Digital Commons Network^™

Empowering Equity In Postsecondary Transition For Marginalized Culturally And Linguistically Diverse Students With Disabilities By Implementing A Culturally Responsive Summary Of Performance Teacher Training And Support Program, Rebekka Joanne Jez

Doctoral Dissertations

Marginalized culturally and linguistically diverse students with special needs often struggle after high school. Many special educators are unaware of legal mandates and best practice in postsecondary transition, especially the intricate needs when working this group. The culturally responsive Summary of Performance (CRSOP) training and support program was designed to inform and support teachers in self-determination and culturally responsive practices while transitioning students from high school. Five teachers and seven students in a large urban district were interviewed and surveyed before and after the CRSOP training and support program to evaluate the effectiveness of the CRSOP teacher training. Teachers reported …

Perceptions Of Bilingualism And Home Language Maintenance And Loss: A Study Of Latino Parents At A San Francisco Bay Area Elementary Charter School, Emily Mccormick Enstice

Doctoral Dissertations

There is limited research that investigates parent perceptions with respect to their early elementary school children's home language use. To fill the gap in research, this study explores the relationship between first generation Latino parent perspectives of bilingualism, home language maintenance and loss, and the intersection of culture and identity in an elementary school community. It also investigates how parents create an additive bilingual environment in the home.

This participatory action research (PAR) study involved group dialogue sessions and individual interviews in order to engage co-researchers and participants. PAR provided this study with the structure and tools to change and …

Sealing The Cracks Of The Educational Pipeline: Counterstories That Reveal Cultural Resiliency And Collective Responsibility In Latinas’ K-16 Success, Angela Shaw

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative research is to discover and describe the successes and institutional barriers along the educational pipeline for Latinas who are the first in their families to have successfully completed their undergraduate degrees. This research explores the unique elements of gender such as gender role socialization and stereotyping under the context of student retention and successful completion of a baccalaureate degree. This research includes nine counterstories of Latinas who were the first in their families to have successfully completed their undergraduate degrees. The results of this study find that throughout childhood, many participants' parents taught their children …

Latino Immigrant Parents Of English Language Learner Students, School Involvement And The Participation Breach, Jose Vicente Gonzalez

Doctoral Dissertations

The problem addressed in this study was the minimal school involvement by Latino immigrant parents due to the hegemonic practices, cultural misunderstandings and deficit-thinking models adopted by school personnel. The purpose of this Participatory Action Research (PAR) was to investigate the perceptions and benefits of participant and co-researcher parents who collaborated in the creation of an anti-hegemonic culturally sensitive advocacy-training program. The theoretical framework employed was Critical Race Theory because it addressed the issues of institutional racism, challenge to the status quo, social justice leadership and allowed for an interdisciplinary approach in order to utilize the parents' experiential knowledge to …

"This Is A Public Record": Teaching Human Rights Through The Performing Arts, Andrea Mcevoy Spero

Doctoral Dissertations

Urban youth in the United States often experience daily human rights violations such as racism and violence. Therefore, Human Rights Education (HRE) can strengthen their understanding of these issues and unleash their power to act toward positive change. This qualitative study attempted to gain a deeper understanding of the use of performance arts to teach human rights in an urban high school setting.

The following meta-question guided this research: "Is it possible for HRE which integrates the performing arts as a pedagogical tool to provide a transformative educational experience for students?" To address this question, the study explored: 1) how …

Popular Music As Popular Expression In North India And The Bhojpuri Region, From Cassette Culture To Vcd Culture, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

In the 1980s the Indian popular music scene was revolutionized by the advent of audio cassettes that dramatically decentralized production and precipitated the rise of syncretic folk-pop hybrids aimed at diverse regional audiences. In the years around 2000, the new medium of the VCD, or video compact disc, came to exert a similarly prodigious impact, enabling inexpensive popular music recordings marketed to diverse audiences to have visual as well as audio components. Song picturizations came to display a variety of approaches, from low-budget Bollywood imitations to new formats evolving in response to local sensibilities. This article outlines some of these …

The Trajectories Of Transplants: Singing Alha, Birha, And The Ramayan In The Indic Caribbean, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

Indo-Caribbean music culture includes a stratum of traditional genres derived from North India’s Bhojpuri region. This article discusses three such genres: Alhâ-singing, an archaic form of birhâ, and an antiphonal style of singing the Tulsidas Râmâyan. Despite the lack of supportive contact with the Bhojpuri region after 1917, these genres flourished until the 1960s, after which the decline of Bhojpuri as a spoken language in Trinidad and Guyana, together with the impact of modernity in general, undermined their vitality. A comparative perspective with North Indian counterparts reveals illuminating parallels and contrasts.

No History, No Certainty, No Legitimacy . . . No Problem: Originalism And The Limits Of Legal Theory, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Martin H. Redish is on the warpath. Like General Sherman marching toward Atlanta (or Justin Tuck marching toward Tom Brady), Professor Redish, together with Matthew Arnould,1 lays waste to every constitutional theory that he encounters. Originalism, with its “belief that constitutional interpretation should be characterized exclusively by an effort to determine the Constitution’s meaning by means of some form of historical inquiry,”2 generates “an often contrived and opaque veil of historical inquiry”3 that provides “an ideal smokescreen behind which judges may pursue their personal[,] moral, political[,] or economic goals with relative impunity.”4 Nontextual theories, for their part, “permit[] selective …

In Their Own Words? Methodological Considerations In The Analysis Of Terrorist Autobiographies, Mary Beth Altier, John Horgan, Christian Thoroughgood

Journal of Strategic Security

Despite the growth of terrorism literature in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, there remain several methodological challenges to studying certain aspects of terrorism. This is perhaps most evident in attempts to uncover the attitudes, motivations, and intentions of individuals engaged in violent extremism and how they are sometimes expressed in problematic behavior. Such challenges invariably stem from the fact that terrorists and the organizations to which they belong represent clandestine populations engaged in illegal activity. Unsurprisingly, these qualities make it difficult for the researcher to identify and locate willing subjects of study—let alone a representative sample. In this research …

A Study Of The Processes Involved In Sexual Battery Investigations, Kelly S. Boone

Abraham S. Fischler College of Education ETD Archive

This applied dissertation was designed to identify the common and unique processes employed during investigations of sexual battery. While departmental policies and state statutes provide guidance on the processes to be used in sexual battery investigations, there is a great deal of variability in the combination of processes that can be employed to investigate these cases. There is also some degree of variability in the outcomes associated with these investigations. This study examined the processes employed during sexual battery investigations in an effort to identify common themes. Importantly, the study identified the variation in cases that are genuine versus unfounded, …

The Effectiveness Of A State Mathematics, Science, And Technology Initiative On Improving The Science Achievement Of Urban Fifth-Grade Students, Michal Grant Robinson

Abraham S. Fischler College of Education ETD Archive

This applied dissertation was designed to provide data for use by the science department in an urban school district regarding the Alabama Mathematics, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI) to improve science achievement. The initiative offered teachers sustained, ongoing professional development and support in science. AMSTI data indicated an overall increase in student achievement at its sites as measured by the Stanford Achievement Test-10th Edition (SAT-10) and the Alabama Science Assessment.

Fifth-grade students from six schools in the district were involved in the study. Three were intervention schools participating in the AMSTI initiative. Three schools from the same district with similar …

Effects Of Remedial Reading On The Oral Fluency Skill Of Students With Disabilities Enrolled In An Inclusive Setting, Willie B. Green

Abraham S. Fischler College of Education ETD Archive

Research showed students with poor reading skills face difficulties in general education classes. Schools are face with the challenge of meeting the needs of all students. Therefore, researchers recommended using a research-based reading intervention program to improve students’ reading achievement.

The Reading to Read intervention program was used to supplement reading benchmarks for each student. Instructions were provided and monitored by assistant teachers trained in the Reading to Read procedure. To measure the effects of the program, pretest-posttest scores were compared for 20 students in the treatment group who participate in the interventions and 20 students in the control group …

Daily Flash Card Drills And Systems Thinking To Master Math Addition Facts, Jerome Ravenna

Abraham S. Fischler College of Education ETD Archive

This applied dissertation was designed to provide better access to information for the students and staff in an elementary school regarding acquisition and retention of basic addition math facts. Teaching techniques and strategies were explored that would enable elementary students to master essential skills in mathematics.

By the end of the first semester in Grade 1, learners must demonstrate knowledge of basic mathematic facts, especially in addition. Learners are subjected to diversified instruction where schools strive to teach a wide variety of subject materials rather than focus on basic skills and mastery. The result is broader student awareness of many …

Exploring The Impact Of Digital Publishing: A Case Study Involving Service-Learning Integrated With Technology, Bridget Ann Bonczyk

Abraham S. Fischler College of Education ETD Archive

The study explored the long-term academic effects on the educational progress for three students who participated in a technology driven service-learning program. The purpose of the study was to describe the long-term effects of the program on the students’ academic experiences and students’ sense of self-efficacy. The study examined whether or not the associated activities involved in the creation of digital books had an impact on the technology skills the students were presently learning.

The writer developed the child-centered service learning project entitled, RealeWriter and RealeLibrary ~ Leading English Language Learners to Learn and Serve in the spring of 2006. …

The Risk Mitigation Strategy Taxonomy And Generated Risk Event Effect Neutralization Method, Daniel A. Krus

Doctoral Dissertations

"In the design of new products and systems, the mitigation of potential failures is very important. The sooner in a product's design mitigation can be performed, the lower the cost and easier to implement those mitigations become. However, currently, most mitigations strategies rely on the expertise of the engineers designing a product, and while models and for failure modes do exist to help, there are no guidelines for performing product changes to reduce risk. To help alleviate this, the risk mitigation strategy taxonomy is created from an empirical collection of mitigation strategies used in industry for failure mitigation, creating a …

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Student Life Skills Courses In The Social And Academic Integration Of Community College Students, Lourdes M. Perez

Abraham S. Fischler College of Education ETD Archive

This applied dissertation was designed to determine if Student Life Skills (SLS) courses impact the social and academic integration of community college students. Additionally, due to the unique demographics of the student population of the research setting, this study also examined if factors such as native language, income and employment workload impact the social and/or academic integration of students enrolled in a community college.

The writer developed an instrument using the Institution Integration Scale (IIS) consisting of 30 items constructed to assess the dimensions of academic and social integration. The instrument requires respondents to indicate their involvement with faculty, staff, …

Evaluation Of A 21st-Century After-School Program At A Southeastern Elementary School, Timothy B. Hunter

Abraham S. Fischler College of Education ETD Archive

The purpose of the research was to evaluate a 21st-century after-school program at an elementary school in the southeastern United States. The program focused on the improvement of academic skills for students in Grades 3 through 5 in the academic areas of English and math. Implementation was in response to the high rate of students scoring below average on standardized tests. The Stufflebeam model was used to guide the program evaluation. Interview data were gathered from the after-school coordinator. Survey data were gathered from the after-school teachers and regular-school teachers. Data were also gathered from archival and empirical sources.

Test …

How Should Plastic-Packaging Companies Apply Artificial Proofs And Topics Of Invention To Communicate Sustainability? : A Heuristic Developed On The Basis Of Rhetorical Analysis, Shristy Bashyal

Masters Theses

"This study examines how the ten plastic-packaging companies use artificial proofs and topics of invention to communicate sustainability-related information. The objective of this study was to answer the following research questions:

(i) Do plastic-packaging companies define sustainability on their website?

(ii) What are the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments in these companies' sustainability-related communications?

(iii) What invention strategies should technical marketing communicators use to communicate company's sustainable practices?

To answer these questions, I analyzed the sustainability-related documents available on the websites of the ten companies. On the basis of this analysis, I developed an invention heuristic that can be …

Semantic Preserving Text Tepresentation And Its Applications In Text Clustering, Michael Howard

Masters Theses

Text mining using the vector space representation has proven to be an valuable tool for classification, prediction, information retrieval and extraction. The nature of text data presents several issues to these tasks, including large dimension and the existence of special polysemous and synonymous words. A variety of techniques have been devised to overcome these shortcomings, including feature selection and word sense disambiguation. Privacy preserving data mining is also an area of emerging interest. Existing techniques for privacy preserving data mining require the use of secure computation protocols, which often incur a greatly increased computational cost. In this paper, a generalization-based …

Using Automatic Speech Recognition Technology With Elicited Oral Response Testing, Troy L. Cox, Randall S. Davies

Faculty Publications

This study examined the use of automatic speech recognition (ASR) scored elicited oral response (EOR) tests to assess the speaking ability of English language learners. It also examined the relationship between ASR-scored EOR and other language proficiency measures and the ability of the ASR to rate speakers without bias to gender or native language. To that end, 179 subjects were given an ASR-scored EOR test with 60 items, followed by an oral proficiency interview (OPI) type assessment and a battery of other language tests. Findings suggest that ASR-scored EOR results could be used alone to predict speaking ability in specific …

Learning From Bilingual Family Literacies, Luz A. Murillo

Teaching and Learning Faculty Publications

This ethnographic study explores the literacies of bilingual families living in the Rio Grande Valley on the U.S.—Mexico border. Murillo argues that immigrant families living on the border play an important role in their children’s literacy development, but that their voices are seldom heard in schools due to powerful and persistent deficit views of Spanish and Spanish-speaking families. To counter these views, Murillo describes the literacy practices that bilingual families engage in on a daily basis, and reports bilingual parents’ views about literacy in Spanish and English. To encourage and guide language arts educators who wish to use bilingual family …

Teacher Retention: What Motivates Highly Qualified Urban Teachers To Stay?, Orlando B. Milligan

Theses and Dissertations

This applied dissertation was designed to provide insight into what motivates highly qualified teachers to remain in urban schools. Research has shown that the single most important factor in a child’s education is the teacher. Consequently, the issues related to teacher recruitment and retention rank as serious problems facing urban schools and the achievement of their children.

The purpose of this study was to examine what motivates highly qualified teachers to remain in urban schools and to identify factors that may contribute to the retention and recruitment of an urban teaching corps. This study also sought to determine if there …

Knowledge, Attitudes, And Beliefs About Hiv/Aids Among Central African Immigrants Who Live In Cedar Rapids, Ia, Natalie M. Sugira

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The purpose of the study was to elucidate and understand the HIV/ AIDS knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes among selected Central African immigrants who live in Cedar Rapids, IA. Included in the study was the identification, availability, and accessibility of HIV/AIDS health services tailored to meet the needs of the African immigrants. A convenience sample of20 (10 males and 10 females) African immigrants originally from Burundi and Rwanda were individually interviewed at their homes. The interview instrument was modeled after and utilized questions from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) of the Center for Disease Control (CDC),which were adjusted to …

Personal Photography, Mobile Media, And Postmodernity: Analyzing Space, Time, And The Visual Culture Of Social Networking, Kevin J. Reardon

Open Access Master's Theses

Contemporary society is overwhelmed with images. Personal photography has in recent decades gone through a considerable change in terms of practice and technology. Traditional forms of production, dissemination and presentation are being uprooted and replaced by new ones. One cause for this change is the emergence of new technologies such as Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS) and Social Network Sites (SNS). These technologies are collapsing the traditional temporal and spatial aspects of personal photography. These current technologies and practices have a distinct relationship with postmodernity. This research is interested in the epistemological implications of these changes. This research utilized a critical …

Law Schools As Knowledge Centers In The Digital Age, Vern R. Walker, A. J. Durwin, Philip H. Hwang, Keith Langlais, Mycroft Boyd

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

This article first defines the general concept of a "knowledge center," and then demonstrates that research laboratories in the sciences provide a concrete example of that concept. This article then applies both the general concept of a "knowledge center" and the scientific research paradigm to legal education in the digital age. Since the information explosion, which occurred as a result of widespread access to the Internet and the World Wide Web, law schools have increasingly employed online tools to disseminate their traditional knowledge products. Being a knowledge center in the digital age, however, also involves re-conceptualizing the forms of useful …

The Measure Matters: Language Dominance Profiles Across Measures In Spanish–English Bilingual Children, Lisa M. Bedore, Elizabeth D. Pena, Connie Summers, Maria D. Resendiz, Kai Greene, Thomas M. Bohman, Ronald B. Gillam

Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study was to determine if different language measures resulted in the same classifications of language dominance and proficiency for a group of bilingual pre-kindergarteners and kindergarteners. Data were analyzed for 1029 Spanish–English bilingual pre-kindergarteners who spanned the full range of bilingual language proficiency. Parent questionnaires were used to quantify age of first exposure and current language use. Scores from a short test of semantic and morphosyntactic development in Spanish and English were used to quantify children’s performance. Some children who were in the functionally monolingual range based on interview data demonstrated minimal knowledge of their other …

Targeting Cell Nuclei For The Automation Of Raman Spectroscopy In Cytology, Jonathan Blackledge, Dmitri Dubovitskiy, Fiona Lyng

Conference papers

Biological cell analysis has, and is still, an important aspect in medical research and clinical diagnosis. Although cytologists routinely undertake a diagnosis using optical mi-croscopy, human factors make this routine unreliable especially when it involves many consecutive tasks that are monotonous, time consuming and focus on pattern matching tasks where the patterns concerned are not always entirely clear and/or do not necessarily belong to a well defined class. Raman Spectroscopy provides the potential to generate a fundamental representation on the status of cellular conditions through the characteristics of a Raman spectrum generated by the back-scatter of a laser pulse incident …

Distributed Formal Concept Analysis Algorithms Based On An Iterative Mapreduce Framework, Ruairí De Fréin, Biao Xu, Eric Robson, Mícheál Ó Fóghlú

Conference papers

While many existing formal concept analysis algorithms are efficient, they are typically unsuitable for distributed implementation. Taking the MapReduce (MR) framework as our inspiration we introduce a distributed approach for performing formal concept mining. Our method has its novelty in that we use a light-weight MapReduce runtime called Twister which is better suited to iterative algorithms than recent distributed approaches. First, we describe the theoretical foundations underpinning our distributed formal concept analysis approach. Second, we provide a representative exemplar of how a classic centralized algorithm can be implemented in a distributed fashion using our methodology: we modify Ganter’s classic algorithm …

Editorial Of E-Book On Action And Language Integration, A Cangelosi

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

Increasing theoretical and experimental research on action and language processing in humans and animals clearly demonstrates the strict interaction and co-dependence between language and action. This has been extensively demonstrated in neuroscientific investigations (e.g., Rizzolatti and Arbib, 1998; Cappa and Perani, 2003; Pulvermuller, 2003), psychology experiments (e.g., Glenberg and Kaschak, 2002; Pecher and Zwaan, 2005; Barsalou, 2008), evolutionary psychology (e.g., Corballis, 2002), and computational modeling (e.g., Cangelosi and Parisi, 2004; Massera et al., 2007; Cangelosi, 2010). All these studies have important implication both for the understanding of the action basis of cognition in natural and artificial cognitive systems, as well …

Choice, Coercion, Capabilities And Conflict: Multilingualism, Human Development And Peacekeeping In A Globalized World, Megan R. Thompson

Honors Projects

The development of English into an international lingua franca is not an inevitable result of globalizing forces. Instead, the “triumph” of the English language and the consequent decline of the world’s linguistic diversity cannot be viewed in isolation of its parallel history of conquest, violence, power and exploitation. Today, the languages privileged by the powerful—not only English, but also other dominant languages or standard varieties of those languages—determine access to social, economic and political mobility. This fact renders any discussion of language “choice” irrelevant—when a choice yields the sacrifice of basic human capabilities on one hand and the denial of …