Digital Commons Network^™

"Awakening" Country And Faith: The Construction Of Sino-Muslim Histories And Identities In The Early Twentieth Century, Mengyu Huang

Honors Thesis Collection

Today, China prides itself as a nation of fifty-six officially-recognized ethnic groups, including ten predominantly-Muslim ethnicities. Of the ten, the most populous are the Huizu or Sino-Muslims. Yet Huizu did not always exist as an ethnic category. As China transitioned from empire to modern nation-state in the twentieth century, new forms of identity emerged. Sino-Muslim intellectuals held different views about whether all Muslims in China comprised one nationality or were ethnically different while sharing one common religion. This internal debate provides the key to understanding how the terms “Hui” and “Huizu” underwent the curious transformation from a religious to an …

Emergence Of Human Episodic Memory And Future Thinking, Michelle Lee

Honors Thesis Collection

Episodic memory and future thinking are crucial capacities that emerge and undergo substantial development during the preschool years. However, their relationship has rarely been examined in tandem within development. Narratives were elicited from 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children (n = 36) to assess episodic memory and future thinking. The richness of children’s memory and imagined future episodes was measured by the number of episodic details in their narratives. Non-narrative measures of episodic memory and future thinking were also administered. As hypothesized, children’s ability to recall personal events and generate possible future events underwent substantial development during the preschool years on …

Representing Expressive Types In Blocks Programming Languages, Marie Vasek

Honors Thesis Collection

In blocks programming languages, such as Scratch and App Inventor, programs are created by connecting visual program fragments shaped like jigsaw puzzle pieces. The shapes of these blocks help novices avoid frustrating syntax errors commonly encountered in textual programming languages by strongly suggesting how expressions and statements are composed to form programs. In statically typed programming languages, every expression has a type that indicates the kind of value it denotes (e.g. number, string, boolean). Types allow a programmer to more effectively reason about the behavior of their program. In blocks languages, the shapes of the block connectors can be used …

Redefining The L1: Can Vowel Categories Change?, Yoolim Kim

Honors Thesis Collection

I study the phenomenon of errors produced by Korean-English bilinguals in both their first and second languages (L1 and L2). Research has demonstrated that such errors are often due to differences in available phonemes and phonotactic constraints in languages (Flege 1995), or because certain phonological processes in one language are transferred into pronunciations in the L2 (Tsukada et al., 2005). However, these reasons do not account for pronunciation errors in the L1. To study these errors in the L1 and L2, I recorded eleven Korean-English bilinguals (all of Korean descent) reading Korean and English passages. I analyzed vowel production and …

Evaluating Female Engagement Team Effectiveness In Afghanistan, Anna C. Coll

Honors Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

“The Abomination Of Mankind”: Anti-Chinese Sentiment And The Borders Of Belonging In San Francisco’S Chinatown, Rachel G. Shuen

Honors Thesis Collection

My project builds upon historical studies about anti-Chinese racism and exclusion by addressing the creation of a problematic police force, the Chinatown Squad, which marked a racialized people and neighborhood for surveillance and discipline. The inauguration of the Chinatown Squad reflected important shifts in the policies of the municipal government and the San Francisco Police Department. Examining the expansion of the police force in the name of public safety alongside the municipally-directed policing of a racialized neighborhood will complicate our historical understanding of anti-Chinese rhetoric and violence.

The Village And The City: Imagining And Building Post-Independence India, Ikuno Naka

Honors Thesis Collection

Since independence in 1947, India has seen the creation of ambitious new postcolonial cities and rural development projects throughout. Underscoring many of these rural and urban planning projects was a new 20th-century understanding of the built environment as being connected to a nation’s society, economy and politics. The redevelopment of India’s built environment was part of a larger utopian project of changing India’s condition of underdevelopment; a means of broadcasting that Nehruvian assumption of nationhood outwards. There were two projects in particular that were pioneers of their time. The first is the redevelopment of the rural agricultural villages of Uttar …

Performing Diasporic Subjectivities: Gendered Narratives Of Cultural Reproduction In A Community Of Tibetan Exiles, Shannon M. Ward

Honors Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

The Writing Center Annual Report: 2011-2012, Kelly Webster

The Writing Center: Reports

During the 2011-2012 academic year, The Writing Center, an Office for Student Success department, implemented programming specifically to address the University of Montana’s identified Strategic Issues and objectives. In doing so, The Writing Center (TWC) marshaled its resources to support students, faculty, and staff in their efforts to become more independent, versatile, and effective writers across the curriculum. This programming responded not only to the University’s Strategic Plan but also to growing student and faculty demand for Writing Center services. Writing Center staff engaged students in intellectual conversations, challenging students to develop as writers and thinkers who contribute to local …

A New Destination For “The Flying Bus”? The Implications Of Orlando-Rican Migration For Luis Rafael Sánchez’S “La Guagua Aérea”, Gabriel Ignacio Barreneche, Jane Lombardi, Héctor Ramos-Flores

Faculty Publications

Puerto Rican author Luis Rafael Sánchez’s “La guagua aérea” explores the duality, hybridity, and fluidity of US-Puerto Rican identity through the frequent travel of migrants between New York City (the traditional destination city for Puerto Rican migrants) and the island. In recent years, however, the “flying bus” has adopted a new number one destination: Central Florida. The Orlando metropolitan area has surpassed New York as the primary locus of Puerto Rican migration on the US mainland. Given that migrants on the “flying bus” have a new primary destination and now tend to remain settled in Central Florida versus returning to …

The Relationship Of Learner-Centered Beliefs Of Principals And Student Achievement, Camela Bonita Dingle Bell

Education Dissertations and Projects

Educators are focused with efforts to improve student achievement through reform and policies; a majority of the efforts are focused on accountability reform. The learner-centered model focuses on school reform that is organized around the personal domain for systemic reform. How principals work with students is greatly influenced by policy and what they believe about student learning and behavior. This dissertation attempted to establish principal beliefs and their effectiveness on student achievement on the End-of-Grade and End-of-Course test in the state North Carolina.

Survey data was collected and analyzed to determine if, and to what extent, significant differences between learner-centered …

The Impact Of Preschool Education On Students' Kindergarten Readiness And Subsequent Kindergarten Performance, Kelsey Musselman Carroll

Education Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of preschool education on students' kindergarten readiness and subsequent kindergarten performance in a low socioeconomic primary school. There are several factors that influence a child's readiness for school, including the children's natural talents and abilities, their families, their early environments, their schools, and their communities.

The setting for this research was a primary school located within a small, urban school district in the piedmont area of North Carolina. For the purpose of this study, all kindergarten students were placed into three subgroups: kindergarten students who attended the prekindergarten program at …

Saudi College Student's Preference For Synchronous And Asynchronous Web-Based Courses:An Exploratory Study., Abdullah Al-Jabri

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Technology has become an essential component of the teaching-learning process,and online-learning,in particular,has captivated the interest of many educational institutions throughout the world.Web-based learning has provided both students and teachers with new and unique ways of communicating with each other.As a result,many studies have been conducted to investigate factors affecting the establishment of productive communications in web-based settings.Likewise,the focus of this study is how the number of courses completed and the participants perception of their English language competence impacted their preferences for synchronous and asynchronous web-based learning in English instruction and in Arabic instruction.The sample consisted of 82 Saudi undergraduate students …

Multilinguality In The Digital Library: A Review, Anne Diekema

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Research

Purpose – Together, increasing globalization and the internet created fertile grounds for the establishment of multilingual digital libraries. Providing cross-lingual access to materials is of particular interest to political entities such as the European Union, which currently has 23 official languages, but also to multinational companies and countries that have different languages represented among their citizens. The main objective of this paper is to review the literature on multilingual digital libraries and provide an overview of this area.

Design/methodology/approach – Based on a thorough literature search in four different databases, a core set of literature on multilingual digital libraries was …

Sjsu Erfa News, Fall 2012, San Jose State University, Emeritus And Retired Faculty Association

Emeritus and Retired Faculty Association (ERFA) Newsletter

Volume 26, Number 1

Deafdigest: Gold Edition, January 1, 2012, Barry Strassler

DeafDigest Gold 2012

No abstract provided.

Augmented Input: The Effect Of Visuographic Supports On The Auditory Comprehension Of People With Chronic Aphasia, Sarah E. Wallace, Aimee R. Dietz, Karen Hux, Kristy S.E. Weissling

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Background: Augmented input (AI), or the use of visuographic images and linguistic supports, is a strategy for facilitating the auditory comprehension of people with chronic aphasia. To date, researchers have not systematically evaluated the effects of various types of AI strategies on auditory comprehension.

Aims: The purpose of the study was to perform an initial evaluation of the changes in auditory comprehension accuracy experienced by people with aphasia when they received one type of AI. Specifically, the authors examined the effect four types of non-personalized visuographic image conditions on the comprehension of people with aphasia when listening to narratives.

Methods …

"At Risk Means A Minority Kid:" Deconstructing Deficit Discourses In The Study Of Risk In Education And Human Services, Cinzia Pica-Smith, Carmen Veloria

Pedagogy and the Human Sciences

Unexamined use of ubiquitous terms such as “at risk” in education and human service courses can lead to reifying raced, classed, and gendered deficit perspectives of youth and youth work. This paper examines the social construction of the term “at risk,” following students in four education and human services undergraduate and graduate courses and the work of two counselor and teacher educators as they engaged their students in the process of deconstructing and interrogating this term. Findings reveal that students enter the classroom with raced and classed assumptions of who is at risk. Students demonstrate a deficit orientation that contextualizes …

Reclaiming Legitimate Authority In The Academy: A Critical Analysis Of Jones' Critical Pedagogy, Michael Mascolo

Pedagogy and the Human Sciences

Like any good paper, Harkins and Wells’ (2009) analysis of critical pedagogy has provoked critical reflection and controversy. In this article, I respond to Jones’ (2012) defense of critical pedagogy, formulated as a response to DeCesare’s (2009) critique of Harkins and Wells’ article. As elaborated by Jones, critical pedagogy is aimed at reducing the power differential between teachers and students in order to empower the diversity of student voices on any given issue. Critical pedagogy invites dialogue among diverse and even clashing perspectives, with a mind toward resolving conflicts between perspectives without privileging anyone viewpoint (including the professor or teacher’s …

Proceedings Of The Graduate Student Symposium Of The 7th International Conference On The Theory And Application Of Diagrams, July 5 2012, Ozge Alacam, Farrukh Arslan, Andrew Blake, Lillian Fanjoy, Luke Macneill, Gorkem Pacaci, Alistair Stead, Peter Vivian, Cengiz Acarturk, Gem Stapleton, Peter Rodgers, John Howse, Andreas Hamfelt, Nathan Miller

Mathematical Sciences Faculty Publications

Proceedings of the Graduate Student Symposium held at the 7th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Diagrams, ("Diagrams 2012"), held at the University of Kent on July 5, 2012. Dr. Nathaniel Miller, professor of in the School of Mathematical Sciences at UNC, served on the symposium organizing committee.

Virginia Commonwealth University Graduate And Professional Programs Bulletin Courses [2012], Virginia Commonwealth University

VCU Bulletins

Listing of professional and graduate courses for 2012-2013

Exiled As The Ship Itself: Liminality And Transnational Identity In Malcolm Lowry's Ultramarine, Under The Volcano, And Dark As The Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, Spencer Tricker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The themes of empire, nationality, and self-imposed exile constitute underexplored topics in critical discussions of modernist author Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957). Until recently, most academic studies have approached his work from biographical, mythological, and psychoanalytic perspectives. While a few studies have performed historical readings of his novels, such investigations tend, primarily, to focus on his engagement with western literary and theoretical movements of the early twentieth century. Of the few studies that address the cross-cultural reach of his novels, most are limited to discussions of Mexican history and traditions, thus prioritizing a specific geographical region when they might, instead, illuminate the …

Does Code Switching Work For Young Children? A Case Study Of English Language Learners, Shamah Md-Yunus, Geena Anselmo, Mohogany Williams

Faculty Research and Creative Activity

The study examines if a code switching technique demonstrated by the teacher helps English language learners acquire a second language. Nineteen preschoolers from families speaking Spanish as their primary language participated in the study for seven weeks. Structured classroom observations, pre-and post-test checklists, anecdotal notes, and the Speaking Component Scale were used to measure children’s scores in speaking, listening and writing in English. Data from the Speaking Component Scale showed an increase in grammar and expressive language scores after learning about the code switching technique. However, the children scored low in the reading component of identifying concepts about print and …

An Analysis Of Governance Policies And Practices In One School District Regarding English Learners, Lynn V. Lysko

Frank Dilley Award for Outstanding Doctoral Study

In a large, urban, high school district, secondary English-learning students are not achieving at the same rates as other identified subgroups on state and local standardized tests. This gap compounds economic and social inequities in the region. A solution to the problem is important to educators and policy makers in providing an equitable education for all students. Using the conceptual framework of organizational culture, this qualitative project study explored the district's policies and practices on the academic program for English learners and whether policies result in meeting academic needs of English-learning students at the secondary level. One-on-one interviews with district …

A Study Of Visual Puffery In Fragrance Advertising: Is The Message Sent Stronger Than The Actual Scent?, Mark Toncar, Marc Fetscherin

Faculty Publications

Purpose - This paper investigates visual exaggerations of fragrance advertisements by comparing subjects’ expectations resulting from print ads to their subsequent product evaluations. It then considers whether the actual scents fall short, meet or exceed these expectations.

Design/methodology/approach - By means of a semiotic analysis we capture the corresponding literary attributes of the ads to develop adjective pairs describing the meaning of the ads. Interviews are conducted to assess the meaning that consumers draw from the fragrance ads and we supplement these findings by performing a blind olfactory product evaluation of the fragrances. Paired sample t-tests are used to compare …

Mathematical Competitions In Hungary: Promoting A Tradition Of Excellence & Creativity, Julianna Connelly Stockton

The Mathematics Enthusiast

Hungary has long been known for its outstanding production of mathematical talent. Extracurricular programs such as camps and competitions form a strong foundation within the Hungarian tradition. New types of competitions in recent years include team competitions, multiple choice competitions, and some exclusively for students who are not in a special mathematics class. This study explores some of the recent developments in Hungarian mathematics competitions and the potential implications these changes have for the very competition-driven system that currently exists. The founding of so many new competitions reflects a possible shift in the focus and purpose of competitions away from …

Incorporating An International Field Practicum: Critical Incidents During A Cultural Immersion Experience Leading To Increased Understanding Of Culturally And Linguistically Diverse Students , Kristin Dixon

Doctor of Education (EdD)

No abstract provided.

Whither The "Year Of China"?, Denise Ho, Jared Flanery

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

To conclude my Chinese history lecture course at the University of Kentucky, I introduce my undergraduates to the concept of “soft power” and suggest that Confucius Institutes are emblematic of China’s cultural diplomacy, which aims to project a peaceful image abroad. Confucius Institutes are centers for teaching Chinese language and culture overseas; they are organized by an office known as Hanban in the Ministry of Education, though their funding comes directly from the Chinese government’s treasury. There are now over 350 Confucius Institutes in the world, and two of these are in the state of Kentucky.

Literacy And Development Within China’S Minorities, Alexandra Grey

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Outside of China, people are agape at the prospect of learning to write Chinese: “So hard! Too hard.” Back in Australia, I know first generation migrants who speak Chinese at home but have never learnt to write; they gape along with everyone else. But for all the jaw-dropping, these people can read and write the national language of their home (for the Aussie-Chinese, that’s English). What about the people inside China for whom ‘Chinese’ is a foreign language? They are a significant minority, and, on the Chinese scale, a minority still means millions of people. ‘Chinese’ is usually loosely used …

"Small Talk": Developing Fluency, Accuracy, And Complexity In Speaking, James Hunter

TESOL Faculty Scholarship

A major issue that continues to challenge language teachers is how to ensure that learners develop accuracy and complexity in their speaking, as well as fluency. Teachers know that too much corrective feedback (CF) can make learners reluctant to speak, while not enough may allow their errors to become entrenched. Furthermore, there is controversy over the effectiveness of recasts (the most common form of CF) in promoting acquisition. This article explores a methodology, ‘Small Talk’, which aims to resolve some of the tensions between the need to encourage truly communicative language use and the need to develop complexity and to …