). AJU’s choice to use two separate classification systems, Library of Congress and Elazar, respectively, provides a necessary separation of academic and religious context, but limits record access between the two collections. Specifically, this study aims to answer the following core research question: is consolidation into one classification scheme both a realistic and helpful solution for increased interoperability? Examining the history, patron needs, and principles of arrangement in both systems provided further insights …

Linguistics And Lis: A Research Agenda, Mary K. Bolin

School of Information Student Research Journal

Linguistics and Library and Information Science (LIS) are both interdisciplinary fields that draws from areas such as languages, psychology, sociology, cognitive science, computer science, anthropology, education, and management. The theories and methods of linguistic research can have significant explanatory power for LIS. This article presents a research agenda for LIS that proposes the use of linguistic analysis methods, including discourse analysis, typology, and genre theory.

Using The Anti-Racism Digital Library And Thesaurus To Understand Information Access, Authority, Value And Privilege, Anita Coleman

Faculty Publications

The new ACRL Framework for Information Literacy, specifically the six threshold concepts about information mirror the experiences of the author as a researcher studying the representation of anti-racism in bibliographic information systems. Anti-racism, in general, is a great concept to use when teaching information literacy and the paper discusses how antiracism information literacy can be taught and learned as part of theological and religious studies education. Since the conference is in Atlanta, the article begins with two stories about the scholar Dubois who lived there and that illustrate some of the IL concepts discussed.  

Improving Text Classification With Word Embedding, Lihao Ge

Master's Projects

One challenge in text classification is that it is hard to make feature reduction basing upon the meaning of the features. An improper feature reduction may even worsen the classification accuracy. Word2Vec, a word embedding method, has recently been gaining popularity due to its high precision rate of analyzing the semantic similarity between words at relatively low computational cost. However, there are only a limited number of researchers focusing on feature reduction using Word2Vec. In this project, we developed a Word2Vec based method to reduce the feature size while increasing the classification accuracy. The feature reduction is achieved by loosely …

Research Productivity In The Departments Of Chemistry And Physics Of The University Of Burdwan During 1960 – 2000: A Comparative Study., Amitava Nandi, Sanjukta Mondal

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

During 1960-2000, Chemistry and Physics department of the University of Burdwan, produced 141 awarded Chemistry theses, 979 published Chemistry thesis articles and 67 awarded Physics theses, 610 published Physics thesis articles. To compare the year wise productivity, authorship pattern and collaboration, Co-authorship pattern, Impact of authors, the citation scenario of the outstanding authors and ranked list of journals they have been analysed. The highest number of thesis (30) during 1986-1990 & 1991-1995 and the highest number of thesis articles (283) during 1991-1995 was submitted by the Chemistry Department whereas Physics department submitted highest number of theses (19) and highest number …

The Collaboration Between Librarians And Faculties In Preserving And Publishing The Intellectual Heritages Through The Institutional Repositories: A Case At Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University, Jakarta, Ulpah Andayani

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This paper deals with the professional partnership between librarian and faculty members in preserving dan publishing the intellectual heritages through the institutional repositories at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University, Jakarta. As a new model or innovation of preservation and publishing, institutional repositories are regarded as the complex project. The collaboration among stakeholders, therefore, is required to the successful development of institutional repositories within the university. By using descriptive study, this paper explores the initiative program of the institutional repositories development and the roles of the librarian in bridging the self-submission by faculties. Based on the study, it was found that …

Extent Of Access To Health Information And Sources For Chronic Disease Patients In Tertiary Health Institutions In South East Nigeria: Implications For Libraries Role, Ebele N. Anyaoku, Obiora C. Nwosu

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Access to relevant health information is essential for helping people to take good decisions to enhance their health and well-being. The research examined the importance, level and sources of access to health information for patients with chronic diseases in two Federal Government Teaching Hospitals in South East Nigeria. The research is a cross-sectional survey that used questionnaire to collect data. Sample was 784 patients in two Federal Government Teaching Hospitals in South East Nigeria. Research questions focused on the importance of health information, extent of patients’ access to disease, coping and treatment information. Findings show that while large majority indicated …

What Do Americans Think About Federal Tax Options To Support Public Transit, Highways, And Local Streets And Roads? Results From Year Eight Of A National Survey, Asha Weinstein Agrawal, Hilary Nixon

Mineta Transportation Institute

This report summarizes the results of the eighth year of a national random-digit-dial public opinion poll asking 1,201 respondents if they would support various tax options for raising federal transportation revenues, with a special focus on understanding support for increasing revenues for public transit. Ten specific tax options tested were variations on raising the federal gas tax rate, creating a new mileage tax, and creating a new federal sales tax. Other questions probed perceptions related to public transit, including knowledge and opinions about federal taxes to support transit. In addition, the survey collected data on standard sociodemographic factors, travel behavior …

Effect Of Cohorts On Student Retention In Engineering, Patricia Backer, Cindy Kato

Faculty Publications

Project Succeed is a campus-wide initiative funded by the U.S. Department of Education. Its focus is to improve the 5-year graduation and retention rates and close the achievement gap for Under-Represented Minorities (URMs) across all majors at San José State University (SJSU). There are three major goals: strengthen SJSU’s core academic performance in retention and graduation; provide an improved supportive environment for URM students; and enhance the delivery and integration of academic and co-curricular support services. For Fall 2015, newly matriculated students in the College of Business, College of Engineering, and Child and Adolescent Development Department (CHAD) were assigned schedules …

47th Chicano Commencement, 2017, San Jose State University, Associated Students

Chicano Commencement

47th Annual Chicano Commencement

"Con Orgullo, Con Poder, Y Sin Miedo" The 47th Annual Chicano Commencement was held on Sunday, May 28, 2017 at the SJSU Event Center.

Document Classification Using Machine Learning, Ankit Basarkar

Master's Projects

To perform document classification algorithmically, documents need to be represented such that it is understandable to the machine learning classifier. The report discusses the different types of feature vectors through which document can be represented and later classified. The project aims at comparing the Binary, Count and TfIdf feature vectors and their impact on document classification. To test how well each of the three mentioned feature vectors perform, we used the 20-newsgroup dataset and converted the documents to all the three feature vectors. For each feature vector representation, we trained the Naïve Bayes classifier and then tested the generated classifier …

Headline Generation Using Deep Neural Networks, Dhruven Vora

Master's Projects

News headline generation is one of the important text summarization tasks. Human generated news headlines are generally intended to catch the eye rather than provide useful information. There have been many approaches to generate meaningful headlines by either using neural networks or using linguistic features. In this report, we are proposing a novel approach based on integrating Hedge Trimmer, which is a grammar based extractive summarization system with a deep neural network abstractive summarization system to generate meaningful headlines. We analyze the results against current recurrent neural network based headline generation system.

A Chatbot Framework For Yioop, Harika Nukala

Master's Projects

Over the past few years, messaging applications have become more popular than Social networking sites. Instead of using a specific application or website to access some service, chatbots are created on messaging platforms to allow users to interact with companies’ products and also give assistance as needed. In this project, we designed and implemented a chatbot Framework for Yioop. The goal of the Chatbot Framework for Yioop project is to provide a platform for developers in Yioop to build and deploy chatbot applications. A chatbot is a web service that can converse with users using artificial intelligence in messaging platforms. …

Named Entity Recognition And Classification For Natural Language Inputs At Scale, Shreeraj Dabholkar

Master's Projects

Natural language processing (NLP) is a technique by which computers can analyze, understand, and derive meaning from human language. Phrases in a body of natural text that represent names, such as those of persons, organizations or locations are referred to as named entities. Identifying and categorizing these named entities is still a challenging task, research on which, has been carried out for many years. In this project, we build a supervised learning based classifier which can perform named entity recognition and classification (NERC) on input text and implement it as part of a chatbot application. The implementation is then scaled …