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Re-Entry Challenges: Comparison And Contrasts Between Korean And American Mks, Ok Kyung Ha

Master's Theses

Problem

Missionary Kids (MKs) have a different experience in the mission fields in terms of culture, language, and social adjustment when compared with their parents. They also face another challenge when they return to their parents’ home country, for they feel out of place and often do not think of their parents’ country as home. The purpose of this Masters thesis is to investigate the experience of MKs in the mission field, during re-entry, and to research the common elements or differences between Korean MKs and American MKs in their re-entry process.

Method

The research method used in this Masters …

The Time Of The Second Coming And The Members Of The Sanhedrin, Alina Roxana Lupu

Master's Theses

Problems

The aspects related to the time of the Second Coming of Jesus were a constant concern of the believers and Bible’s scholars. There are many challenging verses in the Scripture that are talking about the Parousia in temporal terms. This present study was to determine to what extend Jesus’ answer before the Sanhedrin (Matt 26:64) was related to the time of the Parousia and with that generation of his accusers.

Method

An historical perspective over the process of date setting for the Parousia and over the eschatological theology create the framework for understanding the problem of Parousia’s time. The …

The Use Of A Grammaticality Judgment Task To Assess The Role Of Receptive Vocabulary, Cognitive Inhibition, And Cognitive Flexibility On Syntactic Awareness, Lanette Mae Urbin

Master's Theses

Syntactic awareness, receptive vocabulary, and executive control (i.e., cognitive inhibition and cognitive flexibility) are robust predictors of language, literacy, and academic success (Bialystok, Craik, Klein, & Viswanathan, 2004; Davidson et al., 2010; Foursha-Stevenson & Nicoladis, 2011). In general, research demonstrates that receptive vocabulary is related to syntactic awareness (Davidson, Vanegas, Hilvert & Misiunaite, 2017; Galambos & Hakuta, 1988). There is also research to suggest that facets of executive control, such as cognitive inhibition and cognitive flexibility may also be related to syntactic awareness (Bialystok, 1986; Simard, Foucambert, & Labelle, 2013). However, receptive vocabulary, cognitive inhibition, and cognitive flexibility have only …

Culturally Relevant Choral Music Pedagogy And Student Feedback, Theoni Richardson

Master's Theses

The purpose of this teacher action research study was to assess choral education pedagogy through the perspective of high school choir students. The research question asked: How can I utilize student interpretation and critique in order to empirically self-reflect on my choral teaching practice and its cultural relevance? Interpretation and critique are defined as student opportunities to give feedback, both positive and negative, in the form of qualitative oral discussion and quantitative, linear ranking. While research has shown that culturally relevant pedagogy allows for more student engagement and success, I hypothesized that this study would show that students who perceive …

An Exploratory Study Of Factors Influencing The Success Of Refugee Youth In College And University, Lea Tienou-Gustafson

Master's Theses

The educational needs, challenges and outcomes of refugee youth in the United States have been studied a great deal, particularly in regard to primary and secondary education. There is a dearth of research, however, on the refugee experience in higher education in the United States.

This study seeks to add to the body of literature on refugee education by exploring shared features of the refugee experience in higher education. Through an in-depth study of refugee youth in Chicago, the study seeks to understand their experiences before, while entering and during college and university, particularly how these experiences are tied to …

Taking A Stand On One Knee: A Content Analysis Study Of The San Francisco 49ers' National Anthem Protests, Jack Hunter

Master's Theses

Previous communication studies have examined media bias in the coverage of social protest movements and issues of race in sports, but until now there has not been an opportunity to combine the two topics. This study examined media bias in coverage of the San Francisco 49ers’ national anthem protests, from August 2016 to February 2018. Utilizing articles from eight different publications, four from local San Francisco Bay Area outlets, and four from nationally syndicated outlets, a content analysis was conducted to determine whether coverage of the protests exhibited bias against the players and whether local sources were more supportive of …

Separation Events In Modern Greek, Vasiliki Lydia Rounti

Master's Theses

The semantic domain of separation events has been studied for a number of languages. In this thesis, a study on how Modern Greek expresses separation events and how semantically distinct they are from other languages is presented. This is the first study on the semantic features of separation events for Modern Greek. Furthermore, it is the only study so far on separation events for which data have been gathered from a large number of native speakers. Thus, this thesis not only offers a great insight on the language’s semantic structures, but it also presents more concrete observations and conclusions compared …

Language Abilities In Single- And Dual- Language Learners With Autism Or Other Developmental Disorders, Yael Dai

Master's Theses

Parents and providers worry that exposure to two languages will impair language acquisition in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or other developmental delays (DD). However, limited research to date suggests that language milestones and abilities are unaffected. The current study explored language abilities in toddlers with ASD or DD exposed to one versus multiple languages, prior to any intervention. Results showed slower language acquisition in ASD than DD but no main effect of language exposure group or interaction of language group by diagnosis. This study suggests that bilingual parents can communicate with their children in both languages without harm …

Factors Influencing Maternal Involvement In Early Childhood: Exploring The Roles Of Maternal Stress And Children’S Narrative Representations Of Mothers, Rahmet Akpolat

Master's Theses

For children from low-income families, parent school involvement can be a crucial protective factor that supports children’s cognitive and emotional development. The present study seeks to explore how maternal stress in early childhood is associated with mothers’ later school involvement and whether children’s internalized positive, disciplinary and negative maternal representations act as potential mediators of this relationship. Currently, little research has been done on the contextual factors influencing parent school involvement in early childhood and this study aims to fill this gap in the literature. The data included 169 children and mothers from low-income families. Mothers completed questionnaires designed to …

Falling Up: Building Language Use And Cultural Awareness Through The Implementation Of Humor In The Esl Classroom, Glen Kovar

Master's Theses

This study examined the importance of explicitly teaching humor to upper-intermediate and advanced adult English language learners (ELLs), and filled in the gap that exists in studies and literature by examining the use, and implementation of humor in English as a second language/foreign language (ESL/EFL) curricula. Humor is an important human behavior, playing a crucial role in communication, social interactions, and comprehension of a second language (L2) culture. High-level ELLs often lack the linguistic and cultural awareness necessary to effectively communicate. Language courses often accentuate test-taking and language strategies, and courses that explicitly engage with and teach humor to students …

How Patriotic Are Albanians? The Comparative Study Of Patriotic Attitudes In Albania And The Albanian Diaspora, Anxhela Spahiu

Master's Theses

In today’s post-modern digital world, patriotism may not be as prevalent as in the past. In this thesis, my principal aim is to investigate to what extent Albanians, a nationality to which I belong, identify with a patriotic attitude toward Albania. I chose to focus not only on Albanians who live in the diaspora, like myself, but also on Albanians who live in Albania. I believe that to understand national pride to its fullest, you must study the attitudes of those who live in the country of origin as well as of those who live in the diaspora. Many people …

Undocumented Students’ Access To Higher Education In San Francisco, Bay Area, Sandra Miklosic

Master's Theses

This paper will explore the question: “in what ways does DACA status influence undocumented students’ ability to access higher education in San Francisco and Bay Area, California?” Even though DACA does not encompass any direct policies regarding access to education, there is a very strong correlation between having DACA status and accessing higher education for the undocumented students. In this research, I highlight the voices of undocumented students through the method of testimonio. Each participant reflects on their personal experiences with DACA while accessing postsecondary education. In this research, I explore how testimonio, as a methodology and a theoretical framework, …

The Chinese Cultural Influence On Filipino Cuisine, Brandon Chase Lantrip

Master's Theses

This paper illustrates the impact of the Chinese cultural influence upon the Philippines with the primary focus being on Filipino cuisine. It examines how the Chinese cultural influence not only contributed to the development of Filipino cuisine, but how Chinese culture has also influenced the everyday life and culture of the Philippines through language and customary practices for over a millennium. The first section of the paper analyzes the cultural connection between China and the Philippines. The second section illustrates the Chinese language influence and it’s effect upon Filipino cuisine and culture. The third section explores the contested origins of …

Investigating How Anticipation Of Object States Drives Event Comprehension, Kyra Krass

Master's Theses

Previous literature has suggested that, when given change of state events in a visual world paradigm task, individuals anticipate either the object that can be acted upon or the goal. This study investigated under what circumstances an individual anticipates one over the other. We used reversible action verbs (e.g. open/close), destruction verbs (e.g., eat), and creation verbs (e.g., knit) in the past and future tense to investigate how anticipation differs across these conditions. Individuals heard sentences such as "The woman will open the umbrella" while seeing four objects on a screen: the initial state (e.g., a closed umbrella), the end …

The Timecourse Of Phonological Competition In Spoken Word Recognition: A Comparison Of Adults And Very Young Children, Elizabeth Schoen Simmons

Master's Theses

Spoken word recognition (SWR) is the mapping of speech sounds to words from many potential candidates in one’s lexicon. In adults, words that are phonetically similar, of high frequency, or semantically related compete for recognition. An ongoing debate in the literature is whether or not very young children encode spoken words with fine-grained temporal and phonetic detail. Specifically, whether they represent words wholistically or as smaller phonetic units similar to that of adults. The adult literature demonstrates that words that are phonetically similar at onset (cohorts) and offset (rhymes) compete for recognition. As it happens, rhymes have the potential to …

Let's Dance! Designing And Assessing Dance-Integrated Lessons In The Fifth Grade Language Arts Class, Emily Lorraine Hoch

Master's Theses

The purpose of this study was to design movement and dance-integrated lessons that would complement a poetry unit in a fifth grade language arts class at a public charter school. This quantitative and qualitative study sought to discover how the use of creative movement and dance could improve students’ ability to communicate through writing, and revise their work, as well as assess how this approach to teaching would effect their ability to think critically. These integrated lessons aligned with Colorado State Core Standards and 21st Century skills, as dance integration promotes the use of creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration …

Dance For Special Needs Students: Building Confidence And Motor Skills, Jennifer Monique Dabalsa

Master's Theses

Participating in a dance class is influential in the development of young people’s creative, imaginative, individual, and communicative skills. The use of dance within a classroom increases physical fitness, enriches motor skills, coordination, and enhances social skills. Dance also increases muscular endurance, builds balance, as well as encourages teamwork and group skills. Most, if not all individuals crave to be socially accepted on some level. Many individuals with special needs are limited in verbal communication, or they are completely non-verbal. Connecting to individuals with these types of limitations proves to be challenging in comparison with a typical abled bodied individual. …

Tongs: Tldr; Opinion Network Guide System, Andrew Jen Wang

Master's Theses

In the modern world, huge amounts of text are being generated every minute. For example, Twitter users post their current emotions in tweets, while Facebook users vent about their experience in posts. In just one minute, Twitter users upload 350,000 tweets, and Facebook users post anywhere from 2.5 million to 3 million posts. To keep up with this growth in data, almost all of this information goes through automated text processing. To extract features such as the opinion and subjectivity in text, sentiment analysis is applied to the corpus. In this thesis, we present the TONGS library for conducting sentiment …

The Legacy Of British Rule On Lgbt Rights In Jamaica And The Cayman Islands, Zachary Stewart

Master's Theses

This thesis explores the relationship between British colonial influence and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) rights in the Caribbean. Comparing the Cayman Islands, a British Overseas Territory, and Jamaica, an independent former colony of the United Kingdom, the situation for LGBT people is evaluated. While Jamaica has serious abuses and a concerning situation for the human rights of LGBT people, the Cayman Islands’ LGBT community’s position is far less concerning. Owing to its continued connection to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Cayman Islands’ LGBT rights situation is much less dire. Through British influence via …

Improving Companion Ai Behavior In Mimica, Daniel Toy

Master's Theses

Companion characters are an important aspect of video games and appear in many different genres. Their role is typically to support the player as they progress through the game by helping to complete tasks or assisting in combat. However, oftentimes, these companion characters are limited in their ability to dynamically react to new situations and fail to properly assist the player.

In this paper, we present a solution by improving upon the MimicA framework, which allows companion characters to emulate the human player. The framework takes a learn by observation approach by storing the game state when the player performs …

The Influence Of Talker Expectations And Acoustic Variability On Speech Perception In Asd, Anders Hogstrom

Master's Theses

Speech perception is dependent upon the ability to map the sensory features of a speech signal onto the perceptual features which make up language (i.e., phonemes). A great deal of research over the past six decades has focused on how variability across talkers influences speech processing. Listeners are required to normalize the acoustic variability across talkers by continuously updating the mapping from the acoustic signal to phonetic representations. As such, processing speech from multiple talkers is cognitively more demanding than listening to a single talker. This processing cost appears to reflect, in part, the influence of listeners’ expectations that speech …

Factors Associated With Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (Prep) Adherence Self-Efficacy Among High-Risk Drug Users In Treatment, Chanchala Tiwari

Master's Theses

Background: Recent studies on Pre-exposure prophylaxis treatment (PrEP) has received significant recognition as a promising preventive strategy among high-risk individuals. Although a significant amount of research has been conducted on willingness of PrEP use, and NCI as predictors of HIV risk behavior, no study to date, has explored the impact of various motivation factors along with the use of internet & technology devices and psychological aspects on PrEP adherence self-efficacy. So, the objectives of thesis analyses were to examine whether various motivation factors, psychological factors, and communication technology predicts PrEP adherence self-efficacy. Method: The study was conducted among 400 HIV-negative …

When We Were Monsters: Ethnogenesis In Medieval Ireland 800-1366, Dawn Adelaide Seymour Klos

Master's Theses

Ethnogenesis, or the process of identity construction occurred in medieval Ireland as a reaction to laws passed by the first centralized government on the island. This thesis tracks ethnogenesis through documents relating to change in language, custom, and law. This argument provides insight into how a new political identity was rendered necessary by the Anglo-Irish. Victor Turner’s model of Communitas structures the argument as each stage of liminality represents a turning point in the process of ethnogenesis.

1169 marked a watershed moment as it began the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland. English nobles brought with them ideas of centralized power. In …

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 …

Create: Clinical Record Analysis Technology Ensemble, Skylar Eglowski

Master's Theses

In this thesis, we describe an approach that won a psychiatric symptom severity prediction challenge. The challenge was to correctly predict the severity of psychiatric symptoms on a 4-point scale. Our winning submission uses a novel stacked machine learning architecture in which (i) a base data ingestion/cleaning step was followed by the (ii) derivation of a base set of features defined using text analytics, after which (iii) association rule learning was used in a novel way to generate new features, followed by a (iv) feature selection step to eliminate irrelevant features, followed by a (v) classifier training algorithm in which …

Goal Effectiveness In Achieving Educational Outcomes: Experimental Evidence From 9th Graders In Medellin, Colombia, Daniel Salicath, Alessandra Cassar

Master's Theses

Does goal setting among low-income ninth graders leads to higher average goal achievements of educational outcomes? This question is explored by a field experiment motivated by the acknowledged California-based Family Independence Initiative (FII), to analyze the effectiveness of individual goal setting, incentives and self-help groups on the achievement of educational goals. By randomizing treatments and control with the cooperation of the Secretary of Education in Medellin, different classrooms were assigned to five different experimental groups that met systematically for five months. The results show that goal setting is a cost-effective method to help low-income students achieve educational outcomes. Setting a …

With Language Brings Light: Narratives By Deaf Ethiopians And Their Right To Sign Language, Jackie M. Eugster

Master's Theses

The goal of this case study is to share the narratives of Deaf individuals in Ethiopia and how the Deaf community uses Deaf Community Cultural Wealth in order to explore and flourish in audist and colonized spaces. This study engaged photovoice, in a participatory action research technique that can empower and enhance the community’s sense of identity (Wang & Burris, 1997). This study considers the influence of American missionaries and how colonization of African nations has also influenced the trajectory of Deaf education in Ethiopia. Moving away from deficient thinking, DCCW attempts to reframe the Deaf experience as one that …

Effects Of Language And Reading Ability On Input-Driven Plasticity Of Phonetic Category Structure, Stephen Edward Graham

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

Schuell’S Stimulation Approach Administered Intensively For An Individual With Chronic, Severe Non-Fluent Aphasia, Shannon K. Hughes

Master's Theses

Background: Schuell’s Stimulation Approach is frequently implemented within conventional speech language therapy (SLT) for aphasia. Recent research supports the use of intensive treatment, as well as the potential for continued gains in the chronic stage of aphasia. Given the limited evidence-based treatment options for individuals with chronic, severe non-fluent aphasia, investigation was warranted.

Aims: The current study used a single subject design with multiple probes across behaviors to investigate how an individual with chronic, severe non-fluent aphasia, who had ceased to make gains in conventional SLT, would respond to administration of Schuell’s Stimulation Approach at the standard intensive dosage of …

Rapping Back: Counter-Narratives From Auckland, New Zealand, Mariel Lopez Rogers

Master's Theses

Across the Pacific in Auckland, New Zealand two rap groups, Homebrew and @Peace, are contributing to a theoretically rich and socially conscious Hip Hop scene. Their music critically questions commercialism and conformity in a culture shaped by a history of colonialism. This makes their message starkly opposed to the normative values of New Zealand. The musicians of Homebrew and @Peace, a mix of Polynesian and Pakeha (people of European descent), employ methods of decolonization theory through the use of storytelling and focus on indigenous values. In a country that has adopted the neoliberal beliefs that competition drives human relations, and …