Digital Commons Network^™

Educational Assessment: Exploring The Relationship Between Computer Adaptive Testing, Data Analysis, And Student Achievement, Michael Donhost

College of Education Theses and Dissertations

The research on the potential relationship of the Northwest Evaluation Association's Measures of Academic Progress (NWEA MAP) and the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) was conducted in two phases and focused on middle schools with a grade configuration of 6-8 in the state of Illinois. The first phase of the research examined whether or not a significant relationship existed between NWEA MAP test participation by middle schools in Illinois, and ISAT growth over time. A total of 86 schools were involved in the research associated with Phase 1. The second phase of the study aimed to find out if the …

The Effect Of Enrollment In Middle School Challenge Courses On Advanced Placement Exams In Social Studies And Science, Katherine Glaude-Bolte

Dissertations

Educators seek to guide students through appropriate programs and courses that prepare them for future success, in more advanced coursework and in other challenges of life. Some middle schools offer Challenge, or honors, courses for students who have demonstrated high ability. High schools often offer Advanced Placement (AP) courses, which are taught at the college level. This study examined the correlation between enrollment in middle school Challenge courses and subsequent AP exam category scores in social studies and science in a suburban school district. The independent variables were the number of years of enrollment in middle school social studies or …

Bandwidth Tuning Triggers Interplay Of Charge Order And Superconductivity In Two-Dimensional Organic Materials, S. Kaiser, M. Dressel, Y. Sun, A. Greco, J. A. Schlueter, Gary L. Gard, N. Drichko

Chemistry Faculty Publications and Presentations

We observe charge-order fluctuations in the quasi-two-dimensional organic superconductor β″-(BEDT-TTF)₂SF₅CH₂CF₂SO₃, both by means of vibrational spectroscopy, locally probing the fluctuating charge order, and by investigating the in-plane dynamical response by infrared reflectance spectroscopy. The decrease of the effective electronic interaction in an isostructural metal suppresses both charge-order fluctuations and superconductivity, pointing to their interplay. We compare the results of our experiments with calculations on the extended Hubbard model.

Framework For Optimizing Intelligence Collection Requirements, Khiem Tong

Theses

In the military, typical mission execution goes through cycles of intelligence collection and action planning phases. For complex operations where many parameters affect the outcomes of the mission, several steps may be taken for intelligence collection before the optimal Course of Action is actually carried out. Human analytics suggests the steps of: (1) anticipating plausible futures, (2) determining information requirements, and (3) optimize the choice of feasible and cost-effective intelligence requirements. This work formalizes this process by developing a decision support tool to determine information requirements needed to differentiate critical plausible futures, and formulating a mixed integer programming problem to …

A Look Into The Future Of Wireless Mobile Communication Technologies, Jisun Kim, Tugrul Unsal Daim, Timothy R. Anderson

Engineering and Technology Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

The number of wireless mobile communication service subscribers has reached 4.6 billion worldwide in 2009, and mobile revenues are expected to be over $1 trillion around 2012 according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) (ITU, 2010). A significant number of studies have been done to forecast the growing market and evaluate the new generation technology, the Beyond 3 Generation (B3G). However, there is no study forecasting when any of these new technologies will be commercialized. This paper presents a technical framework for forecasting the commercialization timeline of B3G technologies and provides insight on technology trajectories from 1G to 4G. The …

Interdisciplinary: Feminist Teaching, Research And Activism, Jamie P. Ross

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Feminists' interdisciplinary work is a critical response to claims that disciplinary expertise provides real knowledge. Interdisciplinary teaching, research, and activism emerge in opposition to claims that only certain kinds of ideas are valuable. This paper will briefly delineate those concepts that have created an intellectual tradition that does not recognize the political and strategic elements entailed by all knowledge formation. Feminist activism is a reaction to the narrowly defined boundaries of what counts as a good idea. The distinction between passive and active knowledge acquisition allows us to view feminist teaching, research, and activism as active, ongoing engagements that emerge …

Accelerated Erosion Of Saltmarshes Infested By The Non-Native Burrowing Crustacean Sphaeroma Quoianum, Timothy Mathias Davidson, Catherine E. De Rivera

Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Lateral erosion of saltmarshes is affected by many abiotic and biotic factors. While abiotic factors are typically regarded as primary drivers of erosion, biotic influences such as burrowing or bioturbating taxa can also extensively modify the physical structure of this marine habitat. Many estuaries on the Pacific coast of North America have been invaded by populations of the burrowing non-native isopod Sphaeroma quoianum, which are thought to exacerbate the erosion of saltmarshes. We conducted a mensurative experiment to examine the relationship between populations of S. quoianum and lateral erosion rate of saltmarshes in Coos Bay, Oregon, USA. After 1 …

Social Sciences Career Exploration Day And Resume Workshop, Tara Litke, Matthew Greenberg, Haley Zahner

Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

Instrumental Concerto Competition Finals, Kevin Droe, Coordinator, November 1, 2010 [Program], University Of Northern Iowa. School Of Music.

Music Recital Programs

Program of a music recital given by faculty, students, or guest artists from the School of Music at the University of Northern Iowa.

Evaluating Summer School Programs And The Effect On Student Achievement: The Correlation Between Stanford-10 Standardized Test Scores And Two Different Summer Programs, Brian J. Koop

Dissertations

School districts looking for ways to minimize summer learning loss have implemented a variety of programs to combat this problem. Since No Child Left Behind and the need for school districts to meet the goals of Adequate Yearly Progress, it is no longer enough to limit summer learning loss. Now school leaders find it necessary to use the summer months to increase student achievement and prepare students for rigorous learning in the coming school year. This collaborative, quantitative study is an examination of one district’s attempt to improve summer programming in order to meet the need for increased student achievement. …

Effects Of Hurricane Katrina On Freshwater Fish Assemblages In A Small Coastal Tributary Of Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, Martin O'Connell

Earth and Environmental Sciences Faculty Publications

Hurricane Katrina struck southeastern Louisiana on 29 August 2005 and thereby created an opportunity to examine the effects of a catastrophic storm on fish assemblages in a coastal stream. Bayou Lacombe is a small (46.1 river kilometers), primarily freshwater stream that drains into the northeastern portion of Lake Pontchartrain, a large oligohaline estuary located north of New Orleans. In summer 2005 (prior to the hurricane), three upstream and three downstream reaches of Bayou Lacombe were surveyed by electrofishing. These same six reaches were resurveyed in the summer of 2006 to assess the effects of the hurricane on fish assemblages. There …

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Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

From The Reference Desk-Reviews Of Reference Titles, Tom Gilson

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

William Carlos Williams, David Raphael Wang, And The Dynamic Of East/West Collaboration, Zhaoming Qian

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Tree-Based Algorithms For Computing K-Combinations And K-Compositions, Shant Karakashian, Berthe Y. Choueiry

School of Computing: Technical Reports

In this document, we describe two tree-based algorithms for computing all k-combinations and k-compositions of a finite set.

We have developed two algorithms for solving the following combinatorial tasks:

• Given a finite set S and a natural number k, find all subsets of S of size k. In the literature, this problem is called k-subsets and k-combinations.

• Given two natural numbers k, n where k [less than or equal to] n, find all k-compositions of n where a k-composition is an ordered combination of k nonzero natural numbers whose sum is n. Note that in the literature, a …

Fluoride-Promoted Ligand Exchange In Diaryliodonium Salts, Bijia Wang, Ronald Cerny, Shriharsha Uppaluri, Jayson J. Kempinger, Stephen G. Dimagno

Stephen DiMagno Papers

Diaryliodonium salts are shown to undergo rapid, fluoride-promoted aryl exchange reactions at room temperature in acetonitrile. Aryl exchange is shown to be exquisitely sensitive to the concentration of fluoride ion in solution; fast exchange is observed as the fluoride concentration approaches a stoichiometric amount at 50 mM substrate concentration. The reaction is slowed, but not halted if benzene is the solvent, indicating that free fluoride ion or a four-coordinate anionic I(III) species may be responsible for the exchange. The fluoride-promoted aryl exchange reaction is general and allows direct measurement of the relative stabilities of diaryliodonium salts featuring different aryl substituents. …

Using Focus Groups In Preliminary Instrument Development: Expected And Unexpected Lessons Learned, Slyvia C. Nassar-Mcmillan, Mary Wyer, Maria Oliver-Hoyo, Amy Ryder-Burge

The Qualitative Report

Focus groups can be utilized effectively across various stages of instrument development. This article details selected aspects of a process in which they were employed at the initial stages of item generation and refinement in a study of occupational stereotyping. The process yielded rich contextual information about the worldview and corresponding terminology of participants. In addition, the use of a tool developed and previously employed as an approach to clinical case notes (i.e., SOAP notes), produced surprising benefits in documenting the focus group data. The purpose of this paper is to describe this process and highlight the insights that emerged. …

Autonomous Robot Patrolling Of A Sparsely Populated Unknown Environment, Patrick Larocque

Theses

The increasing availability and affordability of autonomous robots has expanded their uses for many new applications, such as exploration, surveillance and threat containment. Most research considers a team of a large number of robots that contain global information. This work explores distributed and low overhead algorithms for patrolling and threat containment within a region sparsely populated with few robots. The robots patrol the area without the global knowledge of the region, but each is equipped with an omni-directional range finder and a positioning system for keeping track of its location and metering distance and directions of events. This study presents …

Characterization Of Two-Phase Flow In A Transparent Pem Fuel Cell Using Simultaneous Anode And Cathode Visualization And Digital Image Processing, Jacqueline Sergi

Theses

Proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells have emerged as a potential alternative to internal combustion engines in order to curb dependency on fossil fuels and reduce harmful CO₂ emissions. Water management has been identified as a key research area for the advancement of PEM fuel cell technology, especially as it affects the purge protocol prior to cell shutdown. The presence of water in the cell is necessary to sustain membrane hydration, but the accumulation of excess liquid water, referred to as flooding, can lead to increased mass transport losses and reductions in performance and durability. In this work, a …

Efficient Mining Of Multiple Partial Near-Duplicate Alignments By Temporal Network, Hung-Khoon Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper considers the mining and localization of near-duplicate segments at arbitrary positions of partial near-duplicate videos in a corpus. Temporal network is proposed to model the visual-temporal consistency between video sequence by embedding temporal constraints as directed edges in the network. Partial alignment is then achieved through network flow programming. To handle multiple alignments, we consider two properties of network structure: conciseness and divisibility, to ensure that the mining is efficient and effective. Frame-level matching is further integrated in the temporal network for alignment verification. This results in an iterative alignment-verification procedure to fine tune the localization of near-duplicate …

An Analytic Characterization Of Model Minimization In Factored Markov Decision Processes, Guo W., Tze-Yun Leong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Model minimization in Factored Markov Decision Processes (FMDPs) is concerned with finding the most compact partition of the state space such that all states in the same block are action-equivalent. This is an important problem because it can potentially transform a large FMDP into an equivalent but much smaller one, whose solution can be readily used to solve the original model. Previous model minimization algorithms are iterative in nature, making opaque the relationship between the input model and the output partition. We demonstrate that given a set of well-defined concepts and operations on partitions, we can express the model minimization …

Smu-Sis At Tac 2010 - Kbp Track Entity Linking, Swapna Gottipati, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Entity linking task is a process of linking the named entity within the unstructured text to the entity in the Knowledge Base. Entity liking to the relevant knowledge is useful in various information extraction and natural language processing applications that improve the user experiences such as search, summarization and so on. We propose the two way entity linking approach to reformulate query, disambiguate the entity and link to the relevant KB repository. This paper describes the details of our participation in TAC 2010 - Knowledge Base Population track. We provided an innovative approach to disambiguate the entity by query reformulation …

The Impact Of Social Media On Software Engineering Practices And Tools, Margaret-Anne Storey, Christoph Treude, Arie Van Deursen, Li-Te Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Today's generation of software developers frequently make use of social media, either as an adjunct or integrated into a wide range of tools ranging from code editors and issue trackers, to IDEs and web-based portals. The role of social media usage in software engineering is not well understood, and yet the use of these mechanisms influences software development practices. In this position paper, we advocate for research that strives to understand the benefits, risks and limitations of using social media in software development at the team, project and community levels. Guided by the implications of current tools and social media …

Arivu: Power-Aware Middleware For Multiplayer Mobile Games, Bhojan Anand, Karthik Thirugnanam, Thanh Long Le, Duc-Dung Pham, Akhihebbal L. Ananda, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Mun Choon Chan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the improved processing power, graphic quality and high-speed wireless connection in recent generations of mobile phone, it looks more attractive than ever to introduce networked games on these devices. While device features and application resource requirements are rapidly growing, the battery technologies are not growing at the same pace. Networked Mobile games are a class of application, which consume higher levels of energy, as they are naturally more computationally intensive and use hardware components including audio, display and network to their fullest capacities. Therefore, the main concern is the limitation of the battery power of such portable devices to …

Gait Variability Patterns Are Altered In Healthy Young Individuals During The Acute Reperfusion Phase Of Ischemia-Reperfusion, Sara A. Myers, Nikolaos Stergiou, Iraklis Pipinos, Jason Johanning

Journal Articles

Background

The role of ischemia reperfusion contributing to functional impairment in lower extremity peripheral arterial disease (PAD) patients has not previously been elucidated. The evaluation of gait variability patterns has proven useful in many pathologic populations. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to isolate and determine the specific effect of the acute reperfusion phase of ischemia-reperfusion on gait variability in young individuals with no vascular disease.

Materials and Methods

Thirty healthy young individuals walked on a treadmill during baseline and the acute reperfusion phase of ischemia-reperfusion conditions while lower extremity joint kinematics were captured. Stride to stride variability was …

Ecological Effects Of Virus-Resistant Transgenic Squash, Holly R. Prendeville

School of Biological Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Two ecological risks associated with the use of transgenic crops include the effects of transgene products on non-target organisms and the effects of a transgene after it moves from crops into a wild plant population. In work presented here, we specifically investigate the ecological risks of virus-resistant transgenic squash. We observed pollinator behavior to determine if pollinators are affected by nontarget effects of the virus-resistant transgene. We found that pollinator behavior did differ between conventional and virus-resistant transgenic squash due to pleiotropic effects of the transgene. This difference in pollinator behavior can affect plant mating patterns, thereby affecting crop-wild hybridization …

When Prayer Trumps Politics: The Politics And Demographics Of Renewable Portfolio Standards, Joshua P. Fershee

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

No abstract provided.

Not All Textbooks Are Created Equal: Copyright, Fair Use, And Open Access In The Open College Textbook Act Of 2010, Nicole A. Nguyen

DePaul Journal of Art, Technology & Intellectual Property Law

No abstract provided.

Smoothness Of Lipschitz Minimal Intrinsic Graphs In Heisenberg Groups ℍN, N > 1, Luca Capogna, Giovanna Citti, Maria Manfredini

Mathematics Sciences: Faculty Publications

We prove that Lipschitz intrinsic graphs in the Heisenberg groups ℍn, with n > 1, which are vanishing viscosity solutions of the minimal surface equation, are smooth and satisfy the PDE in a strong sense.

Interactions Of Carbon Nanotubes With Human Lung Epithelial Cells In Vitro, Assessed By Raman Spectroscopy, Peter Knief

Doctoral

Current methods for the evaluation of cellular interactions with nanoparticles are non-specific, relatively slow and invasive to the cell. Raman spectroscopy is a non invasive technique whose potential in the biosciences has already been demonstrated and has been used in the investigation of cell interactions with various external agents. The main focus of this study is to employ Raman spectroscopy to investigate the interaction of A549 human lung cells with single walled carbon nanotubes. · Carbon nanotubes have attracted considerable interest not only for their outstanding physical and electronic properties, promising a potentially vast number of applications, but also for …