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My Journey Toward A Culturally Relevant Music Pedagogy, Adam Michael Steele Oct 2023

My Journey Toward A Culturally Relevant Music Pedagogy, Adam Michael Steele

Theses and Dissertations

In this study I utilized critical autoethnography to examine my role as a White, male implementing Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) in an early childhood music classrooms. Five research questions were posed: (a) In what ways does White supremacy appear in an elementary music school curriculum? (b) What curricular transformations occur when I, as a White teacher, seek to make my curriculum more relevant to students of Color? (c) What dispositional transformations occur when I, as a White teacher, seek to make my music curriculum more relevant to students of Color? (d) What happens when students of Color engage in a …

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Critical Literacy And Self Efficacy Among Secondary Students Repeatedly Engaged In Literacy Intervention, Haley Rowles Oct 2023

Critical Literacy And Self Efficacy Among Secondary Students Repeatedly Engaged In Literacy Intervention, Haley Rowles

Theses and Dissertations

This mixed-methods study investigated how critical literacy questioning impacted the self-efficacy of secondary students who had been repeatedly engaged in literacy intervention because of failed standardized assessments as well as the teacher experience in using critical literacy questioning. The study was conducted over four and a half weeks in a secondary literacy intervention classroom. Data was collected using surveys, observations, and interviews, which were analyzed through inductive coding. The results of the study indicate that critical literacy questioning, on average, increased student self-efficacy under certain conditions. It also illustrated that the use of critical literacy questioning, which sometimes leads to …

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Measuring School Bullying Experiences Among Chinese Middle School Students: The Structural And Predictive Validity Of Bullyharm-China, Jingyi Yang Oct 2023

Measuring School Bullying Experiences Among Chinese Middle School Students: The Structural And Predictive Validity Of Bullyharm-China, Jingyi Yang

Theses and Dissertations

Bullying is a growing concern in China, yet few measures have been validated to assess different types of bullying among Chinese children. Despite a wealth of evidence on the negative effects of bullying victimization, how gender influences the experience of specific bullying behavior is under-examined. The present study thus aims to adapt and validate the initial BullyHARM scale, as well as explore the predictive validity of six types of bullying for male and female Chinese youth. BullyHARM has previously been shown to be a reliable scale for measuring six bullying domains (i.e., physical, verbal, social/relational, cyber, property, sexual) among children …

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How Do The Students Feel? Long-Term English Learners And Their Experience Under The Esl Label, Molly M. Staeheli Oct 2023

How Do The Students Feel? Long-Term English Learners And Their Experience Under The Esl Label, Molly M. Staeheli

Theses and Dissertations

Far too many English learners in my district enter elementary school as non-native speakers, gradually developing skills only to plateau at early intermediate levels as determined by the annual proficiency exam. As these students become long-term English learners (LTELs) in junior high, the pattern of failing and retaking the test wears on them, likely exacerbated by the district-mandated curriculum for English language development (ELD) classes. Unit topics such as money matters and U.S. national monuments at advanced levels fail to tap into students’ lived experiences. I responded to this problem of practice through mixed-methods action research, beginning with a quantitative …

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Decentering The White Gaze: The Effects Of Involving African-American Students In Curricular Decision-Making In An Independent School Library, Michelle Efird Rosen Oct 2023

Decentering The White Gaze: The Effects Of Involving African-American Students In Curricular Decision-Making In An Independent School Library, Michelle Efird Rosen

Theses and Dissertations

Many Black students at independent schools across the nation spend most of their educational lives with few classmates or teachers who look like them. This isolation is exacerbated by a curriculum that historically has taught to a White standard of excellence. Long the bastion of wealthy, White families, independent schools have generally failed to make headway in their efforts to recruit Black families to their campuses. This has left Black students with the burden of finding their own methods of adapting to a predominantly White school environment. This study sought to determine how involving four African-American fourth-grade students in a …

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Investigation Of Discrepancies In South Carolina Traffic Collision Forms, Jackson Wegmet Oct 2023

Investigation Of Discrepancies In South Carolina Traffic Collision Forms, Jackson Wegmet

Theses and Dissertations

The aim of this thesis is to improve the accuracy of information recorded in the South Carolina traffic collision forms. To accomplish this, it examines 200 forms containing information about fatal crashes in work zones between 2014 and 2020 to determine how many discrepancies exist between the written narrative and other fields. In addition to obtaining these statistics, this thesis seeks to identify factors that influence discrepancies. To test the hypothesis that crash complexity and weather influence the investigating officer’s level of processing (a theory developed by Craik and Lockhart in 1972), and consequentially his/her ability to complete the traffic …

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Pursuing Culturally Responsive Math Teaching By Secondary Math Educators: A Professional Development Action Research Study, Emily Bell Redding Oct 2023

Pursuing Culturally Responsive Math Teaching By Secondary Math Educators: A Professional Development Action Research Study, Emily Bell Redding

Theses and Dissertations

This action research study examines the use of professional development to build the self-efficacy of secondary math teachers in culturally responsive mathematics teaching (CRMT), with the hope to address achievement gaps of Black and Hispanic students. Seven math teachers from a school division in Southwest Virginia participated in a 9-week professional development that included virtual meetings to learn about CRMT, collaboration with colleagues, classroom applications, and self-reflection. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected throughout the 9 weeks in the forms of questionnaires, meeting transcripts, and reflection journals. The research study results found the professional development to build teacher self-efficacy, especially …

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Structure V-1: A Mississippian Mica Workshop In Kershaw County, South Carolina, John Mclellan Dodge Oct 2023

Structure V-1: A Mississippian Mica Workshop In Kershaw County, South Carolina, John Mclellan Dodge

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reanalyzes the pottery assemblage of Structure V-1 at the Mulberry site (38KE12). Because Structure V-1 was originally hypothesized to be evidence of a late seventeenth century occupation at the Mulberry site, the framework I use for this research focuses on identifying evidence of community coalescence after Mulberry’s initial occupation ended. However, new evidence from both the pottery and radiocarbon analysis conclusively dates the structure to around the sixteenth century Mulberry I phase. With that new date in mind, I explore the role mica craft production within Structure V-1 might have had in linking the community at Mulberry to …

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Decoding Trustworthiness And Helpfulness Of Online Reviews In Hospitality: A Reader-Centric Perspective, Xiaonan Zhang Oct 2023

Decoding Trustworthiness And Helpfulness Of Online Reviews In Hospitality: A Reader-Centric Perspective, Xiaonan Zhang

Theses and Dissertations

Online review is an ongoing popular topic for both researchers and practitioners. Consumers’ decision-making is largely influenced by the online reviews, especially those that are perceived as trustworthy and helpful given the information overload issue and existence of fake reviews. This dissertation consists of three independent but closely related studies focusing on trustworthiness and helpfulness of online reviews in hospitality industry. The objectives of this dissertation are to explore the factors affecting review trustworthiness and helpfulness as identified in previous research and determine their relevance to consumers' real-world reading and decision-making experiences, as well as the impact of message framing …

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Eugene O’Neill Returns: Theatrical Modernization And O’Neill Adaptations In 1980s China, Shuying Chen Oct 2023

Eugene O’Neill Returns: Theatrical Modernization And O’Neill Adaptations In 1980s China, Shuying Chen

Theses and Dissertations

After nearly vanishing from the Chinese literary world map for thirty years from 1949 to 1979, Eugene O’Neill’s works underwent a reevaluation and resurgence in the reform era of the 1980s. This decade witnessed a wide range of introductions to, research on, translations, and productions of O’Neill’s play in the Chinese theatrical and cultural landscape. Chinese theater practitioners staged some thirty adaptations of O’Neill’s works in both domains of spoken drama and traditional opera, including productions by colleges, state-owned troupes, and independent theater groups. This dissertation contextualizes some of O’Neill adaptations in the socio-cultural context of the transitional period and …

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Unveiling The Lifeworld Of Educators’ Social Justice Journeys: A Phenomenological Investigation, Maria Rocas Halkias Oct 2023

Unveiling The Lifeworld Of Educators’ Social Justice Journeys: A Phenomenological Investigation, Maria Rocas Halkias

Theses and Dissertations

The aim of this qualitative phenomenological action research was to explore the viewpoints of educators participating in a community of practice that integrates the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework with culturally responsive teaching and personalized learning. The study involved six teachers from a competitive public school district in New Jersey. Data collection methods encompassed weekly reflections, researcher’s field notes, audio-recorded sessions, and interviews. The study yielded valuable insights into organizational frameworks and learning strategies that enhance educators’ ongoing reflective practices, while also advocating for districts to allocate resources to support teachers' continuous personalized professional development. Analysis of the findings …

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The Effect Of Music Therapy Interventions For Early Adolescents With Special Needs To Improve On-Task Behaviors, Shuolin Kong Sep 2023

The Effect Of Music Therapy Interventions For Early Adolescents With Special Needs To Improve On-Task Behaviors, Shuolin Kong

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated the effects of music therapy intervention on on-task behaviors of early adolescents with autism spectrum disorder and/or intellectual disabilities. A within-subject research design was used with four early adolescents diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and/or intellectual disabilities from a Junior high school in the United States. Four school-age students from one classroom (N=4, male= 2, female= 2, mean ages =11.75 years) were selected and assigned to attend two alternated treatment conditions: four group non-music therapy sessions (Treatment A) and four group music therapy sessions (Treatment B). A security video camera recorded the duration of on-task behaviors under …

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Illuminating The Ozarks: A View Of Ozark Mountain Culture Through The Lens Of Regional Craft, Jessica Erwin Sep 2023

Illuminating The Ozarks: A View Of Ozark Mountain Culture Through The Lens Of Regional Craft, Jessica Erwin

Theses and Dissertations

The Ozarks Mountain region has a rich and lengthy cultural heritage. This heritage includes the creation of crafts with attributes unique to the Ozarks. In 1978 the Ozarks Regional Commission, a federal-state partnership, conducted a survey of crafts and craftsmen in the Ozarks. This thesis examines using digitized images of 35mm slides from the report Crafts: The Human Dimension to build a web exhibit about the history and culture of the Ozarks Mountain Region. The topics covered include geography, migration patterns, and craft items of the region.

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Print Versus Electronic: A Mixed-Method Exploration Of Student Preferences At Marathon University, Jennifer King Matthews Sep 2023

Print Versus Electronic: A Mixed-Method Exploration Of Student Preferences At Marathon University, Jennifer King Matthews

Theses and Dissertations

Academic libraries have been adapting and changing their collections with technology. Often, this technology has accompanied a conversion from physical collections, such as print books to electronic collections and electronic books. This mixed methods case study aimed to understand how first-generation college students at a public research university use print books versus electronic books. Data was collected using a survey based on the Academic Reading Questionnaire (Mizrachi, 2015) to assess the attitudes of both first-generation college students and continuing-generation college students towards these materials in the Marathon University Library collection. A qualitative semi-structured interview was also conducted, which focused on …

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Afl Students’ Perception Of Using Mnemonics As A Strategy To Enhance Their Vocabulary Acquisition And Retention, Elsayed Elsisi Sep 2023

Afl Students’ Perception Of Using Mnemonics As A Strategy To Enhance Their Vocabulary Acquisition And Retention, Elsayed Elsisi

Theses and Dissertations

Research in the field of language teaching and learning reveals that mnemonics is one of the most effective language learning strategies for vocabulary. Researchers like Rasiban, et al. (2019); Levin (1993); Zulfa (2019); Kayaaltu (2018) suggest that using mnemonics to learn new vocabulary has a positive effect on vocabulary retention and retrieval. Research also shows however that students’ perceptions may encourage or inhibit the usage of any learning strategy depending on their perceptions of its effectiveness. Hence the importance of detecting learner perception about any learning or teaching device. Despite the above there is limited research about students’ perceptions about …

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South Sudanese And Syrian Refugee Community-Based Organizations In Egypt: Contributions To Resilience And Reduction Of Socioeconomic Vulnerabilities, Alaa Kasmo Sep 2023

South Sudanese And Syrian Refugee Community-Based Organizations In Egypt: Contributions To Resilience And Reduction Of Socioeconomic Vulnerabilities, Alaa Kasmo

Theses and Dissertations

Community-based organizations (CBOs) have emerged as crucial actors in aid delivery of global efforts, including in Egypt, where they have gained recent attention. However, CBOs’ contributions to supporting displaced communities in Egypt must be adequately investigated. This thesis examines aspects of these contributions to resilience and the reduction of socioeconomic vulnerabilities for displaced communities in Egypt. The qualitative research approach presents comprehensive case studies of interviews and focus group discussions with CBO leaders and communities, providing data on four of the Syrian and South Sudanese CBOs and their communities’ experiences and perspectives on these contributions. CBOs enhance resilience and reduce …

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"The Trees Act Not As Individuals"--Learning To See The Whole Picture In Biology Education And Remote Sensing Research, Rebeka A.F. Greenall Aug 2023

"The Trees Act Not As Individuals"--Learning To See The Whole Picture In Biology Education And Remote Sensing Research, Rebeka A.F. Greenall

Theses and Dissertations

To increase equity and inclusion for underserved and excluded Indigenous students, we must make efforts to mitigate the unique barriers they face. As their knowledge systems have been historically excluded and erased in Western science, we begin by reviewing the literature on the inclusion of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in biology education and describe best practices. Next, to better understand how Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander (NHPI) students integrate into the scientific community, we used Social Influence Theory as a framework to measure NHPI student science identity, self-efficacy, alignment with science values, and belonging. We also investigated how students …

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Interference Between Speaking And Computer Tasks In Younger And Older Adults, Paige Elise Asay Aug 2023

Interference Between Speaking And Computer Tasks In Younger And Older Adults, Paige Elise Asay

Theses and Dissertations

This study examined the effects of computer tasks on speech acoustic measures and the effects of speaking on computer task performance in 30 younger and 30 older adults. Participants completed a speech only task, two computer tasks, and simultaneous speaking and computer tasks. Stimulus sentences included the four corner vowels and two diphthongs embedded between voiceless consonants. Acoustic measures of speech included diphthong transition extent and rate as well as vowel space area (VSA) and vowel articulation index (VAI). A text formatting task included two levels of difficulty. A data entry task included sorting items from a shopping list into …

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Critical Engagements With Award Winning Picturebooks: My Journey In Creating A More Equitable Classroom Library, Carrie Elizabeth Crowe Aug 2023

Critical Engagements With Award Winning Picturebooks: My Journey In Creating A More Equitable Classroom Library, Carrie Elizabeth Crowe

Theses and Dissertations

Research consistently shows that students from historically marginalized populations have difficulty accessing texts that represent the realities of their lives. Concerned that such might be the case for my students, I conducted an inventory of my classroom library and sought out award-winning texts that could make my library more diverse and inclusive. I then analyzed these award-winning texts using Bishop's (1992) categories of multicultural literature in order to better understand the picturebooks' underlying messages and ideologies. My examinations showed that the majority of the texts fit into the same category (culturally specific), though I was able to identify award-winning texts …

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The Connection Between Linguistic Insecurity And Cultural Identity In Spanish Heritage Language Learners, Sara Nicole Gardner Aug 2023

The Connection Between Linguistic Insecurity And Cultural Identity In Spanish Heritage Language Learners, Sara Nicole Gardner

Theses and Dissertations

The United States is a host to several ethnicities that bring both their own languages and their own culture to an already large mixing pot. The children of the immigrants who grow up learning both English and their families' heritage language are called heritage language learners (HLLs). The first objective of the study was to find out whether foreign language anxiety had a relationship with reading and writing in Spanish for HLLs in high school. The second was to ascertain whether perception of ethnic identity also had a relationship with reading and writing in Spanish for heritage language learners in …

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Semantically Structured Creative Computer Systems & Automated Evaluation Of Creative Artifacts, Brad Spendlove Aug 2023

Semantically Structured Creative Computer Systems & Automated Evaluation Of Creative Artifacts, Brad Spendlove

Theses and Dissertations

Computational creativity seeks, in part, to develop autonomous agents that exhibit creativity. Language is an ideal creative domain for studying computer agents due to its rich interconnectedness and immense space of possible combinations. This dissertation explores the design, testing, and theory of creative computer systems that write microfiction and play the board game Codenames. The designs of these systems are all similarly based on building up creative artifacts from the underlying structure of the relationships between words. A critical component of the creative process is the ability to evaluate the quality of creative output. Human and automated assessment of our …

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Open Liver Open Lung: Elaborate Expressions In White Hmong, Luke Walker Packer Aug 2023

Open Liver Open Lung: Elaborate Expressions In White Hmong, Luke Walker Packer

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a description of four-word elaborate expressions in White Hmong, a Hmong-Mienh language spoken in the northern mountains of Southeast Asia. The goal of this work is to describe the behavior, characteristics, and functions of the expressions using data from the White Hmong-English Dictionary (Heimbach 1980). A native speaker helped find 318 examples of elaborate expressions in the dictionary. Elaborate expressions have previously been described as "a balanced group of four words in which the first and third element, and the second and fourth element, are either identical to each other or share a common meaning and often …

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Examining The Validity Of A Dynamic Assessment Of Narrative Language To Identify Language Disorder In Diverse School-Age Children, Samantha Kate Rainsdon Meek Aug 2023

Examining The Validity Of A Dynamic Assessment Of Narrative Language To Identify Language Disorder In Diverse School-Age Children, Samantha Kate Rainsdon Meek

Theses and Dissertations

The United States is a culturally and linguistically diverse country. Few assessments used in educational settings have been developed that can be used appropriately with culturally and linguistically diverse students, and research has shown that static, norm-referenced assessments are often biased against these students. One alternative method that shows great promise for overcoming the limitations of static, norm-referenced tests is dynamic assessment. Despite the research and recommendations that support the use of dynamic assessments, relatively few dynamic assessments have been formally developed for the purpose of identifying language disorder. Therefore, the current study sought to determine the validity of a …

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The Student Becomes The Teacher: Training High-Performance Language Models More Sample-Efficiently From Small Models Via Superstilling, Chaz Allen Gundry Aug 2023

The Student Becomes The Teacher: Training High-Performance Language Models More Sample-Efficiently From Small Models Via Superstilling, Chaz Allen Gundry

Theses and Dissertations

Recent advances including the Transformer architecture have revolutionized the Natural Language Processing community by providing immense performance improvements across many tasks, including the development of Large Language Models (LLMs). LLMs show enormous promise as few-shot learners, common-sense knowledge repositories, conversational agents, writing assistants, and coding tools, and are gaining widespread traction in commercial industry. However, LLMs are expensive and time-consuming to train, requiring many passes over terabytes of data for the largest models. In this paper, we present Superstilling, a method for reducing the sample complexity of language model training by distilling the knowledge from a previously-trained model (the teacher) …

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Code Switching Use, Attitudes, And Identity: Differences Among Spanish-English Bilinguals In Canada, Mexico, And The United States, Ana Sofia Rubalcava Karmanov Aug 2023

Code Switching Use, Attitudes, And Identity: Differences Among Spanish-English Bilinguals In Canada, Mexico, And The United States, Ana Sofia Rubalcava Karmanov

Theses and Dissertations

Code-switching (CS) has been extensively studied for a variety of purposes and under many contexts. In recent years there has been a shift in CS literature to better understand the sociological forces that affect speakers’ use of CS. While in earlier literature, CS was perceived negatively by both speakers and the general public (Milroy & Muysken, 1995; MacGregor-Mendoza, 2021; Anderson & Toribio, 2007; Fishman, 1967), it has since been shown that many bilinguals view CS positively. More recent research suggests that bilinguals perceive CS as an important part of their identity and use it to show they belong to particular …

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Grief In Children With Disabilities And How It Is Portrayed In Children's Picture Books, Erjola Gjini Aug 2023

Grief In Children With Disabilities And How It Is Portrayed In Children's Picture Books, Erjola Gjini

Theses and Dissertations

Even though today's children's literature provides a wide range of topics, including books on death and grief, and much has been done to represent children with disabilities accurately and positively, there is still room for improvement. This descriptive study sought to understand how individuals with disabilities were represented in 177 grief-themed children's books from 1965-2023. From the results, only seven books included representations of individuals with disabilities. Additionally, the literary devices such as euphemisms or metaphors utilized in the books to describe how death was represented may inadvertently perpetuate inaccessibility to resources about grief (Berns, 2004). Thus, when choosing books …

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Who Is Talking About The Children? A Systematic Literature Review Of The Missing And Murdered Indigenous Women Crisis Effects On Children, Angela Marcel Fields Aug 2023

Who Is Talking About The Children? A Systematic Literature Review Of The Missing And Murdered Indigenous Women Crisis Effects On Children, Angela Marcel Fields

Theses and Dissertations

The ongoing Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) crisis has affected thousands of families throughout the United States and Canada, resulting in probable trauma to children in the families and communities for generations. Although awareness of the crisis has been growing in recent years through avenues such as social media (#MMIW, etc.), little action has been taken to stem the crisis and its effects. The effects of the crisis on the children left behind is a compelling question that is not often addressed in the media, however. A systematic review of the scientific literature from the United States and Canada …

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The -Go Morpheme And Reference Tracking In Jicarilla Apache, Lee Shanideen Ferrin Aug 2023

The -Go Morpheme And Reference Tracking In Jicarilla Apache, Lee Shanideen Ferrin

Theses and Dissertations

Jicarilla Apache is a Southern Athabaskan language with a complex verbal structure, including a prefix template with positions for more than ten affixes. Little has been done to document or describe the language grammatically or typologically, but one of the morphemes that has been described in the literature is the suffix -go. The morpheme can be found in elicited speech as well as in narrations. This morpheme is one of the few verbal affixes that can appear after the verb stem and plays a role in many subordinate clause constructions. It has been described as a temporal marker, a feature …

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Benefits And Challenges Of Computer-Assisted L2 Chinese Learning In Higher Education, Min Hu Aug 2023

Benefits And Challenges Of Computer-Assisted L2 Chinese Learning In Higher Education, Min Hu

Theses and Dissertations

The first article is a literature review that analyzed 32 articles on computer-assisted L2 Chinese learning in higher education from 2005-2021. Findings revealed current trends, such as mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) and the use of Web 2.0 technologies, and the importance of speaking as the most researched language skill. Most studies employed mixed methods and showed the positive effects of computer-assisted learning on L2 Chinese skills. Challenges identified included limited access to technology, technical difficulties, lack of time and support, and insufficient online/blended pedagogies and competencies. The second article used Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behavior to examine L2 Chinese instructors' …

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Survey Of Reading Habits And Dialogic Book Reading Practices In Parents Of Preschool-Aged Children, Kimberly Cronin Aug 2023

Survey Of Reading Habits And Dialogic Book Reading Practices In Parents Of Preschool-Aged Children, Kimberly Cronin

Theses and Dissertations

This study explored the reading habits and dialogic book reading practices in parents of preschool-aged children. Early literacy practices in the home influence the development of language skills and academic learning of children. These practices were explored by directly by asking parents to reflect and report on their literacy habits in the home setting. It specifically addresses current reading behaviors that parents implement when reading with their child and observations of their child's attention and involvement during book-sharing sessions. This study was part of a larger study focusing on developing and implementing dialogic reading workshops for parents. A survey with …

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