Digital Commons Network^™

Digital Learning Transformation In Higher Education: International Cases Of University Efforts To Evaluate And Improve Blended Teaching Readiness, Charles R. Graham, Ganbat Danaa, Tserenchimed Purevsuren, Adriana Martínez, Cinthia Bittencourt Spricigo, Barbara Maria Camilotti, Tserenkhand Batsukh

Faculty Publications

The global pandemic of 2019 brought heightened awareness to institutions of higher education of the need to engage in a digital transformation that extends beyond university business operations to the pedagogy of the classroom. This paper is a case study that explores three international cases of universities in Colombia, Brazil, and Mongolia that are at different stages along the path of a digital pedagogical transformation. This article tells each story, including (1) what is driving the local need to engage in digital transformation, (2) what the major challenges and barriers are to achieving a transformation, and (3) what efforts are …

An Exploration Of Institutional And Personal Barriers To Online Academic Engagement At A Brazilian University, Cinthia Bittencourt Spricigo, Bárbara Maria Camilotti, Charles R. Graham, Ruth Baptista

Faculty Publications

The recent global pandemic has raised institutional awareness around the world concerning the importance of having high quality online learning options for students. Learner engagement is often correlated with quality outcomes such as student academic success and student satisfaction. Learner engagement is commonly thought of as having three important dimensions: affective engagement, behavioral engagement, and cognitive engagement (ACE framework). Engagement is also enabled or limited by facilitators/barriers. Three important categories of facilitators/barriers are learner characteristics, personal environment, and course environment. Elements in each of these three areas enable or are barriers to students fully engaging in a course. This research …

Understanding The Role Of Online Teaching Assistants In Student Engagement, Sara H. Tuiloma, Charles R. Graham

Faculty Publications

In this paper, we examine how online teaching assistants (OLTAs) interact with students in terms of affective, behavioral, and cognitive support and the influence of OLTA training on these interactions. Through a thematic network analysis, using a tracking instrument and semi-structured interviews with 10 OLTAs, we examined how online university students are supported based on the quantity and quality of interactions with OLTAs, and how training contributes to interactions. Our research addressed two key questions: (1) How do OLTAs support learners in the quantity and quality of interactions? and (2) How does OLTA training around affective and behavioral support influence …

Barriers And Enablers To K-12 Blended Teaching, Courtney N. Hanny, Karen T. Arnesen, Qi Guo, Jordan Hansen, Charles R. Graham

Faculty Publications

The attributes of post-pandemic blended teaching (BT) will more closely resemble pre-Coronavirus conditions than the outbreak’s emergency remote teaching. Thus, barriers and enablers for teachers transitioning to BT after emergency remote teaching will be similar to those of early BT adopters. K-12 research has identified external and internal barriers and enablers to technology integration but has largely overlooked those of BT. This study involved analyzing 62 interviews of K-12 blended teachers to discover factors that enabled BT, stood as barriers to initial and continued blending efforts, and helped teachers overcome barriers. Teacher-perceived barriers included, among others, costs perceived as outweighing …

The Development Of The Process Mining Event Log Generator (Pmelg) Tool, Steven R. Hawkins, Jeffrey Pickerd, Scott L. Summers, David A. Wood

Faculty Publications

Process mining is an emerging technology that allows users to visualize all potential variations of business processes within an organization. It holds significant potential for impacting the field of accounting. However, training professionals and students in its use is challenging due to a lack of event data applicable to accounting and auditing scenarios. To address this issue, we developed an easy-to-use tool called the Process Mining Event Log Generator (PMELG) for generating process mining data files for the order-to-cash process. With the PMELG tool, users can create realistic datasets that incorporate key accounting and auditing concepts, such as segregation of …

The Impact Of Audit Technology On Audit Task Outcomes: Evidence For Technology-Based Audit Techniques, Marc Eulerich, Adi Masli, Jeffrey Pickerd, David A. Wood

Faculty Publications

As audit technology becomes more widespread, practice and academia are raising concerns about the costs and benefits of these technologies. We examine how internal auditors use technologybased audit techniques (TBATs) and how TBATs impact the efficiency and effectiveness of their audits. We use two surveys and interviews of individual auditors and chief audit executives (CAE) to examine their perceptions of TBATs. Auditors perceive TBATs as beneficial. Specifically, an increase in the use of TBATs is associated with completing more audits, finding more risk factors, providing more recommendations, and decreasing audit days. However, CAEs also perceive TBATs to be costly. An …

The Spillover Effect Of Sec Comment Letters Through Audit Firms, Kenneth L. Bills, Ryan Cating, Chenxi Lin, Timothy Seidel

Faculty Publications

This study examines whether auditors serve as a conduit for disseminating Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) views on reporting and disclosure matters as the result of being privy to clients’ SEC comment letters. This examination is important because auditors’ involvement in, and private access to, clients’ comment letters can enhance the timeliness of dissemination and have a constraining influence on reporting or disclosure choices that diverge from SEC views. Among clients with a greater expectation of impaired goodwill that do not receive a comment letter with a goodwill-related comment, we find a greater likelihood of goodwill impairment when the audit …

Reduced Audit Quality Acts: A Review And Organizational Model, Troy A. Hyatt, Douglas F. Prawitt, Kyle M. Stubbs

Faculty Publications

With increasing regulatory focus on improving audit quality, research on drivers of audit quality remains important to academics, professionals and regulators. One compelling branch of this research focuses on auditors' intentional actions that reduce audit quality, often referred to in the literature as reduced audit quality acts (RAQAs). This paper provides a review and synthesis of the RAQA literature, including a unifying definition for RAQAs and a model for organizing past and future RAQA research. With the model, we explore antecedents to RAQAs as well as the discovery of, responses to and subsequent consequences of RAQAs. We also discuss potential …

Balancing Loyalties: A Behavioral Study On How The Quality Of Supervisor-Subordinate Relationships Affects Whistleblowing Intentions, Jace B. Garrett, Douglas F. Prawitt, Kyle Sopp

Faculty Publications

While high-quality relationships among employees yield many benefits to organizations, they may have unintended consequences for whistleblowing. In a first experiment, we investigate whether high-quality employee-supervisor relationships reduce employees’ willingness to report supervisor wrongdoing through an internal hotline. We also investigate whether the quality of such relationships mitigates the effect of evidence strength on reporting intention. In a second experiment, we test the robustness of the effects of relationship quality and evidence strength on employees’ willingness to report wrongdoing identified in our first experiment, but to an external auditor. We also examine two factors that may mitigate the negative effect …

The Pure Language Project, Dan Belnap, Michael Mackay

Faculty Publications

In the summer of 1835, Joseph Smith and his associates purchased four mummies and some papyri scrolls from Michael Chandler.1 That summer Joseph would participate in a project that would produce a fascinating set of texts, referred to today as the Egyptian Language Documents (ELD), used and compiled mostly in Kirtland, but also consulted and expanded in Nauvoo.2 These documents, which include three incomplete variants of what was called an “alphabet” as well as an incomplete “grammar,” integrated a series of characters with explanations.

Current Issues Faced By Controllers, Anthony C. Bucaro, T. Jeffrey Wilks, Christopher Yust

Faculty Publications

We conduct a series of semi-structured interviews with controllers and chief accounting officers from large public and private companies—over half are Fortune 500—to identify the current issues faced by the controllership function. We map these issues into the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA®) Management Accounting Competencies and highlight recent research that addresses these issues and where there are gaps. Our findings suggest three IMA competencies that weigh heavily on controllers’ minds: (1) collaboration, teamwork, and relationship management; (2) information systems and technology; and (3) talent management. Finally, we describe how the insights from controllers suggest important improvements to accounting curriculum …

The Effect Of Patent Disclosure Quality On Innovation*, Travis Dyer, Stephen Glaeser, Mark H. Lang, Caroline Sprecher

Faculty Publications

The patent system grants inventors temporary monopoly rights in exchange for a public disclosure detailing their innovation. These disclosures are meant to allow others to recreate and build on the patented innovation. We examine how the quality of these disclosures affects follow-on innovation. We use the plausibly exogenous assignment to patent applications of examiners who differ in their enforcement of disclosure requirements as a source of variation in disclosure quality. We find that some examiners are significantly more lenient with respect to patent disclosure quality requirements, and that patents granted by these examiners include significantly lower-quality disclosures and generate significantly …

Check Your Attitude: An Examination Of Companies’ Adversarial Disclosures About Tax Enforcement, Hannah W. Judd, Sean T. Mcguire, Connie D. Weaver, Junwei Xia

Faculty Publications

This study examines companies’ voluntary disclosures of an adversarial stance toward tax enforcement in income tax footnotes, where companies express disagreement with tax authorities or a willingness to litigate unresolved audit issues. We find that larger companies, industry leaders, and companies in industries with high litigation risk are more likely to make adversarial disclosures toward tax enforcement, and companies’ tax planning activities do not solely determine such disclosures. We examine the implications of adversarial disclosures on future tax audit outcomes and find that future settlement outcomes are more unfavorable for companies with such disclosures relative to those without. Finally, our …

Auditing With Data And Analytics: External Reviewers’ Judgments Of Audit Quality And Effort, Scott A. Emett, Steven E. Kaplan, Elaine G. Mauldin, Jeffrey Pickerd

Faculty Publications

Audit firms hesitate to take full advantage of data and analytics (D&A) audit approaches because they lack certainty about how external reviewers evaluate those approaches. We propose that external reviewers use an effort heuristic when evaluating audit quality, judging less effortful audit procedures as lower quality, which could shape how external reviewers evaluate D&A audit procedures. We conduct two experiments in which experienced external reviewers evaluate one set of audit procedures (D&A or traditional) within an engagement review, while holding constant the procedures’ level of assurance. Our first experiment provides evidence that external reviewers rely on an effort heuristic when …

The Icfr Process: Perspectives Of Accounting Executives At Large Public Companies, Eldar Maksymov, Jeffrey Pickerd, T. Jeffrey Wilks, Devin Williams

Faculty Publications

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act charges management with the primary responsibility for internal control over financial reporting (ICFR). However, prior research tells us little about the ICFR process from management’s perspective. We develop a theoretical model of the ICFR process from management’s perspective and examine that model by surveying 145 and interviewing 35 accounting executives at large US public companies. Our primary finding is that executives feel constrained in their ability to direct ICFR and hold perspectives that reflect these constraints. Specifically, most executives feel compelled by auditors to follow the PCAOB’s preferences even though executives believe these preferences often tend to …

Effects Of Parent-Implemented Interventions On Outcomes Of Children With Autism: A Meta-Analysis, Wai Man Cheng, Timothy B. Smith, Marshall Butler, Tina Taylor, Devan Clayton

Faculty Publications

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been shown to beneft from parent-implemented interventions (PIIs). This meta-analysis improved on prior reviews of PIIs by evaluating RCTs and multiple potential moderators, including indicators of research quality. Fifty-one efect sizes averaged moderately strong overall benefts of PIIs (g=0.553), with studies having lower risk of research bias yielding lower estimates (g=0.47). Parent and observer ratings yielded similar averaged estimates for positive behavior/social skills (g=0.603), language/communication (g=0.545), maladaptive behavior (g=0.519), and to a lesser extent, adaptive behavior/life skills (g=0.239). No other study, intervention, or participant

The Sabbath In The Old Testament, Dana M. Pike

Faculty Publications

The scriptures consistently depict the significance of sacred space and sacred time in the lives of the Lord’s covenant people. Sacred time is still experienced today, as in the past, through commemorations and celebrations on specific days that are dedicated to God and thus regarded as holy. These days punctuate the passing of ordinary or common time and are intended to help bring focus and clarity to relationships with the divine.

Evaluation Of A Complexity-Based Morphosyntactic Treatment For Children With Language Disorders Of Mixed Etiologies, Kirsten M. Russell

Faculty Publications

Language disorder is characterized by difficulty with the comprehension and production of different aspects of language. School-aged children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and school-aged children with Down syndrome (DS) demonstrate similar deficits in the area of morphosyntax, which often creates barriers during social interactions and for academic learning. Although affected children may receive intervention, progress can be slow. Selecting appropriate treatment targets is critical for effective intervention. Traditional approaches for selecting treatment targets are based on developmental readiness (i.e., developmental) or functional need (i.e., remedial). However, intervention utilizing targets selected by these methods produce only modest results, despite a …

Teaching Non-Native Sound Contrasts Using Visual Biofeedback, Shawn L. Nissen

Faculty Publications

This demonstration will explain how non-native sound contrasts can be taught to second language (L2) learners using real-time visual biofeedback through an electropalatographic (EPG) sensor. How the EPG sensor is created from a dental mold and is subsequently produced will be shown during the presentation. An explanation of how a student can visualize the contact patterns of their speech and how a tutor might use the various features of the associated software to customize the instruction to an individual speaker will be illustrated during the presentation. Possible limitations, costs, and drawbacks to using the technology will also be discussed.

Perceptual Ratings Of Pronunciation For L2 Learners Of English As A Function Of Task Type, Word Position, And Listener Expertise, Shawn L. Nissen, Rachel Kemmey, K. James Hartshorn

Faculty Publications

Abstract Second language (L2) learners of English must learn to pro-duce English phonemes, words, and sentences. These L2learners make many errors when learning English; they may change the place or manner of articulation, insert vowels, or delete consonants. Obstruent sounds, such as fricatives, affricates, and stops, can be especially difficult for L2 learners. This study analyzed native English speakers’ perception of the quality of obstruents produced by native Mandarin Chinese and Korean speakers. Target words containing obstruents had been produced in three different tasks: in a carrier phrase, in a paragraph, and in a spontaneous speechsample. Obstruents were produced in …

Alcohol Misuse And Gun Violence: An Evidence-Based Approach For State Policy, Silvia Villarreal, Amy Bornhorst, Richard Bonnie, Kami Chavis, Ari Davis, Shannon Frattaroli, Kelly Roskam, Jeffrey Swanson, Joshua Horwitz

Faculty Publications

During the COVID-19 pandemic, excessive drinking increased by 21% and alcohol-related deaths increased approximately 25%.6 At the same time, gun sales increased by 40%, gun homicides by 35%, and gun suicides had the largest one-year increase ever recorded.

These alarming trends urge us to think about alcohol misuse as a risk factor for gun violence. To better understand this connection, the Consortium, in partnership with the Center for Gun Violence Solutions, developed this report to highlight the available research to inform policy. As detailed in this report, alcohol misuse is associated with a risk of dangerous firearm behaviors, interpersonal firearm …

Right Hemispheric White Matter Hyperintensities Improve The Prediction Of Spatial Neglect Severity In Acute Stroke, Lisa Rohrig, Christoph Sperber, Leonardo Bonilha, Chris Rorden, Hans-Otto Karnath

Faculty Publications

White matter hyperintensities (WMH) are frequently observed in brain scans of elderly people. They are asso-ciated with an increased risk of stroke, cognitive decline, and dementia. However, it is unknown yet if measures of WMH provide information that improve the understanding of poststroke outcome compared to only state-of-the-art stereotaxic structural lesion data.We implemented high-dimensional machine learning models, based on support vector regression, to predict the severity of spatial neglect in 103 acute right hemispheric stroke patients.We found that (1) the additional information of right hemispheric or bilateral voxel-based topographic WMH extent indeed yielded a significant improvement in predicting acute neglect …

Perceived Covid-19 Threat, Perceived Healthcare System Inequities, Personal Experiences Of Healthcare Discrimination And Their Associations With Covid-19 Preventive Behavioral Intentions Among College Students In The Us, Juliana S. Sherchan, Jessica R. Fernandez, Shan Qiao, Arie W. Kruglanski, Allana T. Forde

Faculty Publications

College students are often reluctant to follow U.S. preventive guidelines to lower their risk of COVID-19 infection, despite an increased risk of transmission in college settings. Prior research suggested that college students who perceived greater COVID-19 severity and susceptibility (i.e., COVID-19 threat) were more likely to engage in COVID-19 preventive behaviors, yet there is limited research examining whether perceived COVID-19 threat, perceived U.S. healthcare system inequities, and personal experiences of healthcare discrimination collectively influence college students’ COVID-19 preventive behaviors. This study identified latent classes of perceived COVID-19 threat, perceived U.S. healthcare system inequities, and personal experiences of healthcare discrimination, examined …

Resonant Perfect Absorption Yielded By Zero-Area Pulses, Yu He, Zuoye Liu, Christian Ott, Adrian N. Pfeiffer, Shaohua Sun, Mette B. Gaarde, Thomas Pfeifer, Bitao Hu

Faculty Publications

We propose and study the manipulation of the macroscopic transient absorption of an ensemble of open two-level systems via temporal engineering. The key idea is to impose an ultrashort temporal gate on the polarization decay of the system by transient absorption spectroscopy, thus confining its free evolution and the natural reshaping of the excitation pulse. The numerical and analytical results demonstrate that even at moderate optical depths, the resonant absorption of light can be reduced or significantly enhanced by more than 5 orders of magnitude relative to that without laser manipulation. The achievement of the quasicomplete extinction of light at …

Fire Influence On Regional To Global Environments And Air Quality (Firex-Aq), Carsten Warneke, Joshua P. Schwarz, Jack E. Dibb, Olga Kalashnikova, Gregory Frost, Jassim Al-Saad, Steven S. Brown, Wm. Alan Brewer, Amber Soja, Felix C. Seidel, Rebecca A. Washenfelder, Elizabeth B. Wiggins, Richard H. Moore, Bruce E. Anderson, Carolyn Jordan, Tara I. Yacovitch, Scott C. Herndon, Shang Liu, Toshihiro Kuwayama, Daniel Jaffe, Nancy Johnston, Vanessa Selimovic, Robert Yokelson, David M. Giles, Brent N. Holben, Philippe Goloub, Ioana Popovici, Michael Trainer, Aditya Kumar, R. Bradley Pierce, David Fahey, James Roberts, Emily M. Gargulinski, David A. Peterson, Xinxin Ye, Laura H. Thapa, Pablo E. Saide, Charles H. Fite, Christopher D. Holmes, Siyuan Wang, Matthew M. Coggon, Zachary C.J. Decker, Chelsea E. Stockwell, Lu Xu, Georgios Gkatzelis, Kenneth Aikin, Barry Lefer, Jackson Kaspari, Debora Griffin, Linghan Zeng, Rodney Weber, Meredith Hastings, Jiajue Chai, Glenn M. Wolfe, Thomas F. Hanisco, Jin Liao, Pedro Campuzano Jost, Hongyu Guo, Jose L. Jimenez, James Crawford

Faculty Publications

The NOAA/NASA Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality (FIREX-AQ) experiment was a multi-agency, inter-disciplinary research effort to: (a) obtain detailed measurements of trace gas and aerosol emissions from wildfires and prescribed fires using aircraft, satellites and ground-based instruments, (b) make extensive suborbital remote sensing measurements of fire dynamics, (c) assess local, regional, and global modeling of fires, and (d) strengthen connections to observables on the ground such as fuels and fuel consumption and satellite products such as burned area and fire radiative power. From Boise, ID western wildfires were studied with the NASA DC-8 and two …

Relationship Between Live-In Grandparents And Grandchild’S Health And Well-Being In Palestinian Refugees In Lebanon, Olfat B. Sheikomar, Hala Ghattas Ph.D., Nadine R. Sahyoun

Faculty Publications

Grandparents (GP) play influential roles in grandchildren’s health, behavior, and life. However, this relationship has not been examined in the Arab region. This study assesses whether the presence of GP in the household is associated with grandchildren’s health and wellbeing. Health status was determined by a child experiencing chronic health conditions or an acute illness, and wellbeing was determined based on school attendance and child labor. Data were collected through surveys conducted in 2010 and 2015 of representative samples of Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon. Multivariate logistic regression showed that, even after controlling for potential confounders, including the presence of …

Do Green Policies Produce Green Jobs?, Neal Woods, Jiyoon Kang, Morgan A. Lowder

Faculty Publications

Objective

We examine the relationship between clean energy policies and green job growth.

Methods

Using a set of meta-regression analyses, we assess the green job creation performance of a wide variety of policies in the American states.

Results

Our findings indicate that renewable portfolio standards and public benefit funds are systematically associated with increases in green jobs, although the effects of other policy tools are ambiguous at best. Effect estimates in the existing literature are significantly driven by how the dependent and core independent variables are measured.

Conclusion

Overall, our findings suggest that some policies may be an effective component …

Global South Research Collaboration: A Comparative Perspective, Abdoulaye Gueye, Edward Choi, Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela, Gustavo Gregorutti

Faculty Publications

Research collaboration has become a major research topic in the social sciences. While this literature has mainly focused on collaborative dynamics in the Global North, more recent studies have examined these dynamics within the Global South. This article expands the scope of analysis by comparing the level of co-publications by Global South-based scholars with Global South-based colleagues and that between academics at Global South institutions and researchers in Global North universities. It shows that academic partnerships within the Global South are less common than instances of collaboration between the Global South and Global North. The relatively weak Global South collaborative …

A Tree-Ring Record Of Historical Fire Activity In A Piedmont Longleaf Pine (Pinus Palustris Mill.) Woodland In North Carolina, Usa, Monica T. Rother, Thomas W. Patterson, Paul A. Knapp, Tyler J. Mitchell, Nell Allen

Faculty Publications

CO₂ capture from industrial point source waste streams represents an important need for achieving the global goal of carbon-neutrality. Compared with conventional liquid sorbents, solid sorbents can exhibit several distinct advantages, including enhanced lifetime and reduced energy consumption for sorbent regeneration. Considering that reducing CO₂ emission is a great challenge, reaching approximately 37 billion metric tons just in 2021, ideal sorbent solutions should not only exhibit a high capture performance but also enable large scale manufacturing using low-cost precursors and simple processes. In this work, we demonstrate the use of a commodity polymer, polystyrene-block-polyisoprene-block-polystyrene …

Nitrous Oxide Production And Isotopomer Composition By Fungi Isolated From Salt Marsh Sediments, Birch Maxwell Lazo-Murphy, Samantha Larson, Sydney Staines, Heather Bruck, Julianne Mchenry, Annie Bourbonnais, Xuefeng Peng

Faculty Publications

The emissions of nitrous oxide (N₂O), a potent greenhouse gas and ozone-depleting agent, have been steadily increasing from coastal environments, such as salt marsh sediments, as a result of anthropogenic nutrient loading. Biotic processes, including nitrification and denitrification, are the largest sources of N₂O from salt marsh sediments. While it is assumed that the bulk of N₂O from salt marsh sediment is produced by nitrification and bacterial denitrification, recent reports suggest fungal denitrification may contribute significantly. In this study, four fungi capable of growth under sulfidic conditions were isolated from salt marsh sediments in …