Digital Commons Network^™

Flipping The Script: Prioritizing The Autistic Voice In The Understanding Of Scriping As “Key To Autistic Identity”, Colleen D. Arnold

Doctoral Dissertations

Traditional research regarding communication differences for autistic individuals, including scripting (“delayed echolalia”) is grounded in the pathology paradigm and thus emphasizes the elimination of scripting, without looking at the features and benefits it serves the individual utilizing it. This study, by prioritizing the autistic voices as the resounding experts on the topic of scripting, attempts to identify the communicative features and benefits of scripting, as well as how the dynamics of the conversation partner impact the exchange, both positively and negatively. Further, the research looks at the features of scripting as described by autistic adults. It also addresses the pressures …

Remaking Friendship In Unlikely Places: Queer-Decolonial Educators And Connections Across Experience, Politics, And Pedagogy, Maureen Nicole Osborne

Doctoral Dissertations

Over the past decade, queer and trans advocacy has garnered increased attention in political, popular, and educational debates. The current prevailing models to explain and justify gender and sexual difference rely on understandings of selfhood that were developed in colonial, clinical, U.S., white, and middle-class cultural contexts. The cultural particularity of these most-accessible models has produced marginalization of queer and trans students and educators who have different understandings of gender and sexual difference. Queer-decolonial educators are individuals who are critical of colonial, Western understandings of gender, sexuality, and difference more broadly. These educators often work within contexts that do not …

Mobility In Syntax: On Contextuality In Labeling And Phases, Yong Suk Yoo

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates how mobility of syntactic elements is affected by the theory of labeling (Chomsky 2013) and the theory of phases (Chomsky 2000, 2001), with the special attention paid to the contextuality of labeling and phases, and traditional adjunction.

The Impact Of Ancestral Language Maintenance On Cultural Identity Among White Immigrant Descendants: A Phenomenological Qualitative Study, Micaella Elizabeth Colla

Doctoral Dissertations

There is insufficient research on the cultural identity formation of White immigrant descendants who have experienced ancestral language loss. This phenomenological qualitative study conducted in San Francisco, California explored the experiences and perceptions of seven White immigrant descendants in response to these questions: (1) What is the role of L1 (mother tongue) maintenance on identity maintenance among White immigrant descendants? (2) How do immigrant descendants view their cultural identities in the absence of their ancestral languages? And (3) How might educators encourage second language and culture acquisition, while protecting students’ first languages and cultures? Research data included narratives from in-depth, …

Developing Intercultural Competence Through Online English Language Teaching, Didem Ekici

Doctoral Dissertations

With an increasing number of refugees and immigrants in European and American classrooms, teachers need to be prepared to meet their varied and complex needs. In particular, to help these diverse students succeed, teachers need to be interculturally competent, which is a combination of many skills including attitude, linguistic and cultural awareness, empathy, and flexibility. However, developing these skills not only takes theoretical knowledge but also hands-on training and practice. While many programs in school of education provide experiential practicum projects and online collaborations with diverse students, they have not expanded to the population in war zones. Moreover, a review …

Compassion Fatigue Among Mental Healthcare Providers And The Impact On Overall Wellbeing, Ruchi Patel

Doctoral Dissertations

Compassion, a virtue of the helping profession, can be jeopardized by a provider’s continuous exposure to the trauma experiences of others. The impact of burnout, secondary stress and compassion fatigue on a mental healthcare provider’s work and personal life has been increasingly studied due to negative ramifications on our community healers. The present study used a cross-sectional design to survey mental healthcare providers across specialty and discipline in efforts to gain a better understanding of the relationship between a provider’s degree of compassion fatigue and specific demographic variables, physical health and their spirituality. One hundred and thirty-seven participants across the …

A Theory Of Timing Effects In A Self-Organizing Model Of Sentence Processing, Garrett Smith

Doctoral Dissertations

Many leading theories of human sentence processing assume that language compre- hension and production take place under the strict control of a symbolic grammar. For example, in sentence comprehension, reading or hearing a word triggers the application of a grammar rule that incorporates the word into the existing sentence structure so that the resulting structure is consistent with the all of the rules of the grammar. These theories have had wide success in explaining important timing effects, e.g., predicting speed-ups or slowdowns while reading a sentence. A number of phenomena have been identified, though, that challenge these grammar-controlled theories and …

The Theory Of Quotative Complementation In Japanese Semanticosyntax, Koji Shimamura

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation aims at constructing a syntactic and (to a lesser extent) semantic theory of quotative complementation in Japanese mediated by the reporting suffix to, Rep for short. Rep has been treated as a complementizer (C) in the literature. However, I will propose that Rep is not C but an instance of an adjunct clitic in the sense of Aoyagi (1998), contrary to the widely accepted view. This captures the wide range of distribution of Rep that has been understudied in the generative literature, and we can provide a uniform analysis ofto without postulating multiple lexical instances of Rep …

Mother-Child Conversations About Other People: The Role Of Mothers’ Personal Intelligence, Erin Marie Kenney

Doctoral Dissertations

The dissertation focuses on two studies that explore an intriguing context in which variations in personal intelligence are apparent: the way parents talk with their children about other people. Fifty 6-9 year-olds and their mothers participated in Study 1. Study 1 documented individual differences in mother-child conversations about others and their relationship with mothers’ personal intelligence and children’s conversational variables, and also examined children’s use of trait labels and social behavior ratings. Forty-two 4-5 year-olds and 43 7-8 year-olds participated in Study 2 with their mothers. Study 2 replicated many of Study 1 findings, including significant correlations between mothers’ conversational …

Parental Coping In Filipino American Caregivers Of Children With Intellectual And/Or Developmental Disabilities, Kathrynn Mabalot

Doctoral Dissertations

The coping mechanisms of Filipino American caregivers of children with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities are explored using an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). This study aimed to comprehend the subjective experience of caregivers and how they operationalize the established constructs of resilience. Particular focus is paid to the subjective experience of coping in Filipino American caregivers of children with special needs. The participants’ parenting experience and how they manage parenting stress are documented and analyzed using an interpretative phenomenological framework. Seminal studies on resilience, family resilience, and Filipino American psychology are discussed. The results yielded five broad domains (clarity of parenting …

Feature Arithmetic In The Nominal Domain, Zheng Shen

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation looks into how multiple number features interact in agreement. In particular, I investigate how an element behaves when it gets two number values, i.e. multi-valuation. Although phi feature agreement has been investigated extensively for more than 20 years, multi-valuation has not been looked into as a standalone phenomenon across languages. Multi-valuation provides a novel perspective into long-standing issues such as whether semantic agreement and morphological agreement are both required and whether there is a correlation between the agreement on N and T in a given language.

Chapters 2 and 3 focus on theoretical and empirical aspects of the …

Wastewater Pipe Condition And Deterioration Modeling For Risk-Based Decision-Making, Greta J. Vladeanu

Doctoral Dissertations

The dissertation research work described here has four primary objectives: (1) the development of a comprehensive wastewater pipe condition rating model that incorporates a large number of environmental, structural, and hydraulic parameters of the pipe; (2) the development of a wastewater pipe deterioration model used to predict future overall condition states of the pipe, as well as determining the probability of failure at any given age of the pipe; (3) the development of a comprehensive consequence of failure model that assesses the consequence of wastewater pipe failure using economic, social, and environmental cost factors; and (4) the development of a …

Does Physiology Play A Role In Conflict?: Exploring The Associations Between Testosterone, Accommodation, And Relationship Variables, Anuraj Dhillon

Doctoral Dissertations

Recent investigations have focused on exploring the role of physiology in human communication, yet a plethora of work is required to better understand how physiology affects or is affected by relational communication and the present investigation contributes to this body of research. This study combined the tenets of communication accommodation theory (CAT), relational uncertainty, and steroid/peptide theory of social bonds (S/P theory) to examine the role of testosterone (T) in romantic partners’ conflict conversation behaviors. More specifically, the study proposed that T moderates the association between romantic partners use of (non)accommodation during conflict conversations and relational uncertainty, which in turn …

I See What You Say: Influential Nonverbal Signals Of Frontline Employees On Customer Outcomes, Shuang Wu

Doctoral Dissertations

This research aims to investigate the influential nonverbal signals of frontline employees on customer outcomes. Frontline employees play a vital role in initiating and maintaining customer relationships. The interactions between customers and employees influence not only the immediate reactions, including both affective and cognitive responses, but also customer outcomes, like purchase intention, satisfaction, perceived service quality, and positive word-of-mouth. Both qualitative and quantitative methodologies are employed in this dissertation.

Previous studies examined the effects of employee nonverbal signals on customers’ cognitive responses, but limited research has been done on the affective responses of customers. Affect-based trust, positive affect, negative affect, …

An Embodiment Constraint On Theories Of Affect, Emma Bjorngard

Doctoral Dissertations

Any good theory of emotions should, among other benchmarks, be able to accommodate that emotions can be embodied (I call this the embodiment fact). In particular, it should be able to show that; for every emotion type there is at least one emotion token that is embodied. With this in mind, I will in this dissertation review various well-known philosophical accounts of emotions with the intention of considering whether or not they succeed in capturing such benchmarks. If one or more theories do well on most benchmarks, but fail to do so in regards to embodiment, I will discuss whether …

Automatic Document Summarization Using Knowledge Based System, Andrey Timofeyev

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation describes a knowledge-based system to create abstractive summaries of documents by generalizing new concepts, detecting main topics and creating new sentences. The proposed system is built on the Cyc development platform that consists of the world’s largest knowledge base and one of the most powerful inference engines. The system is unsupervised and domain independent. Its domain knowledge is provided by the comprehensive ontology of common sense knowledge contained in the Cyc knowledge base. The system described in this dissertation generates coherent and topically related new sentences as a summary for a given document. It uses syntactic structure and …

Investigating The Relationship Between Mathematics Education And Global Citizenship Education Through K-12 Mathematics Teacher Perspectives, Kyle Evans

Doctoral Dissertations

In an increasingly connected world, a higher demand exists for global (citizenship) education in all disciplines, including mathematics. Although researchers in Teaching Mathematics for Social Justice (TMfSJ) have not ignored the need for a critical use of mathematics in society and culture, a primary goal of this work is to promote mathematics as a tool that can be used to analyze and act upon issues of social justice.

Similarly, researchers in Global Education have developed frameworks over several decades identifying characteristics of individuals who can communicate effectively with others across cultural and language differences and act as responsible citizens of …

Transcultural Performance Art, Political Intention, And The Aesthetic Projects Of Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Coco Fusco, Violeta Luna, Roberto Sifuentes, And La Pocha Nostra, William R. Stark

Doctoral Dissertations

Transcultural Performance Art, Political Intention, and the Aesthetic Projects of Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Coco Fusco, Violeta Luna, Roberto Sifuentes, and La Pocha Nostra

William R. Stark

University of Connecticut, 2018

This dissertation analyzes socio-cultural and socio-political concerns that characterize performance art in the United States (U.S.) from the late 1980s to 2015. Of particular interest to my research are performance artists who cross cultural borders and challenge normative cultural paradigms, celebrate cultural hybridity, and challenge the epistemological value of national, cultural, ethnic, and racial borders. My research examines the ways that multimedia performance artists Guillermo Gómez-Peña (1955 – Mexico City, D.F.), …

Topics In Stochastic Analysis And Riemannian Foliations, Qi Feng

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation contains three research directions.

In the first direction, we use rough paths theory to study stochastic differential equations and SPDEs. We first prove convergence and the rate of convergence of the Taylor expansion for the solutions of differential equations driven by $p$-rough paths with $p>2$. The main results are the Castell expansion and the tail estimate for the remainder terms. Our results apply to differential equations driven by continuous centered Gaussian process with finite $2D~\rho-$variation and fBm with $H>1/4$. We then give a new and simple method to get a priori bounds on rough partial differential …

Vocabulary-Learning Strategies Of Students Learning Chinese As A Foreign Language In An Intensive-Training Setting, Yan Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

Compared with the research on vocabulary-learning strategies in the field of teaching English as a second or a foreign language, the research on the strategy use of Chinese-as-a-foreign-language (CFL) students, especially CFL students in an intensive-training setting, is scarce. The relationship between CFL students’ vocabulary-learning-strategy use and their learning outcomes remains underresearched. Therefore, this mixed-methods study was conducted to investigate the strategy use of CFL students in learning Chinese vocabulary words in an intensive language program and its relationship to students’ learning outcomes.

A total of 137 beginning to advanced students enrolled in the program participated in the study. The …

Measuring Cogency In Argument In The Seventh-Grade English Classroom, Millie Gonzalez-Balsam

Doctoral Dissertations

Constructing a cogent argument that addresses real-world problems aids students in the development of critical thinking and requires students to present multiple perspectives in a credible manner. Yet, rubrics do not always measure students’ reasoning. The purpose of this study was to create a valid and reliable instrument to measure cogency in argument. I created a Teacher Designed Rubric Measuring Cogency (TDRMC) based on Toulmin’s model of argument for its emphasis on context-specific warrants, and I used Wilson’s framework for assessment to operationalize the construct of cogency. I compared the TDRMC to the current standardized assessment rubric for the Common …

Advancing The Learning Of Algebra For All: Case Studies Of Teachers’ Efforts Toward Equitable Math Teaching, Ruth Urbina-Lilback

Doctoral Dissertations

Myriad indicators suggest that preparation and access to mathematics coursework is not the same for all. Teachers, central in facilitating equitable math learning experiences (NCTM, 2014), require preparation to support this critical educational need. While principles from research on equitable teaching provide a beginning knowledge base, this knowledge base is incomplete. Teachers must also know how to adapt this knowledge base into their practice, requiring descriptive, “well-documented events” (Shulman, 1986) that can be used for preparation in equitable teaching.

This qualitative study provided an in-depth, close-up examination of practices of four algebra teachers identified as having stances aligned with equitable …

The Para Predicament: Investigating The Intersectionality Of Race, Disability, And Paraeducator Assignment, Christina Saccoccio

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examined the relationship between student characteristics and paraeducator assignment. A Disability Critical Race framework was chosen to investigate whether current models of special education service delivery, which rely heavily on paraeducator supports, may be further marginalizing Students of Color with disabilities. A secondary dataset from one school district of 322 students serviced under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in grades PK-12 was analyzed. This quantitative study utilized multivariate logistic regression with a focus on student characteristics as a predictor variable for paraeducator assignment. My first research question investigated whether individual student characteristics (i.e., race/ethnicity, disability category, …

Invention In The Age Of Innovation: Writing Studies, Creativity, And Social Change, Erick Piller

Doctoral Dissertations

Creativity, innovation, disruption, and other such concepts have become central to much scholarly and popular literature on economics, entrepreneurship, and management. Other influential discourses—psychology, urban design, and higher education policy—have followed suit, taking a similar interest in these concepts. As a result, creativity has ascended to the status of something like a core cultural value—ubiquitous, always referred to positively, but frequently stripped of any specific meaning, or else understood in narrowly individualist and economic terms. With signs of “creativity creep” now appearing in composition studies, my dissertation examines other disciplines’ scholarship on creativity and related concepts and considers how creativity …

Critical Peace Pedagogies At The American Center For Civil And Human Rights And The Canadian Museum For Human Rights: A Comparative Case Study, Ion Vlad

Doctoral Dissertations

The struggle for racial equity in the United States and Canada is ongoing. Troubled historical legacies in both countries have present-day implications. African Americans and Indigenous Canadians are still two of the most marginalized populations from the standpoint of socioeconomics and political representation (Giroux, 2013; Vickers, 2012). In order to redress these problems, human rights and peace education have to pose structural questions and expose systemic unbalances. In the recent past, neoliberalism has had a major influence on the organization and content of American and Canadian formal education, obscuring some of these structural questions (Ravitch, 2013). In this context, human …

Machine Learning Techniques Implementation In Power Optimization, Data Processing, And Bio-Medical Applications, Khalid Khairullah Mezied Al-Jabery

Doctoral Dissertations

"The rapid progress and development in machine-learning algorithms becomes a key factor in determining the future of humanity. These algorithms and techniques were utilized to solve a wide spectrum of problems extended from data mining and knowledge discovery to unsupervised learning and optimization. This dissertation consists of two study areas. The first area investigates the use of reinforcement learning and adaptive critic design algorithms in the field of power grid control. The second area in this dissertation, consisting of three papers, focuses on developing and applying clustering algorithms on biomedical data. The first paper presents a novel modelling approach for …

Investigating The Causes And Cures For Unclear Scholarly Writing, Marlene Ingrid Mahony

Doctoral Dissertations

This qualitative dissertation investigated possible causes and cures for unclear scholarly writing. For this study, a stipulative definition of unclear scholarly writing, or “academese,” is that the language tends to be vague and verbose. The problem, according to the included literature, is that people who use or accept vague language have less academic, social, professional, and civic power. Academese, some say, can detach readers and that can accordingly diminish collective exchange. Because higher education is meant to share knowledge, promote agency, and prepare students to communicate powerfully within and beyond the university, this study researched the causes and cures of …

School Leaders' And Educators' Perceptions Of Ignatian Identity At Jesuit Cristo Rey Schools, William Bludgus

Doctoral Dissertations

This study utilized a mixed-methods, embedded multiple-case study approach; school leaders and educators were invited to complete the study’s survey, and three in-depth interviews were conducted at each school. The six Jesuit, Cristo Rey schools in the study were those, which are solely sponsored by the Society of Jesus, and which have existed for at least eight years. The study’s survey instrument, the CRIGNIS, is an adaptation of the Jesuit Schools Network’s IGNatian Identity Survey; each item of the CRIGNIS was validated for alignment to one of the ten “distinguishing criteria” from What Makes a Jesuit High School Jesuit? (Jesuit …

Exploring Factors Influencing The Willingness To Communicate Among English-As-A-Second Language University Students, Chi-Fang (Michelle) Chang

Doctoral Dissertations

This present study anchored its inquiry in English oral communication and learning English as a second language. The purpose of the study was to explore the factors that influence the willingness to communicate (WTC) of ESL university students from the perspectives of both the students and their oral communication professor. Since the 1980s, WTC among ESL university students has attracted increasing attention because helping them communicate authentically is essential. WTC is correlated with overall English language proficiency because of its equal weight with the other language skills. Therefore, ESL students have targeted WTC as a vital skill. However, research on …

Using Multiliteracies To Engage And Empower Students With Complex Support Needs, Sudha Vaghul Krishnan

Doctoral Dissertations

Using Multiliteracies to Engage and Empower Students with Complex Support Needs This dissertation is comprised of two studies:

• Creating New Learning Spaces Using Multiliteracies with Students with Complex Support Needs

• Transforming Narrative Identity through Multiliteracies

Students with complex support needs (SCSN) are frequently denied access to meaningful and challenging literacy instruction. These studies explore how student- authored narratives in the individualized education plan (IEP), implemented during a multiliteracies curriculum, can simultaneously engage and empower SCSN. These studies are based on the qualitative research that I conducted from November 15, 2018 to February 11, 2018 at a special day …