Digital Commons Network^™

Just Looking: Tourist Gaze And The Theme Park Experience, Wei Wei, Yanyan Zheng, Nathaniel Line, Lu Zhang

Rosen Research Review

What makes a memorable theme park experience? New research led by UCF Rosen College of Hospitality Management's Assistant Professor Wei Wei looks at how visitor experience is influenced by the 'tourist gaze'—the consumption of visual experiences, as well as other services, in a tourism destination. With important implications for theme park operators and managers, the study focuses on visitors' visual interactions with fellow visitors and finds they have a significant impact on visitors' emotions and the quality of their overall experience.

Theme Park Visitors Prefer Human-Like Robots In Customer Service Interactions, Ady Milman, Asli D.A. Tasci

Rosen Research Review

Service robots are becoming increasingly popular in many industries and social settings, including education, childcare, elderly therapy centers, and even theme parks. Tourism and hospitality industries are adopting robots enthusiastically and are being closely studied to observe guest engagement and reaction to robotic services. Service robots are becoming increasingly popular in many industries and social settings, including education, childcare, elderly therapy centers, and even theme parks. Tourism and hospitality industries are adopting robots enthusiastically and are being closely studied to observe guest engagement and reaction to robotic services. UCF Rosen College of Hospitality Management researchers, Dr. Ady Milman and Dr. …

Empowering Chinese Students To Regain The “Voice” Via Vygotsky’S Zpd Integrated With The Socratic Seminar, Zhengjie Li Dr.

Journal of English Learner Education

Many Chinese students studying in the United States (U.S.) today report that they do not have a “voice.” They feel marginalized because of a lack of communicative competence in English and their inability to understand Western cultures, especially during their first year in the U.S. (Ching et al.). Some Chinese students are unable to adapt to the academic environment in American high schools, which leads to feelings of exclusion. To smooth this transitional period, this study suggests that the scaffolding (see Bruner, 1978, 1985) from ESL teachers in both verbal and written forms be implemented before students are placed into …

Effectiveness Of English Learners Computer-Based Testing Accommodations: A Meta-Analysis, Tuba Gezer Dr., Claudia Flowers, Richard Lambert

Journal of English Learner Education

With the increased number of English learners (ELs) participating in large-scale state testing, there has been an increased focus on fairness in testing for these students. Test accommodations have shown promise in eliminating barriers and improving accessibility, and computer-based testing (CBT) allows individual customization of tests with built-in accessibility features. Most research on testing accommodations focuses on paper-based tests, but CBT is the most predominant mode of delivering large-scale state assessments. This study aims to synthesize research on the validity and effectiveness of CBT accommodations for EL students. Meta-analysis methodology was used to summarize the findings from previous CBT studies. …

Accelerate Beginner English Learner’S Writing Skills From Day One, Eugenia F. Krimmel Ed.D.

Journal of English Learner Education

This article addresses the customary practice of delaying teaching of writing for Beginner English Learners (BELs) which often results in slowing writing development. Barriers preventing teachers from earlier writing instruction include a belief BELs cannot produce written English before learned orally first, a lack of teaching writing know-how, and few level-appropriate materials for older BELs. The systematic approach ALL Beginner Learners of English (ABLE) Writing Method is a solution to build both teachers’ confidence and BELs’ phonics, spelling, and writing skills from day one. The basic premise of the ABLE Writing Method is that if one is able to think, …

Meeting Minutes 06-21-2023, Staff Advisory Council

Staff Advisory Council Meeting Documents

No abstract provided.

Vertebrate Animal Behaviors And Abundances On Estuarine Shorelines Stabilized With Biodegradable Materials Utilizing Wildlife Cameras, Katherine Guise

The Pegasus Review: UCF Undergraduate Research Journal

Living shoreline stabilization is a restoration technique that utilizes natural materials as breakwaters, plus vegetation landward of the breakwaters, to protect coastlines. This research does not provide information about how new, biodegradable restoration materials affect vertebrates that utilize these shorelines. For this project, I monitored 18 restoration sites along Canaveral National Seashore with wildlife trail cameras: 3 made with cement-infused jute breakwaters, 3 with metal gabion oyster shell breakwaters, and 4 with previously used breakwaters manufactured from plastic mesh oyster shell bags. This project used 4 sites as positive controls (intact vegetation) and 4 as negative controls (highly eroded, no …

Staff Council Financial Statement June 2023, Staff Council

Staff Advisory Council Treasurer Reports

No abstract provided.

Jim Brown, Richard C. Crepeau

On Sport and Society

Over the past few days, the sports media have been filled with commentary and tributes to Jim Brown, superstar running back of the Cleveland Browns and leader in the battle against racism in the NFL, in Sport, in the United States, and across the world. Brown died last week at 87 having set all sorts of records in the NFL and having played an important leadership role in the fight for Civil Rights.

Enhance Collaborative Online Learning And Skill Building With Learning Activities Using Shared Templates, Heather Thomson

Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository

At the start of the semester, students begin by identifying a problem of interest and then work through a series of shared templates to develop a solution. Learning activities are collated into a final group presentation.

Linear Regression With Regularization On The Genetic Architecture Of Maize Flowering Time, Roland Fiagbe

Data Science and Data Mining

Over a century, the maize crop has been one of the most important crop species that is targeted for genetic investigations and experiments. One of the major experiments that have been a topic of interest is crossing inbred lines to produce better offspring through a process called heterosis. Crossing the inbred lines create numerous SNP markers that determine the time to male flowering. This project seeks to explore the SNP markers to select the most relevant ones for predicting time to male flowering using linear regression with regularization methods due to the fact that p > n in our dataset. Various …

Meeting Minutes 05-17-2023, Staff Advisory Council

Staff Advisory Council Meeting Documents

No abstract provided.

Creating Accessible Instructional Materials, Rachel E. Trnka

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Presentation at the FLA 2023 pre-conference panel, titled FACRL presents Academic Libraries & Student Success for the Next Generation

A Recommender System For Movie Ratings With Matrix Factorization Algorithm, Amir Alipour Yengejeh

Data Science and Data Mining

Nowadays, a Recommender System is a technology
that aims to predict preferences based on the user’s selections.
These systems are applied in numerous fields, such as movies,
music, news, books, research articles, search queries, social tags,
and various products. In this study, we use this potential tool to
predict the ratings of users’ preferences in MovieLens datasets. To
do so, we applied the matrix factorization algorithm and calculate
the RMSE as our evaluation metric. The results represent that
RMSE estimated for the train and test set are 0.83 and 0.93 that
are very close one another. This results indicates that …

Genome-Wide Association Study Of The Maize Crop By The Lasso Regression Analysis, Amir Alipour Yengejeh

Data Science and Data Mining

The accurate estimation of the male flowering period in Maize crops is key for the prediction crop fertility. The recent scientific investigations has shown that the genetic single nucleotic polymorphism (SNP) can contribute in this regard. The genomewide association study (GWAS) is employed to generate these attributes (SNP). But it caused a high-dimensional data in which 4,981 observations with 7,389 SNP attributes. Hence, in this study, we used the penalized regression approach with the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) to reduce the dataset. In this regard, we set the regularization parameter to 0.21. It resulted in a set …

Analysis Of Credit Approval By Decision Tree, Amir Alipour Yengejeh

Data Science and Data Mining

Nowadays, machine learning algorithms are com-
monly used by the financial institutions or bankers to evaluate
the applications’ requires for credit card. In this study, we used
the decision tree algorithm to predict credit card approval based
on the other associated features applicants like age, employment
status, Education Level, etc. Our results shows that the applicants’
Prior Default and Debt, and Employed have more contribution
in the credit card approval.

Movie Recommender System Using Matrix Factorization, Roland Fiagbe

Data Science and Data Mining

Recommendation systems are a popular and beneficial field that can help people make informed decisions automatically. This technique assists users in selecting relevant information from an overwhelming amount of available data. When it comes to movie recommendations, two common methods are collaborative filtering, which compares similarities between users, and content-based filtering, which takes a user’s specific preferences into account. However, our study focuses on the collaborative filtering approach, specifically matrix factorization. Various similarity metrics are used to identify user similarities for recommendation purposes. Our project aims to predict movie ratings for unwatched movies using the MovieLens rating dataset. We developed …

Literature Reviews And Library Support Models, Jason D. Phillips, Corinne Bishop, Andy Todd

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Join us in a discussion of the “what, when, and why” of planning various types of literature reviews and the academic library models used to support faculty and student literature reviews ranging from systematic reviews for original research to reviews used in course assignments. Participants will learn about academic library models used to support systematic reviews and literature reviews for course assignments. Timelines and resources about planning reviews will also be shared.

Episode 33: Wrapping Up Season 4 And Looking Ahead To Season 5, Christina Torres

Futures in Languages Transcripts

Listen to this short episode wrapping up our Spring 2023 season of Futures in Languages and looking ahead to our Fall 2023 season.

As mentioned in the episode, if you have a question about language learning or opportunities that can come from language learning, please send us a message at [email protected] with the subject title “Questions for Alumni.” Who knows, you might hear your question answered by a guest in a future podcast!

The Scoop, Vol. 10 Issue 2, May 2023, Health Sciences Library

Volume 10

Latest news and updates from the Health Sciences Library in our monthly newsletter for May 2023.

Press Release - New Associate Dean, Rachel Vacek, University Libraries

Libraries' Documents

No abstract provided.

Staff Council Financial Statement May 2023, Staff Council

Staff Advisory Council Treasurer Reports

No abstract provided.

Adding Linked Open Data To A Digital Humanities Collection In Alma, Sai Deng, Lee Dotson

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Working with Digital Initiatives, digital humanities and history faculty members, the Metadata Librarian at the University of Central Florida Libraries has added Linked Open Data (LOD) to Ex Libris’ Alma for the PRINT Migration Network: Pemberton Correspondence Collection. Wikidata entries on people and places in this collection are created and their Uris are linked to the cataloging records. Meanwhile, Library of Congress (LC) linked open data vocabularies, such as LC Subject Headings, LC Name entities, FAST headings and genre headings are also added to the records. GeoNames are incorporated into the University Libraries’ Institutional Repository records and are under consideration …

Evaluating Library Instruction At 2-Year And 4-Year Institutions: Findings And Data Analysis, Karen Kaufmann, Katy A. Miller, Rachel E. Trnka

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Presentation slides from Association of College & Research Libraries Project Outcome webinar on April 25, 2023.

Join us as we share our experience using Project Outcome for analysis of our cross-institutional research project. We'll discuss our process, methodology, and the findings from this research. Using our experience as a case study, we hope to generate ideas for others interested in exploring Project Outcome for other research projects. This may include identifying opportunities, planning and implementation considerations, and analyzing results.

Leveraging Lecture Passwords To Humanize Your Online Course, Meredith Butulis

Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository

This article offers easy-to-implement real-life strategy examples to humanize the online classroom and boost student engagement through the use of lecture password questions.

Episode 32: Daniella Sauri, Christina Torres

Futures in Languages Transcripts

Listen to Daniella talk about her experiences at UCF before graduating in spring 2019 with a major in hospitality management from the Rosen College of Hospitality Management. She also took part in a study abroad program in Cuba through the Modern Languages and Literatures Department. Hear Daniella talk about how she was able to celebrate her Peruvian heritage by being a founding member of the Peruvian Student Association at UCF. Hear her talk about how these undergraduate educational experiences and her heritage Spanish language skills have influenced her work trajectory in the hospitality industry. Daniella currently works as a consumer …

Meeting Minutes 04-19-2023, Staff Advisory Council

Staff Advisory Council Meeting Documents

No abstract provided.

Intimate Partner Violence, Miami-Dade County, And System Responses, Julio Montanez, Amy Donley Phd

Institute for Social and Behavioral Science (ISBS)

In 2022, the UCF Institute for Social and Behavioral Science (ISBS) undertook a year-long study of intimate partner violence (IPV) in Miami-Dade County. Using an array of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, ISBS has developed a report to summarize its efforts.

S9 E11: Teacher Preparation With Dr. Mary Little, Rebecca Hines, Lisa Dieker

Practical Access Transcripts

Today we interview Dr. Mary Little, a Professor of Exceptional Student Education at the University of Central Florida and in expert in partnerships. Tune in to learn about her experience and her goal to improve K-12 student learning, especially within diverse, urban schools.

Don't forget we love to hear from our listeners. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. We look forward to receiving your questions on our Google Phone (407) 900- 9305, Facebook (Practical Access), Twitter (@AccessPractical), or Instagram (@Practical_Access).

Episode 31: Christal Ramirez, Christina Torres

Futures in Languages Transcripts

Listen to Christal share how she decided to study at UCF. She explains how she found her way into working multiple internships during her last year of undergrad, and the value of those experiences. Christal graduated in 2020 with a major in Political Science & International Relations as well as an undergraduate TEFL certificate from the Modern Languages Department. Hear her talk about overcoming challenges related to graduating in the middle of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic time, and listen to her share stories about the many life lessons learned while working at the Orlando Center for Justice, a local nonprofit, …