Digital Commons Network^™

Incorporate Peer Review Feedback To Enhance Personal Reflection, Daniel W. Eadens

Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository

Peer review feedback is a utilitarian strategy and great practice in any course. Providing peer reviews has significant advantages including having to make judgements about peer submissions requiring a higher taxonomy of knowledge about the material, resulting in increased understanding. Additionally, this teaches students mistake avoidance, improving skills as well as increasing motivation. This entry provides details about an assignment which asks students to personally reflect and then offer supportive feedback to peers regarding their leadership development.

Using Genai To Develop A Peer-To-Peer Feedback Assignment That Fosters Online Student Interaction, Karen Edwards

Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository

This TOPR strategy demonstrates that with the help of generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools (e.g., ChatGPT40; Claude3.5 Sonnet), online instructors can quickly develop interactive student feedback activities that foster critical thinking skills while building a community of learners (Fowlin, et al., 2025).

Win-Win Field Placement: Creating Research Innovations In Online Msw Programs, Christina Kuchman, Hsiu-Fen Lin

Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository

This win-win field placement project proposes an innovative research education for the online Master of Social Work (MSW) programs. Students usually have challenges in fulfilling the competency requirement on research and feel disconnected between research, practice, and policy (Betts et al., 2024). Through this innovation, we can unleash the potential of the student, the agency, and the university. More importantly, we believe that this approach can be applied to other majors that require a field education and a research methods course as part of their curriculum, such as education, public health, criminal justice, and environmental science.

Applying Universal Design For Learning Strategies To Increase Student Engagement With Your Course Syllabus, Amy Sugar, Amanda Groff

Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository

Apply Universal Design for Learning to syllabi design.

Introduction To Prompt Engineering, Mary Rubin, Rachel Vacek

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This presentation explores the fundamentals of effective prompt engineering, which involves well-crafted instructions for AI models to generate meaningful responses. Effective prompts can be written using frameworks like CLEAR and TRACI. The CLEAR Framework focuses on conciseness, logical structure, explicitness, adaptability, and reflection, while TRACI emphasizes task, role, audience, creation, and intent.

Additionally, the presentation addresses ethical considerations and best practices in prompt engineering, including academic integrity, attribution and transparency, and the importance of evaluation and assessment. By mastering these techniques, users can optimize their interactions with AI models, ensuring accuracy, relevancy, and minimizing bias.

Know Your Library - Alexander Street Videos, Diamond R. Williams

Libraries' Documents

No abstract provided.

Know Your Library - Nature Journals, Diamond R. Williams

Libraries' Documents

No abstract provided.

Feeling Imposter Syndrome And Burnout? Time To Burn It Down And Get Back To Basics, Jordan Ruud, Jason D. Phillips

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Many librarians’ self-doubt is arguably at a high point, leading to a distorted self-image and low morale. Beginning with the foundational problems of impostor syndrome and burnout, this chapter proposes a return to basics as a strategy for overcoming these problems. Librarians and other information professionals besieged by uncertainty around their abilities and status can find a way back to professional fulfillment through “burning it down and starting over” – in essence, demolishing one’s received understanding of one’s role by taking conscious stock of one’s duties, setting reasonable personal goals, recalibrating expectations of oneself, and reconstituting one’s professional identity on …

Know Your Library - Access World News, Diamond R. Williams

Libraries' Documents

No abstract provided.

Ucf Libraries Promotion Criteria, Jason D. Phillips

Library Faculty

At UCF, library faculty are promoted on the basis of their professional effectiveness and their demonstrated record of achievement. As noted above, performance of Professional Responsibilities is the most important factor in promotion, as this accounts for the majority of a librarian’s annual responsibilities. Achievements in Research/Scholarship/Creative Works and Service are also required, with standards delineated later in the document.

At What Cost? The Personal Stakes Of Intellectual Freedom, Jason D. Phillips, Jordan Ruud

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This chapter explores the emotional, professional, and political costs faced by librarians advocating for LGBTQ+ inclusion and intellectual freedom within libraries. Through personal narrative and critical reflection, the authors introduce the concept of "queer battle fatigue"—a framework for understanding the cumulative psychological toll on LGBTQ+ individuals who are consistently placed in advocacy roles within predominantly cisheteronormative institutions. A case study of a drag storytime event at a university library illustrates the social backlash, institutional pressures, and moral injury experienced by organizers, demonstrating how well-intentioned programming can become flashpoints for political controversy. The authors highlight the intensifying hostility toward LGBTQ+ representation …

Introduction, Jason D. Phillips, Jordan Ruud

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This introductory chapter sets the stage for a collection addressing the censorship and resistance surrounding LGBTQ+ materials in libraries. The editors, drawing from personal experiences and professional challenges, reflect on the increasing sociopolitical hostility toward LGBTQ+ communities and the parallel rise in restrictions within library spaces. They argue that libraries cannot remain neutral as targeted attacks on marginalized groups intensify, and they position this book as both a chronicle of current struggles and a practical toolkit for resistance. Highlighting contributions from a diverse group of librarians across various library types and geographic locations—including voices from Canada, Ireland, and the Philippines—the …

Instruction In Synthesis Writing Can Be Augmented By Giving Students A Generative Ai Prompt, Drew Loewe

Teaching Repository of AI-Infused Learning

This entry describes an AI-augmented strategy to assist students in synthesis writing, specifically in a general education writing course. The approach uses an instructor-created generative AI prompt to give additional in-process feedback on drafts, helping students identify and address common synthesis challenges such as patchwriting and sequential reporting. Preliminary results suggest that students using the AI prompt demonstrated increased confidence and improved synthesis skills, as indicated by both their self-reports and better assignment performance compared to previous semesters.

Ai-Integrated Cross-Disciplinary Liberal Arts Colloquium, Diana S. Perdue, Niloofar Gholamrezaei, Jennifer Krusinger, Shannon Hogan

Teaching Repository of AI-Infused Learning

What began organically as an AI-focused collaboration between faculty in different disciplines along with researchers in the college’s Center for Instructional Innovation, has evolved into college-wide pedagogical workshops and the development of a studio model that affects courses, programs, and paradigms for faculty scholarship.

Lessons from these collaborations inform understandings of how key features of liberal arts education can be supported through intentional AI-integration within a Cross-Disciplinary Liberal Arts Colloquium. More specifically, this colloquium offers recommendations on adapting a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and reflective studio model to in-person, online, and hybrid educational environments facilitated through a Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) …

Uncovering Acoustic Biomarkers To Classify Parkinson Disease Through Machine Learning, Felix Yeboah

Data Science and Data Mining

The early detection of diseases profoundly influences treatment efficacy, and accurate classification methodologies are essential for effective disease identification. In this project, we examined fve different classifers—Logistic Regression, Gaussian Naive Bayes, K Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and Support Vector Machines—and evaluated their performance in detecting Parkinson’s disease (PD) based on voice features. The study aims to identify the best classifier for detecting PD. XGBoost performed the best, with an accuracy of 91% on the full dataset. After variable selection, KNN had the best performance with an accuracy of 91%. These findings suggest that Machine learning algorithms(classifiers) can …

Comparison Of Two Strategies Of Screening Experiments: Single-Shot Experiment Vs. Two-Stage Screening Experiment, Kelvin Njuki, Emil Agbemade

Data Science and Data Mining

Experiments involving many factors are often complex, time-consuming, and expensive. Screening out the least important factors helps the experimenter(s) allocate the limited resources efciently to the most important factors. Supersaturated and orthogonal array designs are among the designs used to conduct screening experiments. Supersaturated designs (SSDs) are those where the number of runs (observations) is less than the number of factors, while orthogonal array (OA) designs are those where at least the columns are orthogonal to each other. In this study, we conduct a simulation study to compare two strategies of screening experiments. Strategy one is a single shot experiment …

Advanced Machine Learning Techniques For Cardiovascular Disease Risk Prediction, Godfred Ahenkroa Kesse

Data Science and Data Mining

of mortality, necessitating advanced predictive models to aid early detection and prevention. This study explores the application of machine learning techniques, including Lo- gistic Regression, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Random Forest, and XGBoost, to predict CVD risk using a dataset of 69,997 observations encompassing demographic, clinical, and lifestyle factors. Data preprocessing involved one-hot encoding of cat- egorical variables and scaling to ensure compatibility with all models. Model performance was evaluated using metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and AUC-ROC. Among the models, XGBoost demonstrated the highest accuracy at 74%, leveraging its gradient-boosting framework to effectively handle feature interactions and imbalanced …

Classification And Evaluation Of Machine Learning Algorithms On The Mnist Dataset, Felix Yeboah

Data Science and Data Mining

This paper discusses the use of machine learning algorithms in classifying the MNIST handwritten dataset. The MNIST dataset consists of 28x28 grayscale handwritten images with 10 classes from 0 to 9. The dataset was normalized by scaling the pixel values to a range between 0 and 1 by dividing each pixel value by 255. We compare and evaluate the K-nearest Neighbor and Naive Bayes algorithm based on performance metrics such as accuracy, error rate, f1-score, and precision. The K-nearest Neighbor algorithm achieved better performance in all the evaluation criteria.

Strategies For Identifying Collaborators: ​Writing & Presenting Collaboratively​, Rachel E. Vacek, Sarah A. Norris

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

A presentation for the University of Central Florida library faculty meeting that highlighted best practices and strategies for effectively collaborating with colleagues on scholarly activities, such as writing journal articles and other publications and presentations.

Little Learners, Big Impact: Inspiring Ocean Awareness In Young Minds, Carly Chard, Kate Frawley, Eduardo Sanchez

High Impact Practices Student Showcase Fall 2025

Marine pollution is one of the most urgent environmental crises of our time, threatening the health of our oceans, the survival of marine life, and the well-being of human societies that rely on them. Our educational presentation introduced 3rd-grade students to the issue of marine pollution through creative, hands-on learning. Students built recycled fish crafts using everyday materials, played an interactive cleanup game that demonstrated the importance of removing trash and rescuing marine animals tangled in fishing lines, and helped design a classroom mural to serve as a lasting reminder of their efforts. This service-learning project not only helped us …

Generations United: Empowering Seniors Through Service, Joseph C. Neddo, Samantha A. Renda, Eli J. Richard, Adam M. Lease, Athan L. Huskey, Connor J. Buttitta

High Impact Practices Student Showcase Fall 2025

As part of my service-learning experience, I partnered with Legacy Pointe at UCF, a senior living community dedicated to lifelong enrichment. Alongside my team, I helped design and implement resident-centered programs that focused on healthcare transitions, wellness, and emotional support. We hosted Healthcare Talks to educate residents on moving between independent living, assisted living, memory support, and skilled nursing. We also organized Flu Shot Clinics in collaboration with CFP Comprehensive Primary Care to promote preventative care, and facilitated mental wellness activities like memory games and a resident-led outdoor golf tournament.

Working with Legacy Pointe staff, Dr. Burrows’ practice, and faculty …

Enhancing Ulcerative Colitis Care: Combining A Fasting Mimicking Diet With Induction Therapy, Umed Norkulov, Arianna Rivera, Fawaz Qazi

High Impact Practices Student Showcase Fall 2025

This project analyzed a clinical trial investigating the effectiveness of adding a Fasting-Mimicking Diet (FMD) to advanced induction therapy for patients with Ulcerative Colitis (UC) The study (NCT0405410) was a Phase 3, randomized controlled trial involving 32 active participants. The intervention group (n=14) received advanced therapy plus the FMD, while the control group (n=18) received therapy alone. The primary objective was to determine if the FMD could improve remission rates and biomarkers. The trial found a statistically significant (P=0.05) benefit for the combined treatment group. The intervention group achieved a 57% clinical response rate compared to 38% in the control …

The Complete Picture: Bird Behavior On Fragmented Vs. Intact Oyster Reefs, Sophia L. Mcgarrity, Natalia Knapp-Seale, Gwyn Kirby, Enno Turner, Laura Ramsey

High Impact Practices Student Showcase Fall 2025

The presence and health of Florida’s coastal birds rely heavily on the integrity of oyster reefs, which house their crawling and swimming prey items. During this project, we observed bird behaviors across oyster reefs in the Indian River Lagoon (IRL) via camera trap footage. The IRL is an important coastal ecosystem that preserves numerous bird species. A previous study in the IRL suggested that live oyster reefs have birds exhibiting more foraging behaviors than on dead reefs, suggesting a need to maintain connected reefs. Our work supports the research of Ph.D. candidate Tara Blanchard, whose work will inform decision-making for …

From Weight To Risk: Understanding Obesity’S Role In Diabetes Mortality, Orina V. Thomas

High Impact Practices Student Showcase Fall 2025

The goal of the study was to look into the potential relationship between obesity and diabetes-related mortality in the state of Florida. Diabetes is a significant chronic illness that has a wide range of effects throughout the state and is linked to major complications and early mortality. Understanding this association is crucial for guiding public health initiatives because obesity is one of the most significant and avoidable risk factors for type 2 diabetes.

To examine this association, I conducted an ecological correlation study using 2022 data from all 67 Florida counties. The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) was used …

Home-Based Exercise Programs For Recovery After Tavr, Nikko Marvin A. Zamora, Bailey Mclain, Devrim Yalcindag, Aisha Khurshid, Michael Ortiz, Cheryl Cavaliere

High Impact Practices Student Showcase Fall 2025

The project titled “Home-Based Exercise Program for Recovery After TAVR” focuses on improving recovery outcomes in patients with heart valve disease, specifically those who have undergone Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (TAVR). The purpose of the project was to evaluate the effectiveness of a home-based exercise program, with and without Cognitive Behavioral Intervention (CBI), compared to an educational control program. The study aimed to enhance patients’ physical functionality, quality of life, and recovery time after TAVR—an important consideration for older adults who may not be eligible for open-heart surgery.

Key activities included interpreting a clinical trial. To be able to look …

Market Signals And Price Setting: Unveiling Barometric Price Leader In The Hotel Sector, Sung W. Lee, Donna Quadri-Felitti, Ami Sharma, Seoki Lee

Journal of Hospitality Financial Management

This paper introduces the concept of barometric price leadership to the hotel sector, where a leading hotel sets prices that reflect demand and supply trends, guiding other hotels in the market to set their prices. While the significance of competitor-based pricing has been rec- ognized, the strategic influence of such price leaders on rivals' pricing has not been thor- oughly examined. This conceptual study delves into the existing literature to discuss the underpinnings and implications of such leadership, illustrating how prices portray vital mar- ket information. The study argues for the recognition and strategic importance of barometric price leaders in …

An Application Of The Abc Classification To A Comparative Analysis Of Financial Performance: A Case Of Listed Hotels In Thailand, Slisa Bhamornsathit

Journal of Hospitality Financial Management

The hotel industry in Thailand has benefited from an increase in tourism and a growth op- portunity from the free flow of trade and investment in the ASEAN region. This study inves- tigates the financial performance of hotel companies listed on the Stock Exchange of Thai- land during the 2011–2022 period. The ABC classification was applied to categorize a sam- ple of hotels based on revenue. The financial performance of the classified hotels was then examined using comparative ratio analysis. The results indicated that high-revenue hotels performed well in terms of profitability; medium-revenue hotels presented high efficiency in asset management, …

Editors’ Letter – Repositioning Jhfm For Impact And Global Relevance, Murat Kizildag, Mats Carlbäck, Jessica Vieira De Souza

Journal of Hospitality Financial Management

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Switching Costs In The Triangle Of Complaint Behavior, Satisfaction, And Switching Behavior In The Hotel Context, Talal Abuhulaibah, Lisa Slevitch

Journal of Hospitality Financial Management

The influence of switching costs could play an important role that prevents dissatisfied cus- tomers from switching to another service provider, particularly in the highly competitive hotel market. Drawing on Hirschman’s model of customers’ reactions to service failures (1970), this study investigated the moderating effect of switching costs on the inter-relationships between complaint behavior, customer satisfaction, and switching behavior for hotel guests. A self-administered questionnaire was distributed via Amazon Mechanical Turk and yielded a total of 1,135 responses from travelers who stayed in US hotels and experienced service failures. The results of this study revealed that switching costs did influence …

Qualities Of Instructors Adult Second Language Learners Identify As Being Most Effective In Supporting Their Language Skills In Intensive English Programs, Nick Myrca Gauthier

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

This qualitative research discusses the importance of the pedagogical and social qualities of instructors in the academic achievement of adult second language (L2) learners enrolled in intensive English programs (IEP). Its primary goal is to comprehend the role of social traits such as empathy, patience, approachability, supportiveness, and respectfulness and of pedagogical traits such as building trust, motivation, and minimizing language learning anxiety when instructing adult L2 learners. Within the framework of this study, a semistructured interview format was used to gather the lived experiences of seven participants who were either enrolled or had been enrolled in a university’s intensive …