Digital Commons Network^™

The Road To Vienna: Habsburg And Ottoman Statecraft During The Time Of Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Paşa (1676-1683), Yasir Yilmaz

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation comparatively analyzes Habsburg and Ottoman decision-making and statecraft during the time of Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Paşa (1676-1683). I synthesize Habsburg diplomatic reports and Ottoman chronicles to show that during the peace negotiations between the Habsburg envoys and Kara Mustafa Paşa’s court before the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, the two state’s diplomatic postures were shaped by their different court structures. At the end, in response to the religiously-oriented explanations of early modern Habsburg-Ottoman confrontations, I argue that the monumental encounter in 1683 was a product of the difference between the two states’ governmental priorities and …

Toward World Englishes Writing: Is It Idealism In The Introductory Composition Class?, Shih-Yu Chang

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of the present study is to discover how teaching college introductory composition for international students within the World Englishes paradigm looks like. The study was conducted through questionnaires, blog entries, and interviews across three semesters in a public university in Indiana, America. In total, three introductory composition classes consisting of 41 students participated the study. The students were introduced to World Englishes through a series of related readings and the designed World Englishes workshop while they were also prepared for writing for other university courses. The results of this mixed-method study show that by learning about World Englishes, …

Cultivating Multicultural Education In Islamic Schools In The U.S: Teachers' Perspectives About Diversity In Islamic Schools, Kadriye El-Atwani

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the perspectives of six teachers who have taught in Islamic schools in the U.S. to comprehend the general context of multicultural education in Islamic schools. This study was designed as a descriptive collective case study primarily to investigate how racial, class, national, language and gender diversity were observed in six different Islamic schools’ climates and classrooms. Designing this research as a collective case study fostered the exploration of various social dynamics among Muslim communities in the U.S., and exemplified different characteristics of Muslim communities through the six cases. Key findings and analyses …

Elementary School Teachers' Attitudes Towards Multilingualism And Language Policy: Kazan, Russia, Alsu M. Gilmetdinova

Open Access Dissertations

The dissertation adopts a transdisciplinary approach to study schools as sites of language policy implementation. Contributions of language policy, TESOL and multilingual education, and linguistic anthropology help understand the role of teachers in language education. Of particular interests are teachers’ attitudes towards multilingualism and language policies, namely, the learning and teaching of national (Russian), titular (Tatar) and foreign (English) languages, as well as teachers’ negotiation of language policies in school. Federal, regional and school policy documents, 25 teacher interviews and site observations from a Tatar-medium school (1), a Russian-medium school (2) and a school with intensive English language program (3) …

First Graders As Sensitive Social Partners And Skilled Readers, Zaira R. Arvelo Alicea

Open Access Dissertations

This mixed methods dissertation is guided by a sociocultural framework and a pragmatist stance to contribute to early literacy scholarship about minority children. In particular, I explore the relationship between low socioeconomic status Puerto Rican children’s reading experience and their social cognition by: (1) assessing them through quantitative and qualitative measures that reveal their capacities in these areas at the end of their first grade year, and (2) documenting their reading experiences at home and at school through ethnographic qualitative methods. The analyses revealed significant positive correlations between the tests of reading and social understanding, a scarcity of conventional reading …

Temperance In The Age Of Feeling: Sensibility, Pedagogy, And Poetry In The Eighteenth Century, Sarah Hattie Maitland

Open Access Dissertations

British Romanticism has traditionally been understood as participating in a narrative of progressive secularism. "Temperance in the Age of Feeling" seeks to challenge this narrative by examining the influence of temperance on Romantic conceptualizations of the relationship between sensation, thought, and feeling. I begin my argument by investigating Romantic notions of temperance as influenced by Book II of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. I claim that Romantic temperance differs from classical temperance because Romantic temperance is concerned with balancing mental faculties while classical temperance is concerned with moderating passions. Next I consider how temperance influenced Romantic theories of the relationship …

Toward A Psychosocial Understanding Of Suicide In American Literature And Culture Of The 1990’S, Sara E. Murphy

Open Access Dissertations

As a means of rectifying the problematic absence of multidisciplinary scholarly work on suicide, this dissertation project interrogates suicide in American literature and culture of the 1990’s across disciplines within the humanities, medicine, and the social sciences. Utilizing a psychosocial approach to the study of suicide – that is, an understanding of suicide as produced both by one’s psychological development within and by one’s social relationship to his or her environment – I address what I have identified as a unique trifurcated suicide response that arose in American culture in the 1990’s as it emerged through major societal and legal …

Nursing Satisfaction In A Magnet Hospital, Ahlam Hussain Abdullah

Open Access Dissertations

A cross sectional descriptive study was conducted to examine the relationship between staff nurses' self-perceptions of structural empowerment, self-perceptions of Magnet hospital characteristics and job satisfaction in a Magnet-designated community hospital in the Northeastern United States. Demographic variables of age, ethnicity, educational level, marital status and years of experience were also examined to determine the extent to which these variables can predict nurses' job satisfaction in a sample of 97 registered staff nurses. Simple linear regression analysis was used to answer the two research questions: What is the relationship between nurses' perception of structural empowerment level and job satisfaction? What …

Attack-Resistant Digital Reputation And Privacy Assessment In Social Media, Yongbo Zeng

Open Access Dissertations

Web 2.0 has been growing rapidly in the past decade, and leading to surging popularity of online social media. There are over 2.1 billion people that are using social media, which is 28% of the global population. Social media has become one of the most complex computing and communication systems in the planet. Social media attracts large amount of people to create, share and exchange information, interests, ideas, pictures, videos, and etc. in the virtual communities. In social media, people can interact with acquaintances and strangers, and thus privacy and security should be considered seriously.

From the privacy perspective, one …

Latino Academic Resilience: Stories Of High Achieving Middle School Ells And The Teachers And Families That Help Them Succeed, Marcela Astudillo

Open Access Dissertations

A general definition of resilience is an ability to thrive and succeed in a variety of areas related to our lives despite adversities we may face. The more specific term referred to as "academic resilience" deals with achieving academic success despite difficulties within an academic setting. Evidence shows that one of the demographic groups that experiences many challenges within academic settings and therefore who often struggle with academic success are English Language Learners. As compared to the regular education population of native speakers of English, ELLs have much higher high school dropout rates and have an overall more difficult time …

Development And Psychometric Evaluation Of A Clinical Beliefs Questionnaire For Licensed Psychologists, Joseph F. Meyer Iii

Open Access Dissertations

In recent decades, a specific class of dubious clinical practices has been labeled pseudoscientific and highlighted as a growing area of concern in psychology. Experts have identified numerous examples of pseudoscientific treatments, which are troubling for various ethical reasons. In light of the absence of research investigating the nature of professional beliefs and knowledge associated with scientifically substantiated and unsubstantiated clinical interventions, the primary objective of this study was to develop a questionnaire (viz., the Clinical Attitudes and Knowledge Questionnaire, or CAKQ) to appraise specific clinical knowledge domains and attitudes toward science among licensed, doctoral-level practitioners of clinical psychology. This …

Unconscious States: A Novel, Rachel May

Open Access Dissertations

Unconscious States tells the story of three sisters in a rural New England town and aims to explore the class, racial, and agricultural tensions in central Massachusetts while addressing issues of addiction, the choices that three women face in making their lives, and a family’s struggle to sustain themselves after a devastating accident severely injures the oldest of the Roe sisters, Mary. The novel integrates the choices of educated women today—between scholarship, family, and work—and the racist underbelly, subtle but pervasive, in a New England town like Bolton, as well as the financial burdens that all families face in a …

The Sentinelle Affair: A Study In Multilingual Language Practices, Jason Peters

Open Access Dissertations

Rhetorical historiography needs to disrupt existing archival arrangements of language differences. These arrangements preserve an ideology of linguistic modernity that effaces and oversimplifies the complex multilingual practices of actual language users. By disrupting the principles of selection and arrangement that make up an archive’s evidential value, rhetorical researchers can undermine ideologies of linguistic modernity and can recover an array of rhetorical resistance strategies that multilinguals have historically taken towards the political and socioeconomic dominance of English. This project does this disruptive work by analyzing the multisitedness of Mount St. Charles, a Catholic high school in Rhode Island. In its original …

Automated Essay Evaluation And The Computational Paradigm: Machine Scoring Enters The Classroom, Catherine M. Barrett

Open Access Dissertations

Grading papers is a "tedious, repetitive, and time-consuming" undertaking, one that invites the sort of sympathies one might receive upon the "death of a pet' (Baker, 2014, p. 36). Perhaps, though, the only thing more distasteful for an English professor than having to grade hundreds of essays each semester is having to hand the job over to the likes of a mindless software program. Automated Essay Evaluation (AEE), the process of scoring essays by computer, was developed in the 1960s but has mostly aroused suspicion and derogation from the composition community.

The parable of the blindfolded villagers describing the same …

Perceived Life Satisfaction Of Expatriate Students Attending International Schools, Brynheld Martinez Zavras

Open Access Dissertations

The primary goal of the present study was to investigate overall and domain-based life satisfaction of expatriate students attending international schools compared to students who attend international schools in their home country. The present study included 114 students from eleven international schools located across nine European countries. Participants completed measures concerning demographic information and the Multidimensional Students' Life Satisfaction Scale (MSLSS). Statistical analyses revealed levels of life satisfaction to be in the positive range for all students. Results indicated that domain-based and overall life satisfaction, as measured by the MSLSS, was similar for males and females. No significant differences were …

Examining The Association Between Variability In Classroom Interaction Quality And Problem Behavior In Head Start Children, Veronica A. Fernandez

Open Access Dissertations

The present study examined the role of variability in observed classroom interaction quality (as assessed by the CLASS) in a sample of Head Start children (N = 965 children, within 54 classrooms and across 8 centers). First, the psychometric properties of the typically used classroom quality mean scores were examined to test whether the levels (mean differences) and rank ordering (reliability) of the scores varied across activity settings (Free Play, Whole Group, Small Group, Meals or Routines/Transitions). Then, variability scores were calculated for each of the three classroom quality domains to examine the unique association between variability in classroom interaction …

Examining Predictors Of U.S. Student Intent To Study Abroad From A Communication Perspective, Jasmine R. Phillips

Open Access Dissertations

This study of American undergraduate students explored the communication factors that contribute to their decisions regarding participation in study abroad programs. The theoretical framework proposed that several communication constructs were related to intent to study abroad. Specifically, intercultural communication competence (ICC), and social influence via face-to-face and computer-mediated communication, were proposed to affect intent to study abroad. Hypotheses generated in this research were grounded in literature on the above constructs and guided by the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA; Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980). Previous literature found that intercultural attitudes such as openness to other cultures and diversity, ethnocentrism, and intercultural …

The Effects Of Vocabulary Instruction On Bilingual Students' Lexico-Semantic Acquisition In English-Medium Contexts: A Systematic Analysis, Alain Bengochea

Open Access Dissertations

This systematic review provides a comprehensive analysis of the empirical literature on the effectiveness of vocabulary instructional methods for English language learners (ELLs) in prekindergarten through 6th grade settings. Thus, a central goal of this study is to appraise the available research on vocabulary learning and assess intervention studies’ levels of evidence for effectiveness in order to make a critical assessment of the variables that are currently represented in the field. Specifically, the research questions guiding this systematic review are: (1) How do intervention studies developing L2 word-meaning acquisition with ELLs in pre-kindergarten through 6th grade settings vary in their …

Epistemic Uncertainty Quantification In Scientific Models, Xiaoxiao Chen

Open Access Dissertations

In the field of uncertainty quantification (UQ), epistemic uncertainty often refers to the kind of uncertainty whose complete probabilistic description is not available, largely due to our lack of knowledge about the uncertainty. Quantification of the impacts of epistemic uncertainty is naturally difficult, because most of the existing stochastic tools rely on the specification of the probability distributions and thus do not readily apply to epistemic uncertainty. And there have been few studies and methods to deal with epistemic uncertainty. A recent work can be found in [J. Jakeman, M. Eldred, D. Xiu, Numerical approach for quantification of epistemic uncertainty, …

The Journey Of Chinese Students From English 106 Maintstream Composition Courses To The Purdue Writing Lab: An Institutional Needs Analysis Of Chinese Students, Aylin Baris Atilgan

Open Access Dissertations

According to the Purdue University International Students and Scholars Enrollment & Statistical Report 10-year Enrollment Trends (2014), over the past ten years there has been an 85% growth in the number of international students matriculating at Purdue. As stated in the Purdue University Fall 2014 International Student and Scholar Enrollment & Statistical Report (2013), Purdue University now enrolls 9,080 international students representing 123 countries. This being the case, Purdue University is among the first five top institutions in the nation hosting international students (Open Doors Report-Institute of International Education, 2014). In recent years, Chinese students make up the largest international …

The Quixote Code: Reading Between The Lines Of The Cervantes Novel, Massimiliano Adelmo Giorgini

Open Access Dissertations

This study in two parts reexamines the notion that Don Quixote was originally seen as no more than a humorous story, and suggests that due to a variety of factors, a closer, more exegetical reading of the text may well be appropriate. In the first section of this work, focus is placed on the long history of the reception of the Cervantes novel as containing some deeper truth beneath the literal surface of the novel. This is complemented by a review of some examples of when several esoteric readings—done without academic rigor and adequate contextual research—have struck dramatically off-target and …

Quantifying Aesthetics Of Visual Design Applied To Automatic Design, Ali Jahanian

Open Access Dissertations

In today's "Instagram" world, with advances in ubiquitous computing and access to social networks, digital media is adopted by art and culture. In this dissertation, we study what makes a good design by investigating mechanisms to bring aesthetics of design from realm of subjection to objection. These mechanisms are a combination of three main approaches: learning theories and principles of design by collaborating with professional designers, mathematically and statistically modeling good designs from large scale datasets, and crowdscourcing to model perceived aesthetics of designs from general public responses. We then apply the knowledge gained in automatic design creation tools to …

Constructing Community From Corpses In Medieval English And Icelandic Literature, Erin C Kissick

Open Access Dissertations

I argue that the bodies of the dead interred within medieval texts are used as focal points for the communities created within those texts. The most famous textual medieval corpses are the relics of saints as described in hagiographies, relics which, outside of these texts, became the centerpieces of many medieval communities, both religious and secular, as demonstrated by Patrick Geary and Carolyn Walker Bynum. More broadly, material culture scholars such as Howard Williams have shown that the graves of nonsaints played a significant role in the preservation of communal memory. In medieval communities, ancestors and other long-gone ancient communities …

Acquisition, Retention And Transfer Of Heavy Equipment Operator Skills Through Simulator Training, Chung Yin So

Open Access Dissertations

Initiatives and collaborations among heavy construction equipment manufacturing companies and training technology firms to develop and employ simulators for varied training purposes are becoming commonplace. However, human factors research on simulator training for operators of construction equipment is still sparse. For simulator training to be effective, it is necessary to understand how skills are learned using the simulator, how those skills are transferred to other tasks, devices, and real scenarios, and how well skills are retained after simulator training. ^ This research is on skill development, specifically as it applies to operator training for two specific types of heavy construction …

An Exploratory Factor Analysis And Reliability Analysis Of The Student Online Learning Readiness (Solr) Instrument, Taeho Yu

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to develop an effective instrument to measure student readiness in online learning with reliable predictors of online learning success factors such as learning outcomes and learner satisfaction. The validity and reliability of the Student Online Learning Readiness (SOLR) instrument were tested using Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and reliability analysis. Twenty items from three competencies, i.e. social competencies, communication competencies, and technical competencies, were designated for the initial instrument based on the Student Online Learning Readiness (SOLR) Model as a new conceptual model. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) revealed that four factor-structures of the instrument …

Relationships Between Lexical Proficiency And L2 Oral Proficiency, Yunjung You

Open Access Dissertations

Lexical proficiency is strongly correlated with L2 productive language ability (Crossley, Salsbury, & McNamara, 2011; Laufer & Nation, 1995). While many studies have investigated the relationship between lexical proficiency and L2 writing ability, not many studies have been conducted in terms of spoken language. Also, few studies have focused on how non-native English speakers with different L1 backgrounds differently or similarly develop lexical proficiency in L2 speaking. Based on this background, the present study is conducted with three purposes: 1) to compare the effectiveness of measures of lexical proficiency in terms of their ability to predict the quality of L2 …

A Sociosemantic Examination Of Secondary English Teacher Written Feedback, Ryan Angus

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to provide a functional linguistic based description of teacher writing comments in secondary ELA classrooms. Based within a case study methodology, this study used analytical tools from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) in order to discover the various meanings that teachers make through their commenting practices. The findings of the study show that teacher comments focus on the content of the student writing, but also, significantly, help teachers to discursively realize various teacher identities. It was also found that teacher comments tended to either be concrete in their reference to …

Exploring Literacy And Technology With Middle School English Teachers: Articulating Understandings Of Knowledge And Teaching Practices, Benjamin A. Boche

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to investigate five middle school English teachers' understandings of literacy and technology. In particular, how do they define literacy, view literacy and technology learning and teaching, and how do they use (or not use) technology to enact their views of literacy in their classrooms. This narrative inquiry qualitative study consisted of three open-ended interviews, written literacy narratives, and multiple classroom observations with each participant as well as the collection of various teacher documents, such as lesson plans, presentation notes, rubrics, and student handouts. Narrative methods were used in the data analysis. ^ Findings were …

Disentangling Fluency, Comprehensibility And Coherence: Toward A Better Understanding Of Oral Proficiency Profiles, Haiying Cao

Open Access Dissertations

This study is an empirical attempt to examine how removal of all possible disfluency markers can help disentangle proficiency components assessed by the Oral English Proficiency Test (OEPT) in order to help build empirical foundations for establishing OEPT profiles. Silent and filled pauses, false starts and repetitions were removed from 50 test recordings in WAVEPAD SOUND EDITOR. Five trained OEPT raters rated the original and edited speeches. Statistical analyses addressed three research questions: 1) do fluency, comprehensibility and coherence ratings significantly change after the disfluency manipulation; 2) do correlations between fluency, comprehensibility, coherence and coherence subcomponents change after the disfluency …

American Joyce: Representations Of The United States In Dubliners, A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, Ulysses, And Finnegans Wake, Briana Casali

Open Access Dissertations

This project is the first comprehensive study of James Joyce’s literary and personal relationship with the United States. With a foothold in both American and Irish fields of literary criticism, it explores a critical gap in Joyce studies that demonstrates a timely, long-standing need for scholars of literature to reconcile the quintessential "Irishness" of one of the twentieth century’s most dynamic and famous authors with the hundreds of allusions to America throughout his canon and to also examine the unflagging personal impact that the laws, culture and customs, politics, history, religion, and people of the United States had on his …