Digital Commons Network^™

An Examination Of Inclusive Practices For Junior Secondary Students With Learning Disabilities In Gaborone, Botswana, Samantha Mrstik

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The country of Botswana has passed laws to support the human rights of their citizens. In accordance with the UN's guidelines, Botswana's human rights initiatives, and the international movement towards inclusive education, inclusive educational reform is taking place. In this ethnographic study, the researcher has examined the inclusive practices currently in place to support junior secondary students with learning disabilities (LD) in Gaborone, Botswana over a four-month period. Participants included administrators, general and special education teachers, and students with LD. The themes of routine, academic activities, classroom life, and accommodations for students with LD emerged upon analysis and are discussed …

A Phenomenological Study On The Implementation Of Louise Rosenblatt's Transactional Theory And Its Impact On Teacher-Efficacy For Literacy Instruction In An Online Environment, Marcus Vu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The present study sought to examine the teacher-efficacy for literacy instruction (TELI) of instructors who teach in an online environment. The phenomenological methodology sought to answer the following research questions: (1) What pedagogical practices do instructors use to provide literacy instruction in an online environment? (2) How do instructors perceive their TELI in an online environment? and (3) What impact, if any, will a Professional Learning Community (PLC) focused on Rosenblatt's Transactional Theory have on TELI in an online environment? The study consisted of a group of seven online instructors. The researcher the acting as facilitator administered the initial interviews …

School Has A Bad Storyline: Gamification In Educational Environments, Irene L. Pynn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

School often has low engagement and frustrating or absent options for the kind of agency the Federal Government's 2016 National Education Technology Plan now recommends educators include in their curriculum. Video games offer opportunities for people to participate in critical problem solving through creative projects. From balancing character statistics, to collaborating with other players, to making ethical and tactical decisions that can change the outcome of the story, successful games draw on the player's interest in learning and analyzing numbers, locations, visual clues, narrative elements, people, and more. One useful example may be found in visual novels (VNs), a medium …

Effects Of Symbol Type On Naming And Identification Of Graphic Symbols By Typically Developing Three, Four, Five And Six-Year Olds Children., Pamela Resnick

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Speech-language pathologists and educators face unique challenges in assessing the language skills of children with complex communication needs due to the wide array of impairments with which these individuals present. For example, most receptive language assessment tools require that children either point to or label line drawings to determine whether or not they comprehend the depicted concepts; task demands such as these preclude administering such assessment tools with children who are unable to physically point to or verbally label presented stimuli. In light of these challenges, the use of eye tracking technologies has become particularly appealing since this alternate response …

Lado And The Need For Uniform Procedures In European Asylum Proceedings, Carla T. Elias Nava

Emory International Law Review

Individuals' linguistic features have often been used to provide evidence of speakers' national origin. The use of language analysis for the determination of origin (LADO) in asylum proceedings has led to inconsistencies in the treatment of asylum applications, as different nations use different procedures of analysis. Although it has not responded specifically to the use of LADO, and the European Union has acknowledged the need for equal treatment of asylum applications through the development of the Common European Asylum System. This Comment applies the purpose of the CEAS to the use of LADO and argues that, like the CEAS, an …

Internal Funding Newsletter, Academic Year 2016-2017, Uno Office Of Research And Creative Activity

Internal Funding Newsletters

Each year, University of Nebraska at Omaha faculty and students conduct globally relevant research and creative activity that reflects the metropolitan mission of the university. The Office of Research and Creative Activity’s internal funding programs support those scholarly endeavors through the Fund for Undergraduate Scholarly Experiences (FUSE), Graduate Research and Creative Activity (GRACA), the University Committee on Research and Creative Activity (UCRCA), and the Award for Distinguished Research and Creative Activity (ADROCA).

Reliability And Validity Of An Arabic Version Of The Self-Determination Assessment – Internet (Sda-I), Mona Alamri Alamri

Wayne State University Dissertations

Self-determination is related to the desirable transition outcomes of an individual. It has gained an increasing amount of attention in numerous fields, including education, sociology, psychology, and other fields related to human behavior. However, there are no measures originally written in Arabic that accurately measure an individual’s self-determination. Thus, during this study, an Arabic version of the Self-Determination Assessment – Internet (SDAi) was developed from the regular English version of the assessment. The SDAi measures the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral factors related to self-determination. The purpose of this study was to develop and then test the reliability and validity of …

Reconceptualizing The Construct Of The Individual Writer In Composition Studies: A Felt Life Model Of Writing, Wendy Duprey

Wayne State University Dissertations

Current scholars in composition and rhetoric emphasize how our worldview perspectives and intellectual positions are animated by our emotional investments, attachments, and commitments. However, despite disciplinary efforts to theorize “the writing subject” in Composition Studies from the 1960s on, I argue the field has yet to develop an integrated cognitive-emotional-motivational construct of the individual writer that comprehensively investigates how an individual’s cognition, emotion, and motivation shapes, and is influenced by, one’s writing process. In my dissertation project, I draw on a range of perspectives from composition studies, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy to develop a model of the individual writer as …

Affective Dissonance: (Post)Feminism And Popular Cultural Expressions Of Motherhood, Judith Lakämper

Wayne State University Dissertations

In “Affective Dissonance: (Post)feminism and Popular Cultural Expressions of Motherhood,” I argue that motherhood in the so-called post-feminist age is structured by a conflicted relationship between affective expectations raised by public discourses of motherhood and the material, embodied experience of maternity, inflected by race, class, age, and sexuality. While recent feminist scholarship has engaged questions of (bodily) materiality, and popular medial discourses increasingly critique unrealistic ideals of motherhood, my dissertation considers these approaches together. Juxtaposing representations of motherhood from various sources – memoirs, digital media, art photography, and television – I demonstrate how the postfeminist rhetoric of female empowerment and …

Pathetic Politics: An Analysis Of Emotion And Embodiment In First Lady Rhetoric, Stephanie Lynn Wideman

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation explores the theoretical and practical relationship between our understandings of emotion’s role in political decision-making. In this pursuit I seek a resurrection for pathos’s legitimacy in persuasive studies through the pursuit of the pathetic political realm. This work has three primary concerns: how may pathetic power be accessed, from where does this power originate, and how might political actors enact this power for their own political goals. I draw primarily from theories related to visual rhetoric and the body in order to provide perspective on how the body is politicized through the pathetic realm. Theoretical perspectives are drawn …

The Dimensionality Of Political Ideology In The Arab World Comparing The Structure Of Political Attitudes On Political Parties’ And Mass Publics’ Levels In Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, And Morocco, Malek Abduljaber

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation explores the structure of political attitudes on the political parties’, as well as mass public levels in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan and Morocco. I present the dimensionality, nature and structuration of political ideologies in these countries. In doing so, I describe the determinants, constituents, and components constructing parties’ and citizens’ political maps that are constantly competing for electoral, as well as actual, relevance within all societal domains. This work provides the first systematic empirical analysis of party systems in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan and Morocco. It explores three basic characteristics of the party system in each case: the number of …

Robotic Arts: Current Practices, Potentials, And Implications, Myounghoon "Philart" Jeon

Department of Psychology and Human Factors Publications

Given that the origin of the “robot” comes from efforts to create a worker to help people, there has been relatively little research on making a robot for non-work purposes. However, some researchers have explored robotic arts since Leonardo da Vinci. Many questions can be posed regarding the potentials of robotic arts: (1) Is there anything we can call machine-creativity? (2) Can robots improvise artworks on the fly? and (3) Can art robots pass the Turing test? To ponder these questions and see the current status quo of robotic arts, the present paper surveys the contributions of robotics in diverse …

Structure And Service Delivery Approach Of The Children’S Bureau’S Resource Centers And Implementation Centers, Tammy Richards, Michelle Graef, Kathy Deserly, Peter Watson, Mark Ells

Center on Children, Families, and the Law: Faculty Publications

The Children’s Bureau (CB) provides a system of training and technical assistance (T/TA) to build the capacity of state and tribal child welfare systems, with the goal of improving outcomes for children and families. During the time period of 2008-2014, this infrastructure included ten National Child Welfare Resource Centers (NRCs), five Child Welfare Implementation Centers (ICs), and a Training and Technical Assistance Coordination Center (TTACC). Individual ICs and NRCs differed in structure and content expertise, yet they served the same jurisdictions and at times provided services concurrently. To increase cohesion and consistency, the NRCs, ICs, TTACC, and CB worked together …

How The Book Of Mormon Reads The Bible: A Theory Of Types, Michael Austin

Journal of Book of Mormon Studies

Typology is one of those words whose meaning shifts dramatically with the position of its user. For religious believers studying the scriptures, typology is a mode of history-the belief that certain events and people should be understood as both fully historical and fully allegorical at the same time. To the unbeliever (or the believer in different things), typology is a mode of rhetoric-a connecting strategy that writers use to create retroactive links between otherwise unrelated stories or that readers use to infer connections between otherwise unconnected things. Those in the first group see the repetition of key narrative elements from …

Consumer Credit In America: Past, Present, And Future, Pamela Foohey, Jim Hawkins, Creola Johnson, Nathalie Martin

Faculty Scholarship

We began organizing this symposium at the start of 2016 with the recognition that consumer credit and financial services were in a state of flux prompted in significant part by the Great Recession. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act brought with it the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB’s creation marked the most significant moment in modern American consumer law. Consumers gained an advocate charged with protecting them through researching, monitoring, and regulating the providers of consumer financial products and services, enforcing federal consumer financial protection laws, and, as importantly, empowering consumers.

Law For The Platform Economy, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article: explores patterns of legal-institutional change in the emerging, platform-driven economy. Its starting premise is that the platform is not simply a new business model, a new social technology, or a new infrastructural formation (although it is also all of those things). Rather, it is the core organizational form of the emerging informational economy. Platforms do not enter or expand markets; they replace (and rematerialize) them. The article argues that legal institutions, including both entitlements and regulatory institutions, have systematically facilitated the platform economy's emergence. It first describes the evolution of the platform as a mode of economic (re)organization …

Gazelem The Jaredite, Elliott Jolley

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

Alma refers to Gazelem in his instructions to his son Helaman in Alma 37:23. This article proposes and explores the concept of identifying Gazelem as a Jaredite seer. Other theories of the identity of Gazelem are addressed in this article but not explored in depth. It discusses the full context of Alma’s words, the Jaredite secret combinations and their oaths, Gazelem’s seer stone, and the Nephite interpreters. Additionally, it proposes a possible timeline that Gazelem lived among the Jaredites. It also discusses the usage of “Gazelam” as a substitute name for Joseph Smith in early editions of the Doctrine and …

Creating The Climate And Space For Peer Review Within The Writing Classroom, Helen Dixon, Eleanor Hawe

Journal of Response to Writing

Substantive and ongoing critique of the quality of one’s writing is necessary if students are to experience writing as a recursive process. However, students’ willingness to critique their texts and those of others is dependent upon the creation of a trusting and mutually supportive learning environment. Using the naturalistic setting of an elementary school writing classroom, attention is drawn to the ways in which two teachers nurtured competence and communication trust (Reina & Reina, 2006) between themselves and students, and among students. Consideration is also paid to teachers’ creation and use of public and private spaces to promote interactions that …

The Effect Of Mid-Focused And Unfocused Written Corrections On The Acquisition Of Grammatical Structures, Ahsan Pashazadeh

Journal of Response to Writing

Studies that have reported delayed positive effects for written corrective feedback (WCF) have typically targeted the use of articles for first- and subsequent- mention functions, using narrowly focused corrections that lack ecological validity. Not much is known about how different grammatical features react to mid-focused and unfocused WCF options, which enjoy more ecological validity. This study investigates the delayed effect of different types of WCF on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ accurate use of three features of English grammar (articles, infinitive, and unreal conditional). Four groups of participants (N = 77) were treated with different feedback options (mid-focused …

Volume 3 Number 2 (2017)

Journal of Response to Writing

No abstract provided.

Jacob’S Protector, Matthew L. Bowen

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

The name Jacob (yaʿăqōb) means “may he [i.e., God] protect,” or “he has protected.” As a hypocoristic masculine volitive verbal form,1 it is a kind of blessing upon, or prayer on behalf of the one so named that he will receive divine protection and safety (cf. Deuteronomy 33:28). Textual evidence from Nephi’s writings suggests that his brother Jacob’s protection was a primary concern of their parents, Lehi and Sariah. Lehi saw Nephi as the specific means of divine protection for Jacob, his “first born in the wilderness.” Moreover, the term “protector” is used twice in LDS scripture, in both instances …

United States Public Opinion And The War In Iraq: Understanding Analysis Polling Trends Through Discourse, Sam Williams

Sigma: Journal of Political and International Studies

War is often thought to be a cause-and-effect dichotomy. Rather than taking a holistic view of war through examination of short-term fluctuations against macrolevel trends, historians often instead define armed conflict by a singular, decisive event and the differing responses and ramifications which stem from it. It is tempting, then, to do the same with public opinion about war: If the nature and ultimate result of a conflict stems from a collection of individual pivotal events, it is natural to think there would also be critical shifts in public opinion corresponding to these decisive events. U.S. military campaigns that are …

The Star-Spangled Banshee: Fear Of The Unknown In The Things They Carried, Mckay Hansen

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In this paper I discuss the nature of the fear that worked upon many of the soldiers of the Vietnam War, concentrating on a fear of the unknown. Drawing upon Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried as its central focus text, my analysis suggests that the fear of the unknown is a product of communities’ efforts to distance themselves from a cultural Other. As such, I posit that those in positions of societal influence employ fear to reinforce racial stereotypes and maintain domestic unity. Perceiving ethnic and linguistic misunderstandings as forces that cultural leaders often evoke deliberately, I claim that …

Creating A Counter-Space Through Listening To And Learning From A Korean Pre-Service Teacher’S Experiences, Jihea Kang

Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications

The author uses a life-historical counter-storytelling approach to examine a Korean female pre-service teacher’s experiences in a U.S. teacher preparation program. The participant encountered challenges due to her perceived language proficiency and communication and participation style in a U.S. higher educational context. Further, the author report how the participant responded to her challenges: (1) by feeling pressure to internalize deficit-oriented narratives and assimilate into dominant cultural norms, and (2) by resisting against the racial stereotype. This study shows that teacher educators need to create counter-spaces for linguistic and ethnic/racial minority pre-service teachers in teacher preparation.

Why Control Of Pro In Rationale Clauses Is Not A Relation Between Arguments, Alexander Williams, Jeffrey Jack Green

Faculty Publications

After (1) or (2) we can use (3), a rationale clause, to mean (4). We then mean that those who acquire a pitcher are the traders of the outfielders.

(1) The team traded away two outfielders

(2) Two outfielders were traded away

(3) PRO to acquire a pitcher.

(4) because then the trader might acquire a pitcher.

On grammatical accounts, this indicates a relation between two arguments that ensures their coreference, for any assignment of values to variables. PRO in (3), for example, would be related in this way to an argument that is linked to the role of …

Transcribing The Digital Archive Of Southern Speech: Methods And Preliminary Analysis, Rachel Miller Olsen, Michael L. Olsen, Joseph A. Stanley, Margaret E. L. Renwick

Faculty Publications

Large-scale transcribed audio corpora are available on Buckeye Corpus, Santa Barbara Corpus, etc.

How do these come to be? What’s the on-the-ground process of building such a corpus?

Here we discuss:

• Methods for large-scale transcription
• Early data & analysis resulting from transcription

Large-scale transcription:

• Time to transcribe. Estimated: 10:1; Reality:13:1

Phonetic Analysis:

• Comparison of formant measurements
• In-house Praat script no good
• DARLA filtered out 53%
• Too early to tell if FAVE modifications were better

Machine Learning For The Automated Identification Of Cyberbullying And Cyberharassment, Daniel N. Ducharme

Open Access Dissertations

Cyberbullying and cyberharassement are a growing issue that is straining the resources of human moderation teams. This is leading to an increase in suicide among the affected teens who are unable to get away from the harassment. By utilizing n-grams and support vector machines, this research was able to classify YouTube comments with an overall accuracy of 81.8%. This increased to 83.9% when utilizing retraining that added the misclassified comments to the training set. To accomplish this, a 350 comment balanced training set, with 7% of the highest entropy 3 length n-grams, and a polynomial kernel with the C error …

Get Rid Of Your Student's Fear And Intimidation Of Learning A Programming Language, Christina Frederick, Matt B. Pierce, Andrew Calvin Griggs, Lulu Sun, Li Ding

Publications

Knowledge of computer programming is very beneficial and often required for engineering students. Unfortunately, students frequently experience fear and intimidation regarding introductory programming courses. Second language acquisition (SLA) techniques have shown promise as a means of content delivery in programming courses. Blended learning environments are also becoming increasingly popular in course frameworks. This workshop will discuss the application of second language acquisition in a blended learning environment (SLA-aBLe) and will examine the effectiveness of using SLA techniques to teach introductory programming. The proposed workshop will also share instructor experience(s), provide course materials, and review student outcomes from this two year …

Mechanisms Of Motivational Interviewing In A Parent-Focused Pediatric Obesity Intervention, Nadia Islam

Theses and Dissertations

Pediatric obesity is a major public health epidemic with serious physical and psychological consequences. Difficulty engaging families in treatment is a significant obstacle in addressing pediatric obesity, especially among underserved populations. Motivational interviewing (MI) is a collaborative, person-centered communication style that has been shown to reduce attrition, increase attendance, and improve patient treatment adherence; however, little is known about the process of MI and how it improves treatment engagement. This study examined clinician and parent language in a pre-treatment MI session that increased initial engagement in a parent- focused pediatric obesity intervention (N= 81). Results showed that increased parent change …

Corpus Stylistic Analysis Of Thomas Harris' The Silence Of The Lambs, Eman Adil Jaafar

Khazar Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

This paper aims to employ one of the corpus stylistic methods to analyze Thomas Harris's novel, The Silence of the Lambs. Recently, technology has invaded our lives. To put it differently, researchers depend highly on computers to access and gain information about certain data. Thus, it is crucial to keep up with the up-to-date developments concerning computational methodologies and toolkits. Corpus stylistics helps to find certain features that cannot be understood without using the techniques of computers. In order to achieve this goal, a quantitative and qualitative methodology is applied. Corpus stylistics helps to analyze lengthy texts more efficiently. This …