Digital Commons Network^™

A Case Study Of How Elementary Special Educators' Perspectives Influence Learning Opportunities Afforded To Students With Intellectual Disabilities, Shari Kay Mccrary

Dissertations, Theses and Capstone Projects (Full IR Collection)

The purpose of this two-year qualitative case study was to explore how elementary special educators’ perspectives influence their curricular and instructional decision-making when engaged in the development of learning opportunities for students with intellectual disabilities. In particular, this investigation focused on gaining a better understanding of educators’ willingness and/or ability to provide rich, relevant, and challenging curriculum to students with intellectual disabilities. The conceptual framework that undergirds this study finds its roots in a theory of social justice, guided by the work of Apple (1979, 1990), Freire (1970, 1998), and Cochran-Smith (2004, 2008). Data collection efforts center around four primary …

Deaf Jokes And Sign Language Humor, R. Sutton-Spence, Donna Jo Napoli

Linguistics Faculty Works

This paper describes the humor of Deaf communities, arguing that the humor is related primarily to the dominant visual experience of Deaf people, but also influenced by their knowledge of humor traditions in the hearing society at large. Sign language humor in America and Britain may be seen in the creation of new visual signs, the witty reanalysis of existing signs and in bilingual games in which English is manipulated within sign languages. The content of Deaf humor supports the in-group of community members who embrace their signing collective Deaf identity and denigrates out-group people, including deaf people who do …

Research Proposal For Study: Can Artifical Emulation Of Synesthesia Aid Visual Word Recognition?, Lucas Charles

Anthós

The field of synesthesia has largely been unexplored beyond mere analysis of the condition and only a few papers on the topic of new applications have been published within the last decade. The condition can potentially provide great benefits to the study of the psychology of language along with its role in language use itself. As understanding of this condition continues to grow, one can draw links between it and its effect on language use, thereby enabling a greater understanding of the language process itself. Synesthesia involves the stimulation of one sense along with involuntary activation of another sensory pathway. …

It’S Not What You Do, It’S Who You Are: Adjectives As Identity-Conferrers, C.B. Rodgers

Anthós

To see how positive identity assessments are created, I investigated two statements, both released by organizations that can broadly be described as part of Portland’s liberal or left community. Each statement responds to assertions that the actions of the organization, or one of its members, provides a platform for anti-Semitic, white supremacist, and/or fascist political organizers to make inroads in Portland. One set of data is a statement from Citybikes, a workerowned cooperative, that was published on Portland IndyMedia, a web-based independent media center; the other is a statement from a Portland community art space, The Variant, that was published …

Emotion: New Dna In Design Process, Cliff Shin

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper presents a design methodology to captivate emotions in the design process. The paper shares examples from the student projects for designing houseware products. The goal was to design consumers’ products that would have substantial and stable emotional connection. It aims to design a product lasting longer. The emphasis was on the emotional bond between the consumer and product. The element, ‘emotion’ has been started getting attention in the design research process in order to compensate the conventional design process activities. This paper provides the three components for deeper understanding of consumers' needs in order to implement emotion in …

Typography Matters When Designing Onscreen Reading Materials For Dyslexic Learners, Myra Thiessen

DRS Biennial Conference Series

With the digital technology that is now available for e-readers an opportunity is presented for tremendous advances to be made in how learning materials are designed for children with dyslexia. Because users have the flexibility to customize presentations the learning materials that are developed for digital reading devises have the potential to be more effective than those generated in more traditional print formats. Previous research has shown that differences do exist in the way that readers interact with content that is presented onscreen as opposed to that in print formats; however, we know relatively little about these differences and as …

Focus, 2012, Summer, Andrews University

Focus

FOCUS (ISSN 1077-9345) is published quarterly, free of charge, for alumni and friends of Andrews University, an institution owned and operated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Autism Spectrum Disorders In Hispanics And Non-Hispanics, Virginia Chaidez, Robin L. Hansen, Irva Hertz-Picciotto

Department of Nutrition and Health Sciences: Faculty Publications

Objectives: To compare differences in autism between Hispanics and non-Hispanics. We also examined the relationship between multiple language exposure and language function and scores of children. Methods: The Childhood Autism Risks from Genetics and the Environment (CHARGE) study is an ongoing population-based case-control study with children sampled (n = 1061) from three strata: those with autism (AU) or autism spectrum disorder (ASD); developmental delay (DD); or the general population (GP). Results: Non-Hispanic cases demonstrated higher cognitive composite scores for the Mullen Scales of Early Learning (MSEL). There were significant associations between multiple language exposure and MSEL subscales for receptive …

Taking A Cultural Perspective On Intimate Partner Violence, Claire Oxtoby

Dissertations (1934 -)

Intimate partner violence continues to be a growing social concern associated with extensive physical, emotional, and financial consequences. Previous models of intimate partner violence have failed to recognize the role cultural components may play in the etiology of violence, specifically cultural values, the bi-dimensional process of acculturation, and sociodemographic variables. Prior research has shown these factors all contribute to women‟s perceptions of violence and such perceptions may impact the relationship between exposure and emotional outcomes. The present study examined how women‟s cultural background influences their perceptions of violence and subsequent adjustment. Eighty-six Latina women completed measures assessing cultural values, acculturation …

Higher Education Students’ Reflections On Learning In Times Of Academic Language Shift, Anne Marie Kagwesage

International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning

This article deals with the current debate on the use of English as the only medium of instruction in contexts where it is a second or foreign language. More specifically, it investigates Rwandan students’ reflections on using English as the sole medium of instruction in their everyday higher education academic activities. The study is mainly based on individual interviews from students at a University in Rwanda, where the language in education policy has changed considerably over the last decade. The findings suggest that students face different challenges and difficulties in using the newly adopted language of learning and teaching. They …

Prevalence, Social Contexts, And Risks For Prepartying Among Ethnically Diverse College Students, Andrew P. Paves, Joseph W. Labrie, Eric R. Pedersen, Justin F. Hummer, Joseph W. Labrie

Heads Up!

Prepartying, also known as pre-gaming, has emerged as a high-risk drinking event among U.S. college students. Research on factors related to prepartying behavior is in its relative infancy. The present study provides prevalence rates for prepartying across ethnic groups and examines how social context (whether prepartying took place with primarily male, female, or coed groups) and demographic factors may influence prepartying behavior. Participants were students from two West Coast universities (N = 2,546) whom identified as White, Asian and Pacific Islander American (APIA), Hispanic/Latino(a), or African American. The percentage of students who reported prepartying at least once in the …

"Just A Fool's Hope": J.R.R. Tolkien's Eucatastrophe As The Paradigm Of Christian Hope, Margaret A. Bush

Senior Honors Theses

In his essay titled “On Fairy-Stories,” J.R.R. Tolkien uses the term “eucatastrophe” to describe the unexpected, fortunate turn of events for the protagonist in a fantasy story. Tolkien applies the word beyond its literary context to signify the Christian’s experience of joy, especially resulting from the Incarnation and Resurrection. Such an explicit link between fiction and theology seems absent from his more well-known work, The Lord of the Rings. Yet both Tolkien himself and critics of his writing have labeled the novel a modern-day classic of Christian literature. This thesis will defend the Christian label of The Lord of …

“This Intense Desire To Know The World”: Factors Influencing The Selection Of Multicultural Children's Literature, Kasey L. Garrison

Teaching & Learning Theses & Dissertations

Multicultural children's literature offers readers the opportunity to experience new perspectives and cultures or reaffirm and develop their socio-cultural identity (Boston & Baxley, 2007; Yokota, 2009). The availability of diverse titles for youth is critical in enhancing 21st Century literacy and social skills (AASL, 2007; Common Core, 2010; Krashen, 2004). The purpose of this study was to identify factors influencing collection development and the selection of multicultural children's literature in public library collections in geographically and demographically diverse communities across one southeastern state.

Employing a mixed methods design, the researcher first surveyed ten library system collections totaling 70 libraries …

Using Undergraduates' Digital Literacy Skills To Improve Their Discipline-Specific Writing: A Dialogue, Nancy November, Karen Day

International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning

As two lecturers from quite different disciplines—Population Health and Musicology—we faced a common instructional challenge: how to improve the standard of student writing in our first-year courses for non-majors, and thus to invite our students into the discourses of our disciplines. We collaborated in the design of a sequence of online writing assignments for our separate courses, which would address this question. We were inspired by the high-level digital literacy skills of our students, which we sought to use in similar ways to improve the students’ other literacy skills, especially disciplinespecific writing skills. Drawing on educational design research methodology, we …

Against Physicalism-Plus-God: How Creation Accounts For Divine Action In Nature's World, Lydia Jaeger

Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers

No abstract provided.

Question Answering System Using Open Source Software, Gaurav Gangwal

Master's Projects

To get the answers of a question there are lots of search engine availbale. But the problem with the search engine is that instead of giving a straight forrward answer they usually gives the links/URL to the webpages which might have the answers. Instead of providing links Question Answering System will provide the straighforward answer to user's question. Tasks intended by the project : • Takes question as an input from the user. • Analyses the sentiment behinds the question. • Lookover the information availbale in the knowledge base related to question. • Compute the answer of the question from …

Information-Theoretic Multi-View Domain Adaptation, Pei Yang, Wei Gao, Qi Tan, Kam-Fai Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We use multiple views for cross-domain document classification. The main idea is to strengthen the views’ consistency for target data with source training data by identifying the correlations of domain-specific features from different domains. We present an Information-theoretic Multi-view Adaptation Model (IMAM) based on a multi-way clustering scheme, where word and link clusters can draw together seemingly unrelated domain-specific features from both sides and iteratively boost the consistency between document clusterings based on word and link views. Experiments show that IMAM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

Joint Learning For Coreference Resolution With Markov Logic, Yang Song, Jing Jiang, Xin Zhao, Sujian Li, Houfeng Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Pairwise coreference resolution models must merge pairwise coreference decisions to generate final outputs. Traditional merging methods adopt different strategies such as the best first method and enforcing the transitivity constraint, but most of these methods are used independently of the pairwise learning methods as an isolated inference procedure at the end. We propose a joint learning model which combines pairwise classification and mention clustering with Markov logic. Experimental results show that our joint learning system outperforms independent learning systems. Our system gives a better performance than all the learning-based systems from the CoNLL-2011 shared task on the same dataset. Compared …

Identifying Event-Related Bursts Via Social Media Activities, Xin Zhao, Baihan Shu, Jing Jiang, Yang Song, Hongfei Yan, Xiaoming Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Activities on social media increase at a dramatic rate. When an external event happens, there is a surge in the degree of activities related to the event. These activities may be temporally correlated with one another, but they may also capture different aspects of an event and therefore exhibit different bursty patterns. In this paper, we propose to identify event-related bursts via social media activities. We study how to correlate multiple types of activities to derive a global bursty pattern. To model smoothness of one state sequence, we propose a novel function which can capture the state context. The experiments …

Coalitions And Language Politics: Policy Shifts In Southeast Asia, Amy H. Liu, Jacob I. Ricks

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Why is it that some governments recognize only one language while others espouse multilingualism? Related, why are some governments able to shift language policies, and if there is a shift, what explains the direction? In this article, the authors argue that these choices are theproduct of coalitional constraints facing the government during critical junctures in history. During times of political change in the state-building process, the effective threat of an alternate linguistic group determines the emergent language policy. If the threat is low, the government moves toward monolingual policies. As the threat increases, however, the government is forced to co-opt …

Learner Corpus Linguistics In The Efl Classroom, Peter Crosthwaite

PASAA

Learner corpora, or searchable collections of the written or spoken production of language learners, have become increasingly vital in the field of applied linguistics. As advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing have allowed for the automatic or semi-automatic parsing, tagging and coding of large chunks of learner-produced text, there is increasing interest in the analysis of large-scale corpora of many millions of words, collected from a broad range of linguistic tasks, language backgrounds, and learner proficiencies.

The Filipino And Latino Managers: A Comparative Study Of Their Value Orientations, Arnel Onesimo O. Uy, Regina A. Greenwood, Edward F. Murphy, Jaime Alberto Ruiz Gutierrez, Miguel R. Olivas-Lujan, Sergio Madero, Neusa Maria Bastos F. Santos, Silvia Ines Monserrat, William Teeple, Julia Teahen

DLSU Business & Economics Review

Few studies have explored value similarities and differences between private sector managers in Latin countries like Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil and the Philippines. These countries were former colonies of either Spain or Portugal or both. In our study, we found that managers from the Philippines, Argentina, and Brazil were more alike as they were classified as possessing High Personal and High Moral value orientations, while managers from Colombia and Mexico were most alike as they possessed a High Personal and High Competence value orientations. We discuss the implications of these findings, limitations of the study, and make recommendations for …

The Amazigh's Fight For Cultural Revival In The New Libya: Reclaiming And Establishing Identitiy Through Antiquity, Kim Lee

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

The Multimodality And The Communication Of Explanation Graphics: Three Analytical Approaches On Safety Guides, Tingyi S. Lin

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The purpose of explanation graphics is to present processes, quantities, and phenomena. In many cases such as facial expressions, emotional effects, and spatial relations, there is great potential for graphics to explain things and relations in clearer and more sophisticated ways than mere texts can. From the viewpoint of visual information, well-planned and sophisticated graphics can tell stories and make complex ideas clear (Holmes, 1984; Jacobson, 1999; Wurman, 1989; Tufte, 1983/2001). Effective and efficient guidelines for successful explanation graphics can help people make good decisions quickly. For example, explanation graphics for safety can rescue people. Most people usually do not …

Subversion Through Inversion: Kent Monkman's "The Triumph Of Mischief", Monique Thérèse Belitz

Art & Art History ETDs

Monkmans acrylic painting The Triumph of Mischief is the central subject of this investigation which includes its relationship to other paintings and objects in the installation The Triumph of Mischief. By applying Mieke Bal's narratology theory, the principles of carnivals as proposed by Mikhail Bahktin, the four dichotomies underlying Western movies, Monkman's appropriation of older art work, his use of various binary opposites and his inclusion of iconographic details from various art history epochs are explained. Investigating the painting from a postcolonial and postmodern theoretical angle demonstrates that several iconic images from Western art history are decolonized by mocking and …

A South African Perspective On The Clash Between Culture And Human Rights, With Particular Reference To Gender-Related Cultural Practices And Traditions, John Cantius Mubangizi

Journal of International Women's Studies

South Africa is infamous for its history of disenfranchising most of its population under the dehumanizing policy of apartheid. A country of almost 50 million people, South Africa has a diverse array of languages, races, religions and ethnic communities, and has faced significant challenges - political, cultural and socio-economic – since the advent of democracy in 1994. The writers of the 1996 Constitution faced the unenviable task of accommodating the diverse viewpoints that inevitably derived from South Africa’s fractured history and society. The Constitution is one of the most progressive in the world, and notably includes a Bill of Rights, …

Doing Science Within A Culture Of Machismo And Marianismo, Karen Englander, Carmen Yáñez, Xochitl Barney

Journal of International Women's Studies

Women have been joining the ranks of professional scientists in increasing numbers although international statistics indicate that women‘s participation varies substantially in different regions. Variation in rates of participation can be explained in part by cultural contexts, and in Mexico, dominant cultural ideologies of machismo and marianismo prevail. To understand the impact, if any, of these ideologies on the lives of women scientists in their professional interactions, a case study was conducted at one research institute. The results indicate that the women scientists report different interactions with men and with other women, and interactions vary with the status of the …

Feature-Based Opinion Mining And Ranking, Magdalini Eirinaki, S. Pisal, J. Singh

Faculty Publications

The proliferation of blogs and social networks presents a new set of challenges and opportunities in the way information is searched and retrieved. Even though facts still play a very important role when information is sought on a topic, opinions have become increasingly important as well. Opinions expressed in blogs and social networks are playing an important role influencing everything from the products people buy to the presidential candidate they support. Thus, there is a need for a new type of search engine which will not only retrieve facts, but will also enable the retrieval of opinions. Such a search …

Exile On Main Street: Competing Traditions And Due Process Dissent, Colin Starger

All Faculty Scholarship

Everybody loves great dissents. Professors teach them, students learn from them, and journalists quote them. Yet legal scholars have long puzzled over how dissents actually impact the development of doctrine. Recent work by notable empirical scholars proposes to measure the influence of dissents by reference to their subsequent citation in case law. This Article challenges the theoretical basis for this empirical approach and argues that it fails to account for the profound influence that uncited dissents have exerted in law. To overcome this gap in the empirical approach, this Article proposes an alternative method that permits analysis of contextual and …

Beyond Post-Modernity In Mathematics Education, Ole Skovsmose

The Mathematics Enthusiast

A radical form of postmodernity is presented with reference to Nietzsche’s ideas with respect to truth, knowledge, sciences, progress, democracy, and ethical values in general. Thereafter is presented Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge. This brings us forward to the notion of genealogy, which is a defining idea for the postmodern conception of critique. However, it is emphasised that a critique can address the generativity of mathematical rationality by considering mathematics-based fabrications. Finally, imagination is presented as yet another feature of a critical enterprise. It is illustrated how such a three dimensional critical enterprise is relevant for both mathematics and mathematics education. …