Digital Commons Network^™

Institutional Difference: A Neglected Consideration In The Scholarship Of Teaching And Learning?, Chrissie Boughey

International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning

Excerpt: This invited essay considers how thinking about institutional differences can enhance the scholarship of teaching and learning. It does this by drawing on a recent piece of South African research which used data produced as part of a national process of auditing institutions for quality assurance purposes (Boughey, 2009; Boughey 2010; Boughey & McKenna, 2011a; 2011b). Overwhelmingly, the research revealed that, although universities were paying attention to issues related to teaching and learning (and drawing on literature and research produced as part of the scholarship of teaching and learning to do so), little attention had been given to the …

A Phenomenological Study Of The Beliefs, Attitudes, And Strategies Sixth And Seventh Grade Content Area Teachers Use To Teach Below Grade Level Readers, Lisa A. Clark

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purposes of this study were to identify the attitudes and beliefs content teachers have concerning teaching reading in the content area to below level readers and to identify specific instructional strategies that are used to teach students who are below grade level the content area material. Twelve participants were selected, using maximum variation sampling, based on the grade level and content area they taught. Data was collected from middle school content area teachers using interviews, surveys, observations, and document examination in an attempt to identify attitudes, beliefs, and specific challenges content teachers face instructing below grade level readers. The …

Central New Mexico Education Needs Assessment, Jeffrey Mitchell

BBER Publications

The UNM Bureau of Business and Economic Research conducted a needs assessment for educational support services in Bernalillo, Sandoval, Torrance, and Valencia counties. The objective was to identify areas where United Way of Central New Mexico investments would have the greatest impact on improving educational outcomes in its four county service area, with an emphasis on student readiness. BBERs methodology included a literature review of educational policy, focusing on best practices and effective programming; in-depth interviews with experts throughout the four county area; and collecting and analyzing quantitative data to better understand the local socioeconomic determinants of educational achievement. Best …

Understanding Fourth Graders' Decline In Reading Motivation From Students' And Teachers' Perspectives, Christine A. Hebert

Teaching & Learning Theses & Dissertations

Previous research by Chall and Jacobs (2003) documented the phenomena of the fourth grade slump, a period in which students switch from learning to read to reading to learn and the subsequent loss of motivation to read. The purpose of this research is to present a phenomenological qualitative study of whether a sample of fourth grade students, low-achieving readers and average achieving readers, exhibited a loss in their motivation to read. Students' responses to a standardized conversational survey and questionnaire, the Motivation to Read Profile (Gambrell, Palmer, Codling & Mazzoni, 2007) and teachers' responses to a researcher-developed questionnaire were examined …

Social Trust In Contemporary Rural China: Its Sources And Impacts On Public Goods Provision, Narisong Huhe

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

Social trust, as an essential element of political culture, is assumed to strongly affect the effectiveness of political institution. However, such studies in non-democratic settings are scarce, and even scarcer in the Chinese context. This dissertation, using data drawn from an original survey in rural China, examines the extent, sociopolitical origins, and political consequences of social trust in China. The results suggest that China has a unique pattern of social trust owing to its dual Confucian and Communist heritages. While trusts in relatives, neighbors, kinsman, and other villagers (i.e., particularized trust) are extensive, trust in strangers (generalized trust) is scarce. …

Linking Entities To A Knowledge Base With Query Expansion, Swapna Gottipati, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper we present a novel approach to entity linking based on a statistical language model-based information retrieval with query expansion. We use both local contexts and global world knowledge to expand query language models. We place a strong emphasis on named entities in the local contexts and explore a positional language model to weigh them differently based on their distances to the query. Our experiments on the TAC-KBP 2010 data show that incorporating such contextual information indeed aids in disambiguating the named entities and consistently improves the entity linking performance. Compared with the official results from KBP 2010 …

Generating Aspect-Oriented Multi-Document Summarization With Event-Aspect Model, Peng Li, Yinglin Wang, Wei Gao, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to automatic generation of aspect-oriented summaries from multiple documents. We first develop an event-aspect LDA model to cluster sentences into aspects. We then use extended LexRank algorithm to rank the sentences in each cluster. We use Integer Linear Programming for sentence selection. Key features of our method include automatic grouping of semantically related sentences and sentence ranking based on extension of random walk model. Also, we implement a new sentence compression algorithm which use dependency tree instead of parser tree. We compare our method with four baseline methods. Quantitative evaluation based on …

Unsupervised Discovery Of Discourse Relations For Eliminating Intra-Sentence Polarity Ambiguities, Lanjun Zhou, Binyang Li, Wei Gao, Zhongyu Wei, Kam-Fai Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Polarity classification of opinionated sentences with both positive and negative sentiments1 is a key challenge in sentiment analysis. This paper presents a novel unsupervised method for discovering intra-sentence level discourse relations for eliminating polarity ambiguities. Firstly, a discourse scheme with discourse constraints on polarity was defined empirically based on Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Then, a small set of cuephrase-based patterns were utilized to collect a large number of discourse instances which were later converted to semantic sequential representations (SSRs). Finally, an unsupervised method was adopted to generate, weigh and filter new SSRs without cue phrases for recognizing discourse relations. Experimental …

Anthropology, Saint Mary's College Of California

Academic Catalog

No abstract provided.

Classical Languages, Saint Mary's College Of California

Academic Catalog

No abstract provided.

Education, Saint Mary's College Of California

Academic Catalog

No abstract provided.

English And Mfa In Creative Writing, Saint Mary's College Of California

Academic Catalog

No abstract provided.

Modern Languages, Saint Mary's College Of California

Academic Catalog

No abstract provided.

Decontextualizing Development: A Critical Examination Of American Popular Discourse On Foreign Aid, Jeffrey Haines

Institute for the Humanities Theses

Humanitarian foreign aid is a controversial topic, subject to much popular debate. Although there is much available polling and survey evidence about public stances on the issue, there have been significantly fewer attempts at more in-depth analyses of the public discourse. This thesis is an attempt to explore the popular discourse on aid in more depth, including its rationales, assumptions, and values.

It concludes that both sides of the American public in the debate often make use of similar types of assumptions regarding international affairs, suggesting often deeper agreement than the debate may indicate. It is argued that the set …

La Llorona And Horror: A Chicana Feminist Reading Of The Films “The Wailer” And “The Wailer Ii”, Orquidea Morales

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This thesis, with a thorough analysis of The Wailer: La Llorona (2006) and The Wailer II: La Llorona II (2007), analyzes how these films create a new filmic representation of La Llorona. These films, marketed specifically for the Latina/o market, portray an important icon not only for the Mexican and Mexican American community and to a lesser extent a broader Latina/o community but also for Chicana feminists that have adopted her into their world vision as a symbol of agency. I propose a Chicana horror feminist reading of these films to look at gender and genre. The image of La …

Pre-Professional Curricula, Saint Mary's College Of California

Academic Catalog

No abstract provided.

Associated Students Annual Report 2010-2011, San Jose State University, Associated Students

Associated Students Annual Reports

No abstract provided.

Butler To Lead School Organization And Science Achievement Project, June 30, 2011, Melanie Marquez

USF St. Petersburg Campus News and Press Releases

No abstract provided.

Class Notes, Georgia Southern University

CLASS Notes

No abstract provided.

June 30, 2011, The Daily Mississippian

Daily Mississippian (all digitized issues)

No abstract provided.

Class Notes, Georgia Southern University

Arts & Humanities: News & Publications (2009-2023)

Excerpt: "Like most of higher education today, the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences continues its teaching, research, and service throughout the summer, and we take great pride in our ongoing student and faculty accomplishments."

Annual Report Of The University, 2010-2011, Volumes 1-5, University Of New Mexico

UNM Annual Reports

DEPARTMENTAL MISSION • To recruit, evaluate, and admit qualified students to UNM, including beginning freshman, transfer, returning, non-degree, international, and graduate applicants; • To provide information about UNM admission requirements, policies, and academic preparation to our internal and external constituents; • To provide guidance for academic success and, as necessary, advise students about appropriate alternative options to help them meet their academic goals. We do this through teamwork by providing individualized quality service to our constituents. We are committed to creativity and flexibility in working in an ever-changing environment. We strive to provide service in a way that exceeds our …

Tolerance Of Ambiguity And Inductive Vs. Deductive Preference Across Languages And Proficiency Levels At Byu: A Correlational Study, Jordan Ray Bledsoe

Theses and Dissertations

This study explored the relationships between roughly 330 participants' tolerance of ambiguity and their preference for either an inductive or deductive presentation of grammar by means of an online survey. Most participants were college students. Other variables examined included years of study, in-country experience, proficiency, age, year in school, and language of choice. A new instrument for measuring inductive vs. deductive preference was also created based on Cohen, Oxford, and Chi's (2001) Learning Style Survey (LSS). Results showed weak correlations between: tolerance of ambiguity and inductive preference (.25), tolerance of ambiguity and proficiency (.25), and inductive preference and proficiency (.20). …

Unfreedom In Paradise: Examining Race, Citizenship, And Anti-Haitianism In The Dominican Republic, Kristen C. Holmes

Open Access Theses

In the Dominican Republic, the memory of the Haitian conquest and annexation of the nation from 1822 until independence on February 27, 1844, along with the solidification of the anti-Haitian nationalist rhetoric of the 1920s and 30s, have fueled deep-seated animosity toward Haitians. Many Dominicans continue to hold strong anti-Haitian attitudes, and negative views of blackness pervade much of Dominican popular discourse, as well as ideas of beauty and social propriety. Lamentably, these negative attitudes toward Haitianness, which has become synonymous with blackness and vice versa, have spread far beyond informal conversations in private households, permeating the political realm as …

Indigenous Women College Students' Perspectives On College, Work, And Family, Jennie L. Bingham

Theses and Dissertations

Native American and First Nations (hereafter referred to as indigenous) women college students are faced with a challenge to balance both their culture and the demands of the dominant Western culture in family, school, and work/employment roles. The presence of indigenous women in higher education and in the work force has increased since World War II. While there is an abundance of literature on work-family balance and work-family conflict, with some focus on the perspectives and expectations of college-aged students, there is a dearth in both of these areas with regards to indigenous populations. In order to begin to …

Oral Proficiency Assessment Of French Using An Elicited Imitation Test And Automatic Speech Recognition, Benjamin J. Millard

Theses and Dissertations

Testing oral proficiency is an important, but often neglected part of the foreign language classroom. Currently accepted methods in testing oral proficiency are timely and expensive. Some work has been done to test and implement new assessment methods, but have focused primarily on English or Spanish (Graham et al. 2008). In this thesis, I demonstrate that the processes established for English and Spanish elicited imitation (EI) testing are relevant to French EI testing. First, I document the development, implementation and evaluation of an EI test to assess French oral proficiency. I also detail the incorporation of the use of automatic …

Queens Library Healthlink: Fighting Health Disparities Through Community Engagement, Tamara A. Michel, Eilleen Sabino, Alexis J. Stevenson, Elisa Weiss, Alison Carpenter, Bruce Rapkin

Urban Library Journal

Queens, New York is a diverse urban environment and home to many recent immigrants and low-income populations, which are known to have lower access to healthcare and are thus at higher risk for a wide range of negative health outcomes. Queens residents face serious cancer disparities, with late-stage cancer detection rates for breast, colorectal and prostate cancers far surpassing national averages. Developed to address such disparities, Queens Library HealthLink (HealthLink) is a four-way partnership that seeks to increase access to cancer screening, care and education in medically underserved neighborhoods in Queens. Through 20 of the 62 Queens Public Libraries, HealthLink …

Deafdigest: Gold Edition, June 26, 2011, Barry Strassler

DeafDigest Gold 2011

No abstract provided.

Death Becomes Her: Theodicy In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, Jack K. Mallard

Theses and Dissertations

A study of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, particularly "The Sound of Her Wings" and "The Kindly Ones: Part 13," demonstrates its theological richness. The Sandman's ability to participate in theodicy becomes clear by framing that study within a framework provided by Ernest Becker's ideas about the terror of death and Karen Armstrong's observations of the historical utility of negative theology and compassion. The analysis of the formal characteristics of The Sandman shows the range of aesthetic possibility inherent in the comics form. Lastly, the study makes apparent the continued readerly desire for engagement with questions about God, transcendence, …

Olfact – On A Pedagogy Of Curiosity ©, Susan Benn, Kerstin Mey

Experiential Knowledge (EKSIG) Conference Series

A Pedagogy of Curiosity invites cross-disciplinary initiatives and collaboration to look at sensory possibilities in relation to urban planning, to learning in formal and informal situations, and to the ways we explore and understand our environment and ourselves and how we interact with each other. The project crosses disciplines, sectors, ages, cultures and geographical borders to test the nature, potential and performance of the embodied sense of smell as a means to immerse ourselves in the world more fully, to navigate the present and 'sniff out' the future. A Pedagogy of Curiosity encourages a new body of 21st sensory skills …