Digital Commons Network^™

Historically Marginalized Groups In Psychological Science, Celeste Caviness

Open Access Dissertations

Over the past thirty years there has been a concerted effort to evaluate the inclusion of historically marginalized groups (HMG) – women, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, and low-income individuals – in research. This has been done through content analyses of research literature published in top-tier psychological journals. The purpose of this study was to examine the research literature to assess the degree to which the current literature includes ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities, women, and those of varying socioeconomic status and whether research questions focusing on historically marginalized groups are being examined within mainstream journals. Six issues from 2012 …

Firefighters’ Multimodal Literacy Practices, Timothy R. Amidon

Open Access Dissertations

This study explores the ways that firefighters’ utilize multimodal literacy practices to construct and communicate knowledge in environments where risk is present. Specifically, this dissertation sketches the interrelationships between alphabetic, aural, cognitive, gestural, kinesthetic, oral, tactile, spatial, and visual genres which evolve and circulate within embodied, analog, and digital media on firegrounds. A heuristic research methodology was constructed by borrowing and adapting components from extant multimodal and digital ethnography, community-based research, and writing activity and genre research. Using a range of emergent digital research methods, data was captured during six observational periods wherein 75 participants engaged in live-fire training activities; …

Essays On Social Media And Branding, Gema Vinuales

Open Access Dissertations

Social media have changed the way individuals interact with each other, with corporations and with brands; and thus, the context for brand management. Recognizing the potential of social media to reach massive audiences, brands have become more “social” and embraced the new media; however, many are still struggling to effectively harness their potential. Research has aimed to offer some insights into the emerging social media challenges and have established some differentiated streams of research that serve as a general framework for these dissertation manuscripts. Specifically, we identify WOM communications, online reviews, media channels comparisons, online community influence, and co-creation as …

Haitian Parents' Experiences With The Iep Process And Their Involvement With The Special Education Program, Margarette Mahotiere

Open Access Dissertations

Current literature and recent legislation advocate parental involvement in education as ‘best subsequent reauthorizations practice.’ The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) Amendment of 1997 and its promote parental participation in the special education process by requiring schools to consider parents as equal partners in the development of the Individualized Education Plan (IEP) for students with disabilities. However, parents have reported the process as stressful and confusing. Prior research revealed barriers that marginalize culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) parents to passive roles in the process. Using qualitative methods, this study focused on Haitian parents’ participation in both the IEP process …

Bridging Academic Discourse For Emergent Bilingual Preschoolers: A Spanish-English Dual Language Teacher's Instructional Practices And Extratextual Talk During Shared Readings Across Two Different Genres And Languages, Sabrina F. Sembiante

Open Access Dissertations

This qualitative case study examines the nature of a dual language preschool teacher’s instructional practices and extratextual talk during shared-book reading practices with two different genres of books in Spanish and English. Specifically, I explore the interpersonal, ideational, and textual features of one teacher’s talk in English- and Spanish-language medium book reading activities as she shares and discusses a storybook and a nonnarrative informational book with her emergent bilingual preschool students. The study is guided by the following research questions: (1) How are teachers’ instructional and discourse practices functional for interacting across different genres and in different languages? (a) What …

Lightweight Moral Realism: Objectivity And Reasoning Without Heavyweight Facts, Mark Douglas Warren

Open Access Dissertations

In this dissertation, I develop a non-representational approach to metaethics that avoids the ontological and epistemic problems that traditional realist views face: accounting for the nature of moral facts and our knowledge of these facts in a way that comports with naturalism. According to expressivism—the most popular non-representational account in contemporary metaethics—moral claims don’t aim to represent moral facts or properties, but instead function to express our non-cognitive attitudes like approval or disapproval. This is a promising approach, but the view has substantial difficulties accounting for important features of moral discourse, like objectivity and complicated moral reasoning. I develop an …

Maternal Sensitivity, Maternal Mind-Mindedness, And Infant Socioemotional Functioning: An Examination Of Concurrent Associations, Nancy Ignacia Longoria

Open Access Dissertations

Associations between maternal sensitivity, maternal mind-mindedness, and infant socioemotional (SE) functioning were examined in a sample of 40 mother-infant dyads. Semi-structured home observations were conducted to assess maternal sensitivity and collect maternal ratings of maternal depression and infant SE functioning. Mind-mindedness was assessed during free play and teaching interactions during the home visit. Sensitivity at home was positively associated with mind-mindedness during a free play interaction, but not during a teaching interaction. Neither sensitivity nor mind-mindedness was significantly associated with total infant SE scores, or scores on 3 SE subscales (adaptive functioning, self-regulation, and interaction with people). A trend between …

Reasoning Across Language And Vision In Machines And Humans, Andrei Barbu

Open Access Dissertations

Humans not only outperform AI and computer-vision systems, but use an unknown computational mechanism to perform tasks for which no suitable approaches exist. I present work investigating both novel tasks and how humans approach them in the context of computer vision and linguistics. I demonstrate a system which, like children, acquires high-level linguistic knowledge about the world. Robots learn to play physically-instantiated board games and use that knowledge to engage in physical play. To further integrate language and vision I develop an approach which produces rich sentential descriptions of events depicted in videos. I then show how to simultaneously detect …

The City In Mind: Environmental Literacy And Adaptation In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Adam Edward Watkins

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation argues that a new paradigm of selfhood emerged in nineteenth-century British literature, one that recognized the individual will and environmental influence not as antithetical but as dialectical forces in the formation of the self. The concept of an externally negotiated subject challenges both the inward and socially determined conceptions of self that have dominated the relevant criticism. Informed by empiricist, associationist, and evolutionary theories of the mind, the portrayals of subject-formation in this study highlight the radical changes occurring in the human environment in nineteenth-century, which catalyzed the conception of a malleable yet self-forming subject. Along with the …

"I Have Thought Proper To Inform The World": Reading Unconventional Testaments Of 18th-Century New England Women, Elyssa Tardif

Open Access Dissertations

Early New England women chose to pass down what they owned and valued: clothing, cupboards, pewter dishes, commonplace books, etc. But some women passed down something more: a written testament, which sought to shape public opinion in colonial New England. A "testament" usefully suggests a text that both serves as a witness to lived experience as well as the means by which the individual herself can frame the narrative for those who come after. This project aims to examine not only written records but also their audience: who were the heirs to these testaments and how were the records preserved …

Methods Of Revision In Sixteenth-Century English Cycle Drama, John Case Tompkins

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation contends that guilds-folk in sixteenth-century England made their own changes to the play-texts of civic drama and that these changes remain visible to us in the manuscripts which preserve the plays. Further, it argues that the actors and pageant-makers themselves often made these revisions, rather than the civic or ecclesial authorities traditionally credited for rewriting the pageants. These changes, introduced in production and transferred into the texts, helped keep the plays vibrant and successful throughout most of the sixteenth century and reflect the practical and local concerns of their participants. This work continues the historical investigations into pageant …

Inexorable Burden: Rhetoric And Togetherness, Ethan Sproat Mckay

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation employs philology and cultural analysis to reassess longstanding notions in rhetorical theory and moral philosophy (via classical rhetoric and technical communication). In particular, I use diachronic analyses of the terms telos, symbouleutikon, and sympheron (from Aristotle to present) as a theoretical springboard to reassess more contemporary issues in rhetoric and technical communication. The technical communication topics this dissertation covers include criticisms of expediency as a motive in technical communication; the changing landscape of instruction manual composition; the role of purpose-completion and stakeholder awareness in visual rhetoric; and the futility of advancing ideology-free technical writing pedagogies. More theoretical topics …

Predicting Language Impairment Status: A Risk Factor Model, Johanna Maria Rudolph

Open Access Dissertations

The etiology of specific language impairment (SLI) is multifactorial. Research has shown that genetic, environmental, and developmental factors may influence the course of its development. Because many of these factors are present even before a child is born, it is possible that a child's risk of developing the disorder can be identified long before grammatical deficits are observed. The goal of this study was to develop and validate a screening tool to discriminate between children with SLI and typically developing (TD) children using risk factor information including gender, family history of communication or reading disorders, socioeconomic status, maternal and paternal …

The Role Of Young Hoosier Book Award Nominees In The Classroom: Using Approaches To Multicultural Education As A Lens For Evaluating Literature, Shaylyn Barrie Marks

Open Access Dissertations

This study demonstrates the need for the integration of multiculturalism in the K-12 curriculum as well as provides a heuristic based on the work conducted by Sleeter and Grant (2009) to evaluate literature for level of multiculturalism. In the study, the researcher uses an evaluate heuristic to critically analyze and evaluation ten of the books from the 2011-2012 Young Hoosier Book Award (YHBA) nominee list. The heuristic created for this study is applied to the books appearing on the YHBA nominee list to evaluate each book on an individual basis, but also by association, the types of books that that …

Mispronunciation Detection For Language Learning And Speech Recognition Adaptation, Zhenhao Ge

Open Access Dissertations

The areas of "mispronunciation detection" (or "accent detection" more specifically) within the speech recognition community are receiving increased attention now. Two application areas, namely language learning and speech recognition adaptation, are largely driving this research interest and are the focal points of this work.

There are a number of Computer Aided Language Learning (CALL) systems with Computer Aided Pronunciation Training (CAPT) techniques that have been developed. In this thesis, a new HMM-based text-dependent mispronunciation system is introduced using text Adaptive Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (AFCCs). It is shown that this system outperforms the conventional HMM method based on Mel Frequency Cepstral …

Exploring The Effects Of Conversational Repair As A Scaffolding Strategy To Promote Mathematics Explanations Of Students With Learning Disabilities, Jia Liu

Open Access Dissertations

Conversational repair often occurs in conversations when people attempt to address communicative breakdowns or inaccuracy by way of repeating what have been said or putting them in another way. The review of literature on conversational repair revealed that as an important concept in pragmatic aspect of language, it is an effective strategy to improve communication of different populations with disabilities. However, it is rarely studied in the domain of mathematics and with the population with learning disabilities/difficulties (LD). In current reform-based, discourse-oriented mathematics classrooms, students with LD encounter difficulties articulating or explaining well their reasoning processes due to the mathematical …

Assessing The Preparedness Of The Veterinary Profession To Communicate With Limited English Proficient Spanish-Speaking Pet Owners, Ruth Ellen Landau

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of the present study was to assess the preparedness of the veterinary profession to communicate with limited English proficient Spanish-speaking pet owners (LEP SSPOs). Results of surveys with 393 Latino pet owners, 383 small animal veterinarians and staff, and over 2000 veterinary students indicate that interaction between veterinary professionals and LEP SSPOs is not a rare occurrence: Veterinarians in states with large established or fast-growing Latino communities are seeing LEP SSPOs and their pets on a regular basis: 89% of veterinarians have LEP Spanish-speaking clients, over half of these practitioners are seeing LEP SSPOs weekly, and over half …

Science Classroom Discourse For Fourth Grade English Language Learners' Scientific Literacy Development, Shu-Wen Lan

Open Access Dissertations

Recent research has shown that the construction of science knowledge involves students' development of science understanding and science language, particularly as it relates to intertextual connections to science terminology and concepts that teachers and students make in science classroom discourse. However, up to now, there is little research exploring this development in upper elementary students, including English Language Learners (ELLs). Through a qualitative case study of a fourth grade science classroom with ELLs, this research project investigated science classroom discourse, using the frameworks of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) discourse analysis and intertextual analysis, to understand the nature of science classroom …

The Effect On Cumulative Language Acquisition Increase For English Language Learner Students In Kindergarten Through Third Grade Who Attended Multiple Years Of Summer Remediation Programs, Gregory Anthony Baker

Open Access Dissertations

Baker, Gregory A. Ph.D., Purdue University, December 2013. The Effect On Cumulative Language Acquisition Increase For English Language Learner Students In Kindergarten Through Third Grade Who Attended Multiple Years Of Summer Remediation Programs. Major Professor: Marilyn A. Hirth

Already academically at risk, students in the rapidly growing English Language Learner (ELL) student population in the United States face additional challenges due to regression of English language acquisition over the average ten-week agrarian summer break when they return to homes in which Spanish was the primary language spoken. While the influence of summer learning loss has been investigated in different contexts …

Automatic Identification Of Metaphoric Utterances, Jonathan Edwin Dunn

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the problem of metaphor identification in linguistic and computational semantics, considering both manual and automatic approaches. It describes a manual approach to metaphor identification, the Metaphoricity Measurement Procedure (MMP), and compares this approach with other manual approaches. The dissertation then describes an implemented and simplified version of the procedure, Measuring and Identifiying Metaphor-in-Language (MIMIL), and compares the premises of this system with other automatic metaphor identification systems. MIMIL and three existing metaphor identification systems are then evaluated on a common data set. Finally, the dissertation looks at difficulties which face attempts to automatically identify metaphors caused by …

Support And Barriers To Help Seeking In Latina/O Migrant Workers, Rachel Becker

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation explored help seeking for mental health concerns in migrant workers using a community-based mixed-methods design. Specifically, the study asked two sets of questions; the first explored individual-level predictors of help seeking and the second focused on contextual-level factors related to mental health, well-being, and help seeking. Participants were 95 Latina/o migrant workers living in South Florida. A portion of these individuals participated in the qualitative phase. Hierarchical regression analyses were used to answer the first set of questions. Results indicated informal help seeking was predicted by gender, acculturation, coping strategy, depressive symptomology, and attitudes toward seeking professional help. …

Fragmented Memories: The Archival Turn In Contemporary Caribbean Literature And Visual Culture, Marta Fernandez Campa

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation examines the ways in which contemporary Caribbean visual artists and writers are creating archives of memory that address the erasures of subaltern perspectives characteristic of colonial, and postcolonial, archives. From an interdisciplinary perspective this project looks at the artwork of visual artists Christopher Cozier and Roshini Kempadoo, Dorothea Smartt’s and M. NourbeSe Philip’s poetry and the fiction of Edwidge Danticat and Junot Díaz. Their creative work configures modes of archiving ‘counter-memory’, that is, memory that contradicts or revises official history. By looking at different forms of counter-memory across genres and geographies I aim to demonstrate common aesthetic concerns …

Study Guide For The Role Of Lord Ruthven In Heinrich Marschner's Der Vampyr, Jeffrey James Williams

Open Access Dissertations

The Study Guide for the Role of Lord Ruthven in Heinrich Marschner’s Der Vampyr is designed to thoroughly prepare the performance of Lord Ruthven and promote Heinrich Marschner’s composition beyond the fringes of the operatic repertory. A methodical search of dissertation titles, abstracts, and related studies reveals a lack of preparation, performance, or study guides for Lord Ruthven and other major, compelling characters in opera and music drama. The purpose of this document is to provide a detailed study for the role of Lord Ruthven in Heinrich Marschner’s opera, Der Vampyr. The researcher’s secondary purpose is for this guide to …

The Variety Of Names, Fredrik B. Haraldsen

Open Access Dissertations

I defend a form of semantic pluralism about proper names. Proper names are, like pronouns, singular terms, and as such rigid and semantically simple. Though occurrences of proper names are often directly referential, I argue that proper names also – like pronouns – sustain anaphoric occurrences, in which case the work roughly in the manner of first-order variables. Instead of a unified theory of names in terms of their contributions to propositions expressed by sentences in which they occur, I argue that singular terms are unified in terms of a requirement that they take unstructured values, a requirement issued by …

A Performer's Guide To Karl Amadeus Hartmann's Concertino For Trumpet And Seven Solo Instruments, Leslie Scarpino

Open Access Dissertations

Renowned German symphonist Karl Amadeus Hartmann composed his Concertino for Trumpet with Seven Solo Instruments (Concertino für Trompete mit sieben Soloinstrumenten) early in his compositional career. After its premiere in 1933, the Concertino was lost. It was rediscovered in 2001. The purpose of this essay is to encourage performance of Hartmann’s trumpet concertino and to give an overview of its structure and history. This essay also includes a pedagogical overview of the work.

The Transcriptional Coactivation Function Of E6-Associated Protein In The Brain: Novel Insights Into The Pathobiology Of Angelman Syndrome, Jimmy El Hokayem

Open Access Dissertations

Angelman syndrome (AS) is a complex genetic disorder that affects the nervous system. AS affects an estimated 1 in 12,000 to 20,000 individuals. Characteristic features of AS includes developmental delay or intellectual disability, severe speech impairment, seizures, small head size (microcephaly), and problems with movement and balance (ataxia). AS individuals usually have microdeletion of the maternal copy of 15q11.2 -15q13 region of chromosome 15. The E6-associated protein, E6AP (an E3 ubiquitin protein ligase enzyme) gene, UBE3A is located in this region and it has been shown that deregulation of E6AP gives rise to AS and neuropathology of autism spectrum disorders …

Effect Of A Curricular And Professional Development Intervention On Elementary Teachers’ Science Content Knowledge, Brandon S. Diamond

Open Access Dissertations

Teacher science content knowledge (SCK) is an important but rarely studied construct. The study examined two research questions using two measures of SCK (i.e., knowledge test and questionnaire) in order to explore changes in SCK over time and to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention at improving SCK as compared to the control group of teachers who did not receive the intervention: (1) Did participation in two years of the study have additional benefits over one year of participation? and (2) Did teacher background variables and treatment group (treatment vs. control) predict teacher SCK at the start of the intervention …

Peer Play As A Context For Identifying Profiles Of Children And Examining Rates Of Growth In Academic Readiness For Children Enrolled In Head Start, Elizabeth R. Bell

Open Access Dissertations

Head Start has a unique opportunity to alleviate the negative effects of poverty in young children prior to entry into formal schooling. Research has shown that early interventions are most successful when they have a comprehensive focus that is individualized to children’s needs. In order to maximize children’s early experiences in Head Start, research must identify what types of early learning experiences work best for specific groups of children. The present study employed a child-centered approach to identify profiles, or subgroups, of children displaying early patterns of peer play behaviors in an ethnically and linguistically diverse Head Start program and …

Moral Emotions In Nonhuman Animals, Daniel A. Hampikian

Open Access Dissertations

I defend the view that some nonhuman animals can be morally motivated by empathic emotions. First, I argue that we are justified in ascribing to some animals phenomenal consciousness, the conceptual capacities to represent values and intentional objects, and the relevant behavioral and physiological similarities to human emotional states. Subsequently, I argue for a model of basic emotions that I call the Awareness of Physiological Vehicles (APV) account. According to the APV account, an animal’s emotion is best thought of as a focal awareness of an intentional object and a peripheral awareness of sensations of physiological states as indicators of …

The Role Of Teacher Commitment And Burnout In Predicting Outcomes Of Preschoolers With Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Multilevel Structural Equation Approach, Drew Carson Coman

Open Access Dissertations

The recent economic downturn and political climate within the federal government has threatened special education resources for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The literature suggests that one consequence may be teacher burnout; a syndrome shown to have detrimental effects on the educational outcomes of students. The aims of this study were to investigate burnout in three groups (i.e., TEACCH, LEAP, and HQSEP) of high fidelity preschool teachers, its associations with teacher commitment to philosophy, and the potential effects on the social and communicative functioning in preschoolers with ASD. A sample of 75 teachers and 198 students were investigated within …