Digital Commons Network^™

Integrated Reading-Writing Instruction For Elementary School Emergent Bilingual Students, Irina Malova

Open Access Dissertations

This comparative case study investigated integrated reading-writing instruction (IRWI) as an approach for writing instruction implemented after the adoption of Common Core State Standards (NGA & CCSSO, 2010a). Specifically, I explored the nature of IRWI through video-recorded observations of writing instruction, teachers’ perspectives towards this approach, and features of critical knowledge (Fitzgerald & Shanahan, 2000) utilized by five teachers in five fourth grade English Language Arts classrooms with emergent bilingual students. This study was guided by the following three research questions: 1) What is the nature of integrated reading-writing instruction in 4th grade ELA classrooms with emergent bilingual students? 2) …

Examining An Executive Functioning And Bilingual Advantage Among Latino Dll Children In Head Start: A Strength-Based Approach, Lisa J. White

Open Access Dissertations

Young Spanish-speaking Latinos in the U.S., most of whom are from low-income backgrounds, perform below their English-speaking peers at kindergarten entry. This achievement gap is concerning considering the rising number of Latino children in the U.S. living in poverty. Despite this risk, a large body of research highlights the positive effects of learning two languages. Latino DLLs attending Head Start, compared to their monolingual peers, were recently found to have higher executive functioning (EF), a set of domain-general cognitive skills that robustly predict academic achievement. This emerging evidence is encouraging, however, there is still a lack of research on how …

Tmi: The Data-Driven Literature Of The American Renaissance, Brad Christopher Rittenhouse

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation posits that much of the aesthetic innovation associated with the American Renaissance stemmed from a wide range of sociocultural and technological that transformed nineteenth-century America into an urban, consumerist society grappling with an ocean of print, products, and people. Reacting to these new modern landscapes, New York writers like Herman Melville and Walt Whitman produced highly anomalous texts that prioritized the aggregation, aestheticization, and transmission of unprecedented volumes of cultural data. Borrowing from and building upon the contemporary information management strategies of rationalist fields like descriptive biology, accounting, and library science, these writers in particular developed a “data-driven” …

Éticas Y Estéticas De La Profanación: Redes Y Tensiones En La Literatura Peruana Y Venezolana Del Entre Siglos (1880-1910), Luz Ainai Morales Pino

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes a selection of literary productions from Peru and Venezuela´s entre siglos (1880-1910) from a relational perspective that combines some of the tenets of literary studies, visual culture studies, and gender studies. This dialogical approach is groundbreaking in as much as it puts in relation a set of texts that have never been studied together, given their apparent aesthetic and ideological divergences. With this method, I aim to problematize the taxonomies set by the critical tradition, as well as to articulate a wider and more complex perception of Perú and Venezuela´s entre siglos literary production. In that sense, …

Navigating Identities: The Musical Lives Of Four Second-Generation Immigrant Children In Miami, Florida, Sandra Sanchez Adorno

Open Access Dissertations

The expanding social worlds of middle childhood prompt children to evaluate and explore their sense of selves to better understand who they are and where they fit in (Erikson, 1968; Josselson & Harway, 2012). Children born in the USA to at least one foreign-born parent, also known as second-generation immigrants, often straddle multiple cultures, making their social contexts highly diverse and their explorations of identity complex (Sebastian, 2008). This collective case study focused on the home musical lives of four second-generation children in Miami, Florida, USA to gain greater insight into music’s meaning in their lives and the role it …

The Solo Vocal Songs Of Richard Wagner: A Pedagogical Guide For Use In The Voice Studio, Sarah Theresa Shipkowski Wee

Open Access Dissertations

The solo vocal songs of Richard Wagner are an under-performed part of the standard classical vocal repertoire. In this paper, fifteen of Richard Wagner’s solo vocal songs have been researched and analyzed. The orchestrated solo works, fragments, songs with chorus, arias or operatic compositions of Richard Wagner were not considered in this paper. The background of each song is addressed including what was going on in Wagner’s life at the time they were written, and any note-worthy information about the poet of the text, or the text itself. A poetic translation of each text has been included. The songs are …

The State Of Music Education In Basic General Public Schools Of Ecuador: The Administrators' Perspective, Johanna Elizabeth Abril

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine the state of music education in the Basic General Public schools in Ecuador from the perspective of the school administrator. A survey distributed via e-mail to 1,800 school administrators yielded a response rate of 27.4%. Administrators were asked to indicate the degree to which a list of music learning outcomes and broad educational outcomes in music were being met in current and ideal conditions. Results of the survey revealed that only a small percentage of the respondents (N = 475) offered music instruction at their schools. However, a further analysis showed significant …

Over The Edge Of The World: Irish Convict Writing And Contemporary Australian Literature, Barbara M. Hoffmann

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation explores the ways that Irish convicts transported to Australia in the nineteenth century influenced Australian nationalism and national culture. Using the principle of oceanic studies that the material conditions of sea travel are shaping influences, I look in the first chapter at journals as well as a manuscript newspaper written by Irish Fenian political prisoners on board the convict ship Hougoumont. The restrictions and conditions of the ship encouraged these Fenians to practice a subtle, personal, and metaphoric form of nationalism, carried out through telling stories of themselves and the Irish experience. The second and third chapters turn …

Voices At The Intersection: Exploring The Roles Of Race And Gender In The Pedagogies Of Black Male Special Educators, Patrice Elizabeth Fenton

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to explore some of the questions that arise as one probes the call for more Black men to enter the teaching profession, particularly as these questions relate to their racial and gendered identities. Further, the focus was on Black male special educators, as the literature demonstrated that there was very little research that captured the experiences of this group. To this end, the following research question was posed: What roles do race and gender play in the pedagogies of Black male special educators? Using intersectionality as a conceptual framework, this qualitative study included, 12 …

Cartographies Of Social Death: Abjection And The American Dispossessed, Allison N. Harris

Open Access Dissertations

Cartographies of Social Death: Abjection and the American Dispossessed argues that property violence acts as a nexus for social death and abjection in the United States. The project considers how nineteenth- and early-twentieth century dispossessory U.S. legislation haunts late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels. Attending to the particularity of space and borders, Cartographies maps the legal, socio-cultural, and psycho-linguistic constructions of personhood in novels framed by these legislations. I propose an intersectional collective “American dispossessed” concatenated by their experience of property vulnerability as subjects formed in relation to death. I develop a theory of intersubjective abjection to posit an optimistic but not …

Relationship And Power Dynamics In Women's Same Sex Abusive Couples, April D. Trotman

Open Access Dissertations

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a widespread occurrence in the United States, particularly in women’s same sex relationships. Unfortunately, beyond preliminary data on prevalence rates, little is known about how the power dynamics in women's same sex IPV compares to that of heterosexual couples. The purpose of the current study is to describe the types of abuse women experience in same sex relationships, illustrate the role of power and control over the course of an abusive relationship, and demonstrate the extent to which abuse changes over time within a relationship and during a woman's subsequent relationships. Using qualitative methods, twelve …

The Blame Game: The Effect Of Recommendation Context On Product Outcome Attributions, Stephanie L. Jacobsen

Open Access Dissertations

Written online communications between consumers have emerged to play an important role in the consumer decision-making process (Cheung and Lee 2012). Though electronic word of mouth (eWOM) has been studied widely, less is known about how reviews and, more specifically, product recommendations, affect attribution of credit or blame for a post purchase outcome. Attribution is important because it can affect repurchase behavior, loyalty, and word of mouth. Therefore, this dissertation experimentally examines how recommendation context affects attribution of credit or blame to consumers, reviewers, and retailers. It tests the thesis that context factors that are independent of the product recommendation …

Challenging And Supportive Factors Encountered By Underrepresented Minority Doctoral Students In Science, Technology, Engineering, And Mathematics, Tessy Tatiana Pumaccahua

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of the present study was to examine the supportive and challenging factors underrepresented minority students encounter in an academic setting as they obtain doctoral degrees in STEM disciplines. The study also explored the impact of students’ multiple social identities on their educational experiences, as well as the recommendations these students would provide to incoming doctoral students of color in STEM. Participants in this study consisted of 12 self-identified students from underrepresented minority backgrounds enrolled in STEM doctoral degree programs at predominately White institutions in the U.S.. Qualitative methods were utilized in this study. Specifically, the data was obtained …

The Pre-Collegiate Pipeline To Diversify The Nursing Workforce, Pamela L. Mccue

Open Access Dissertations

In the United States, increasing racial and ethnic diversity coupled with widening health care disparities have prompted growing concern about the lack of racial and ethnic diversity in the health professions. As the largest sector of the health care workforce who practice at all levels and settings of health care, the nursing profession has the potential to widely effect changes to reduce disparities. Yet only 19% of the registered nurse workforce reflects diversity, prompting a look at pre-collegiate pathways to a nursing career. Guided by Social Cognitive Career Theory, this study examined the pre-college factors that influenced student choice in …

Exploring The Use Of Noredink As A Tool For Composition Instruction, Alyson Snowe

Open Access Dissertations

My study, “Exploring the Use of NoRedInk as a Tool for Writing and Composition Instruction,” addresses the questions: (1) How do students experience NoRedInk in the context of a community college writing class? and (2) Is there a relationship between students’ attitudes towards grammar and their performance on the digital platform? Despite a century of research showing that traditional grammar instruction does not improve students’ writing, recent national standards and high stakes tests directly address grammar.

The nature of my research questions lent itself to a mixed-methods approach. The results of my quantitative research from the NoRedInk platform provided me …

Teachers' Experiences Of Induction Coaching: A Narrative Retrospective Inquiry, Jodi L. Clark

Open Access Dissertations

It is well established that beginning teachers need support to bridge the gap from college teacher preparation to the classroom setting (Fletcher & Strong, 2009; Wong, 2003). In fact, lack of support in this transition has been identified as a leading factor that causes beginning teachers to leave the profession at high rates early in their careers (Andrews, Gilbert & Martin, 2006). Research suggests that coaching is an effective way to support beginning teacher’s learning (Ingersoll & Strong, 2011). The purpose of this qualitative research is to tell the lived experiences of nine teachers who took part of in a …

Speaking Truth To Power: Stand-Up Comedians As Sophists, Jesters, Public Intellectuals And Activists, Jillian Belanger

Open Access Dissertations

Stand-up comedians are rhetors who use humor as a rhetorical tool to inform and persuade mass audiences in the classical rhetorical tradition. In this dissertation, I work to recover the rhetorical motives of stand-up comedy, just as rhetoric and composition scholars before me have reread and recovered the legacy of the Sophists. To that end, I align stand-up comedians first with the historical heritage of Sophists and jesters, and then with the more contemporary tradition of public intellectuals and social activists. Using excerpts from stand-up comedy performances, I demonstrate how stand-up comedians are able to persuade and educate with humor. …

Machine Learning For The Automated Identification Of Cyberbullying And Cyberharassment, Daniel N. Ducharme

Open Access Dissertations

Cyberbullying and cyberharassement are a growing issue that is straining the resources of human moderation teams. This is leading to an increase in suicide among the affected teens who are unable to get away from the harassment. By utilizing n-grams and support vector machines, this research was able to classify YouTube comments with an overall accuracy of 81.8%. This increased to 83.9% when utilizing retraining that added the misclassified comments to the training set. To accomplish this, a 350 comment balanced training set, with 7% of the highest entropy 3 length n-grams, and a polynomial kernel with the C error …

Doorways To Being: Modernism And 'Lived' Architectures, Amy A. Foley

Open Access Dissertations

Situated in recent scholarship on interiors and architecture in modernist fiction, "Doorways to Being" explores ways in which the modernist novel proposes a phenomenological engagement with the material environment, specifically the body in relation to transitional architectures. The study of thresholds in select modern fiction seeks to answer the essential question of how and why we move in the constructed world from the perspective of phenomenology and cultural studies. This comparative and interdisciplinary dissertation demonstrates how modernist fiction reestablishes the primacy of the sensed physical world in the spirit of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The introduction theorizes the threshold or doorway as …

Agency In Eating Disorders: American Literary And Visual Memoirs Of Anorexia And Bulimia, Jenny Platz

Open Access Dissertations

In my dissertation I examine the representation of self-creation through anorexia and bulimia in memoiristic narratives, blogs, and YouTube videos in contemporary American culture. I argue that the highly crafted characterizations and structures of the anorexic and bulimic memoirs and blogs implement the disorders into temporary tools of self-care that grant the subjects agency through their pursuits of maturation and identity creation and cannot be simplified into mere warnings and retellings of the dangers of the eating disorders. I am locating my research in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century to encompass the emergence of eating disorder memoirs, Ana …

The High School And Community College Experiences Of Immigrant-English Language Learners, Pamela Murillo

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of the present study was to examine the educational experiences of Hispanic immigrant-English Language Learners (ELLs) who are graduates of the International High Schools and attended and graduated from a community college. The study focuses on the International High School experiences that seem to foster community college readiness. Moreover, the study focuses on supports and challenges experienced by these individuals, the implications of their second language abilities during their time at their community college, and the reason(s) many Hispanic immigrant-ELLs stop at the Associate’s degree and do not continue through to the bachelor’s degree. Twelve International High School …

Language, Culture, And Identity Negotiation: Perspectives Of Adolescent Japanese Sojourner Students In The Midwest, Usa, Reiko Akiyama

Open Access Dissertations

This qualitative research highlights the voices and lived experiences of adolescent Japanese sojourner students and their mothers residing in the Midwest. The central goals of this research are to understand what adolescent Japanese sojourner students’ school experiences in the U.S. are like—particularly in areas with small Japanese populations—and how their experiences in the U.S. shape their current identities as cultural and linguistic minority students. This research also aims to learn how the students’ sojourning experiences influenced their mindsets as future returnee students. I conducted an in-depth case study with a phenomenographic approach as the theoretical framework to deeply investigate the …

Teoria De La Mente Y Sociedad En La Narrativa Policiaca De Lorenzo Silva Y Francisco Garcia Pavon: Estereotipos, Roles De Genero Y Minorias, Jesus Castro Gorfti

Open Access Dissertations

Spanish:

The purpose of this study is to utilize certain aspects of cognitive psychology as a framework to analyze the police procedural novels of two Spanish authors: Francisco García Pavón and Lorenzo Silva. Specifically, we will focus on two main aspects of the mind studied by the cognitive sciences: Theory of Mind and metarepresentations. Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the capacity that human beings have to attribute mental states to other humans, as well as oneself, based on their bodily and facial gestures. The concept of metarepresentation refers to the ability of humans to keep track of who said …

How Training Set And Prior Knowledge Affect Preschoolers' Perception Of Quantity And Early Number Learning, Arum Han

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation examines how training on the iPad can improve children’s quantity recognition, and whether different types of training might be warranted for children with different levels of experience. Study 1 tested the effects of multiple exemplar training (3 cars / 3 apples / 3 ducks, etc.) versus single exemplar training (3 cars / 3 cars / 3 cars, etc.) in recognizing quantities. For children just learning to recognize quantities (0-2 knowers), training with multiple exemplars was most effective for quantities three and four. For 3-6 knower children, single exemplar training was most effective for learning quantities five and six. …

Bad Girls In Corsets: Women And The Transgressive Body In The Nineteenth Century, Colleen Warwick Green

Open Access Dissertations

Women, and their bodies, posed an increasing anxiety for Victorian society. Culturally and outwardly, the Victorian era strove to maintain a level of decorum that, increasingly, the nineteenth-century woman were, rebelling against. The urge for women to break through social barriers and constraints binding them to the century created a divergence in thought from the traditional mores of the past, in turn affecting the ways in which womens’ bodies were portrayed, displayed and manipulated by the authors and artists of the century.

As women entered actively entered into spaces once closed to them, they furthered the rift of uncertainty and …

Examination And Utilization Of Rare Features In Text Classification Of Injury Narratives, Hsin-Ying Huang

Open Access Dissertations

Thanks to the advances in computing and information technology, analyzing injury surveillance data with statistical machine learning methods has grown in popularity, complexity, and quality over recent years. During that same time, researchers have recognized the limitations of statistical text analysis with limited training data. In response to the two primary challenges for statistical text analysis, dimensionality reduction and sparse data, many studies have focused on improving machine learning algorithms. Less research has been done, though, to examine and improve statistical machine learning methods in text classification from a linguistic perspective.

This study addresses this research gap by examining the …

Perceval's Sister And Juliet Capulet As Disruptive Guides In Spiritual Quests, Joanna Benskin

Open Access Dissertations

Perceval’s sister in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and Juliet in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet act as disruptive guides in spiritual quests by contradicting the expectations placed on them as women characters.

Though women are banned from the quest for the Holy Grail, Perceval’s sister accompanies the Grail knights as an authoritative spiritual guide and a symbol of the Eucharist. Previous critics have not recognized Perceval’s sister as a fundamental disruption to the systemic misogyny of the Morte or her Eucharistic significance. She challenges both the chivalric misogyny that sees her as an object of rescue and the …

Sounding Sacred: The Adoption Of Biblical Archaisms In The Book Of Mormon And Other 19th Century Texts, Gregory A. Bowen

Open Access Dissertations

The Book of Mormon is a text published in 1830 and considered a sacred work of scripture by adherents of the Latter-day Saint movement. Although written 200 years later, it exhibits many linguistic features of the King James translation of the Bible. Such stylistic imitation has been little studied, though a notable exception is Sigelman & Jacoby (1996).

Three hypotheses are considered: that this is a feature of 19th century religious texts, and the Book of Mormon adopts the style of its genre as a religious text; that this is a feature of translations of ancient texts, and the Book …

The Application Of Natural Language Processing To Open Source Intelligence For Ontology Development In The Advanced Persistent Threat Domain, Corey T. Holzer

Open Access Dissertations

Over the past decade, the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) has risen to forefront of cybersecurity threats. APTs are a major contributor to the billions of dollars lost by corporations around the world annually. The threat is significant enough that the Navy Cyber Power 2020 plan identified them as a “must mitigate” threat in order to ensure the security of its warfighting network.

Reports, white papers, and various other open source materials offer a plethora of information to cybersecurity professionals regarding these APT attacks and the organizations behind them but mining and correlating information out of these various sources needs the …

Poetry Matters: Radical Politics In Postmodern American Poetry, Christopher J. Padgett

Open Access Dissertations

Directly or indirectly, poetry produced in the postmodern era is implicated in the politics of the time. Postmodern American poetry, then, is not reducible to a single poetic mode or to a specific set of stylistic features. In other words, a more comprehensive understanding of postmodern American poetry can be made by employing a flexible version of Raymond Williams’ notion of uneven development, a theory that insists on the synchronic existence of dominant, residual, and emergent cultural elements. As the stylistically and politically diverse work of the six poets—Susan Howe, Robert Grenier, Gary Snyder, A.R. Ammons, Sherman Alexie, and Kenneth …