Digital Commons Network^™

Collegiate And Post-Undergraduate Experiences Among African American Stem Alumni At The University Of South Carolina, Baindu Nallo

Theses and Dissertations

This study was designed to explore the undergraduate and post-undergraduate experiences of African American STEM alumni from the University of South Carolina from a strengths-perspective. The method utilized for this qualitative study was phenomenological analysis. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 African American alumni who graduated between 2010 and 2020 and majored in science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM). Critical Race Theory and community cultural wealth served as theoretical frameworks for this research. The findings indicate that African American students: 1) want to smoothly transition from high school to college curriculum being equally exposed to collegiate materials at the high …

The Literacies Of Adolescents With International Experiences, Caitlin Hanzlick Rasmussen

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation reports the findings of a study on how international experiences impact adolescents. Data were gathered from interviews with and writing samples from seven participants with varying international experiences. A critical perspective and existing research in New Literacy Studies (NLS), on study abroad programs, and on transnationalism framed the study and predicted much of what was found about the literacies of adolescents with international experiences. However, five new findings emerged as significant about adolescents’ utilitarian, oral, geolingual, critical, and cosmopolitan literacies uniquely impacted by travel. From these findings, new insights emerged about the importance of embracing multiple forms of …

“Virtually A Sisterhood” Virtual Collaboration And Its Impact On Social Connectedness Among A Group Of Culturally Diverse Women, George Banks-Weston

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this action research study was to evaluate the impact of virtual collaboration on social connectedness among a group of culturally diverse women participating in an online business strategy course. This study was guided by three research questions (1) How and to what extent does virtual collaboration impact social connectedness among a group of culturally diverse women participating in an online business strategy course? (2) How and to what extent does a group of culturally diverse women use virtual collaboration tools for activities in an online business strategy course? (3) What are the experiences of culturally diverse women …

The Effects Of Project-Based Learning In The Intermediate World Language Classroom, Steven Tanner Tucker

Theses and Dissertations

The primary purpose of this action research study was to further examine the reluctance of intermediate language learners in speaking production in their second language. Additionally, with emerging strategies such as project-based learning, the study explored the efficacy of this strategy, specifically in terms of the students’ volition and motivation to produce the spoken language during classroom activities. The goal was to assist educators in discovering new social and constructivist techniques that could potentially foster student engagement and language acquisition, especially in regard to speaking competencies in the foreign language. Undoubtedly, action research was the appropriate method for the current …

The Response Of Climbing Bean To Fertilizer And Organic Manure In The Northern Province Of Rwanda, Edouard Rurangwa, Bernard Vanlauwe, Ken E. Giller

All Peer-Reviewed Publications

Climbing beans play a central role in food security of rural households in the densely populated highlands of East and Central Africa. Soil fertility degradation and the lack of nutrient inputsare major limitations to yield of beans and other crops. We conducted field trials in Northern Rwanda in Kinoni and Muko villages to evaluate the effect of mineral N, P, and K fertilizers (both alone and in combination) and farmyard manure on nitrogen fixation and grain yields of climbing bean insmallholder farmers' fields. The trials were laid down in a randomized complete block design with seven replicate blocks in each …

A Method Of Deep Learning Tackles Sentiment Analysis Problem In Arabic Texts, Abdulhakeem Q., Ahmed S., Saman H. Ameen

Iraqi Journal of Computers, Communications, Control and Systems Engineering

Sentiment Analysis (SA) is a field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) whose goal is to extract the emotion, sentiment or more general opinion expressed in a human-written text. Opinions and emotions play a central role in human life. Therefore, there are many academic researches in this field for processing many languages like English However, there is scarce in its implementation with addressing Arabic Sentiment Analysis (ASA). It is a challenging field where Arabic language has a rich morphological structure and there are many other defies more than in other languages. For that, the proposed model tackles ASA by using a …

Learning Opportunities 2020/2021, Illinois Mathematics And Science Academy

Course Catalogs

The graduation requirements of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy are established by the IMSA Board of Trustees. Each semester students must take a minimum of five academic courses (2.5 credits) for a letter grade (not Pass/Fail) not including Fine Arts,Wellness, SIR, Internship, and Independent Study. Students may enroll in a maximum of nine courses each semester including academic courses, Fine Arts, Wellness, SIR, Internship, and Independent Study. The College and Academic Counselor approves enrollment for students in all courses and experiences. Only courses taken for a letter grade will count towards graduation credit.

Sports In Africa, Past And Present, Todd Cleveland, Tarminder Kaur, Gerard Akindes

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

These groundbreaking essays demonstrate how Africans past and present have utilized sports to forge complex identities and shape Africa’s dynamic place in the world.

Since the late nineteenth century, modern sports in Africa have both reflected and shaped cultural, social, political, economic, generational, and gender relations on the continent. Although colonial powers originally introduced European sports as a means of “civilizing” indigenous populations and upholding then current notions of racial hierarchies and “muscular Christianity,” Africans quickly appropriated these sporting practices to fulfill their own varied interests. This collection encompasses a wide range of topics, including women footballers in Nigeria, Kenya’s …

Racial/Ethnic Identity Modeling: An Exploration Of The Effects Of Bilingualism On Racial/Ethnic Identity Expression And Self-Esteem In Multiple-Race Black/African American Adults, Tritia Miyako Finley

Dissertations

The psychological well-being and racial/ethnic identity expression of bilingual multiple-race individuals mixed with Black/African American and another minority racial/ethnic category are largely underrepresented topics in current scholarly literature despite their growing population in the United States. In the current study, the sociohistorical and political processes of colonialism and coloniality were discussed to provide context for the critical examination of familial foreign language ability (FLA), self-esteem (SE), and Black/African American racial/ethnic identity (BRI) expression among multiple-race Black/African American adults (N = 204). Using structural equation modeling, results indicated that higher levels of FLA were related to higher levels of SE. …

Recognizing Art As A Semiotic Mode: Revelations Of An Adolescent Mind, Catherine Elizabeth Deaton

Theses and Dissertations

The following gallery is predicated on the belief that a complete high school curriculum must be responsive to the needs of students as they navigate the stresses of living in isolation during a pandemic and always. High school students with minimal directions or guidance were charged with submitting a photo of a piece of art they had constructed to capture their perceptions of living through the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. The results give a candid view of how these students give purpose to the process of creating art as they construct and convey a sense of “being in the world.” …

Designing Vocabulary Instruction For English Language Learners In A Kindergarten Classroom, Loretta C. Ayers

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this action research study was to evaluate the effectiveness of instructional practices used to teach vocabulary to English Language Learners in a kindergarten classroom. The central question of the study was: what instructional practices in a classroom support vocabulary acquisition of ELLs? The purpose was to determine the impact of an intervention on vocabulary acquisition with a focus on directional prepositions and rhyming word vocabulary. Students were given whole group direct instruction, small group targeted instruction, and integrated peer play opportunities over the course of the study as vocabulary interventions. Data for this study included pre- and …

Digesting Gender: Gendered Foodways In Modern Chinese Literature, 1890s–1940s, Zhuo Feng

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I investigate Han Bangqing (1856–1894), Lao She (1899– 1966), and Su Qing’s (1914–1982) works to study the literary representations of how people purchased, prepared, shared, and ate food in different social contexts allowing them to adapt to new gender norms. I contend that the intersection of food, gender and literature stages the process through which people reconciled different and sometimes conflicting gender norms through their everyday eating practices. When encountering new cooking and eating practices in these literary works, people reflect upon their past lives and, wittingly or unwittingly, begin to accept different gender norms, and modify …

Games And Play Of Dream Of The Red Chamber, Jiayao Wang

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation examines the games derived from Cao Xueqin’s novel Dream of The Red Chamber during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (1880s-1920s) through its various literary and textual representations. In brief, the games create a sense of otherworldliness for players to imagine their mode of being in a space that is set apart from the daily grinds of the historical transition. Dramatic and literary sources have been a constant motif or theme for traditional games in China. However, it was after the publication of Dream of Red Chamber that the characters, the themes and motifs of the novel …

Sentiment Analysis For Software Engineering: How Far Can Pre-Trained Transformer Models Go?, Ting Zhang, Bowen Xu, Thung Ferdian, Stefanus Agus Haryono, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Extensive research has been conducted on sentiment analysis for software engineering (SA4SE). Researchers have invested much effort in developing customized tools (e.g., SentiStrength-SE, SentiCR) to classify the sentiment polarity for Software Engineering (SE) specific contents (e.g., discussions in Stack Overflow and code review comments). Even so, there is still much room for improvement. Recently, pre-trained Transformer-based models (e.g., BERT, XLNet) have brought considerable breakthroughs in the field of natural language processing (NLP). In this work, we conducted a systematic evaluation of five existing SA4SE tools and variants of four state-of-the-art pre-trained Transformer-based models on six SE datasets. Our work is …

Federated Topic Discovery: A Semantic Consistent Approach, Yexuan Shi, Yongxin Tong, Zhiyang Su, Di Jiang, Zimu Zhou, Wenbin Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

General-purpose topic models have widespread industrial applications. Yet high-quality topic modeling is becoming increasingly challenging because accurate models require large amounts of training data typically owned by multiple parties, who are often unwilling to share their sensitive data for collaborative training without guarantees on their data privacy. To enable effective privacy-preserving multiparty topic modeling, we propose a novel federated general-purpose topic model named private and consistent topic discovery (PC-TD). On the one hand, PC-TD seamlessly integrates differential privacy in topic modeling to provide privacy guarantees on sensitive data of different parties. On the other hand, PC-TD exploits multiple sources of …

Place-Based Engagement On Chicago's Northeast Side, Jon J. Schmidt, David Ensminger, Mitchell A. Hendrickson

Education: School of Education Faculty Publications and Other Works

Loyola University Chicago (LUC) is a Jesuit university with a mission to prepare students to “set the world on fire” by promoting justice in the world. Led by its School of Education, LUC has worked to engage this mission in its emerging work with public school partners guided by core principles of mutual benefit among partners, place-based engagement within our communities, and a focus on sustainable relationships. While serving others represents the genotype of our 150-year-old Jesuit university and community and civic engagement represents its phenotype, the last ten years has seen change in the university’s phenotype through dramatic growth …

Towards A Workforce Development Action Plan In The City Of Chelsea: Community Voices, Fabián Torres-Ardila, Daniela Bravo, Henry Chavez, Lorna Rivera

Gastón Institute Publications

The mission of the Gastón Institute at UMass Boston is to inform policymakers and the public about issues vital to the state’s growing Latino community and to provide research, analysis, and information necessary for more effective public policy development. The Gastón Institute has a long track record of conducting collaborative mixed-methods research in Chelsea, especially with Latino immigrants from Central and South America. For example, in 2008-2010, Gastón researchers worked with Chelsea Public Schools to evaluate family literacy programs at five schools. Since 2016, Gastón faculty have been working with Chelsea High School and Bunker Hill Community College’s Chelsea campus …

Redbird Scholar, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Fall 2020), Illinois State University, Office Of The Vice President For Research And Graduate Studies

Redbird Scholar

No abstract provided.

Learning To Leverage Obstacles, Resources, And Strategies In Math Classes With Multilingual Learners, Aaron T. Wilson, Hyung Won Kim, Mayra Ortiz Galarza, Josef A. Sifuentes

School of Mathematical & Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications

Mathematics teachers must be ready for diverse classrooms, where students who are multilingual learners (MLs) bring new dimensions to the teaching and learning. While MLs face obstacles to learning particular to their linguistic and cultural background, they also bring resources and strengths to bear that can be applied to teaching and learning. We have developed a Challenge-Based Instructional activity to help teachers leverage their experiences of teaching math to ML students, to better understand the obstacles and resources, and to select more effective pedagogical strategies particular to this context. This paper reports the benefits teachers gain in implementing this activity.

Cross-Domain Cross-Modal Food Transfer, Bin Zhu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Jingjing Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The recent works in cross-modal image-to-recipe retrieval pave a new way to scale up food recognition. By learning the joint space between food images and recipes, food recognition is boiled down as a retrieval problem by evaluating the similarity of embedded features. The major drawback, nevertheless, is the difficulty in applying an already-trained model to recognize different cuisines of dishes unknown to the model. In general, model updating with new training examples, in the form of image-recipe pairs, is required to adapt a model to new cooking styles in a cuisine. Nevertheless, in practice, acquiring sufficient number of image-recipe pairs …

Automated Discussion Analysis - Framework For Knowledge Analysis From Class Discussions, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman, Mallikan Gokarn Nitin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This research full paper, describes knowledge management of class discussions using an analytics based framework. Discussions, either live classroom or through online forums, when used as a teaching method can help stimulate critical thinking. It allows the teacher to explore in-depth the key concepts covered in the course, motivates students to articulate their ideas clearly and challenge the students to think more deeply. Analysing the discussions helps instructors gain better insights on the personal and collaborative learning behaviour of students. However, knowledge from in-class discussions and online forums is not effectively captured and mined due to lack of appropriate automated …

The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment: The Implications Of Its Legacy, Joshua Barash, Md

Department of Family & Community Medicine Presentations and Grand Rounds

Objectives

• Discuss details of the Tuskegee Study
• Summarize ethical issues
• Explore the legacy of Tuskegee: Distrust of the Medical Establishment

The George-Anne, Georgia Southern University

The George-Anne

• THEATRE GOES VIRTUAL
• Seen at Southern
• Services available to help students and alumni secure a job in the pandemic
• 19 cases during the sixth week
• What Happened to Student Government?
• Senator Jack Hill Memorial Scholarship
• Counseling Center works on self-care for students
• Georgia Southern falls to #19 Louisiana

A Critical Genre Analysis Of The User Requirement Specification Report In The Information Technology Industry, Shahizan Shaharuddin

Student Works (2020-2029)

While it has been established that discursive practices involving writing are highly situated and context-bound, few local studies have examined the processes involved in the construction of texts and the shaping of the intended text. Recent perspectives on writing as ways of working and acting, and texts as social action suggest that studying the processes behind the construction of a text could provide a clearer understanding of the discursive practices involved in the shaping of the text. This is seen as relevant to professional writing context in the present study as texts are often shaped to facilitate the social action …

Knowledge Enhanced Neural Fashion Trend Forecasting, Yunshan Ma, Yujuan Ding, Xun Yang, Lizi Liao, Wai Keung Wong, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fashion trend forecasting is a crucial task for both academia and industry. Although some efforts have been devoted to tackling this challenging task, they only studied limited fashion elements with highly seasonal or simple patterns, which could hardly reveal the real fashion trends. Towards insightful fashion trend forecasting, this work focuses on investigating fine-grained fashion element trends for specific user groups. We first contribute a large-scale fashion trend dataset (FIT) collected from Instagram with extracted time series fashion element records and user information. Furthermore, to effectively model the time series data of fashion elements with rather complex patterns, we propose …

The Impact Of Dynamics Of Collaborative Software Engineering On Introverts: A Study Protocol, Ingrid Nunes, Christoph Treude, Fabio Calefato

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Background: Collaboration among software engineers through face-to-face discussions in teams has been promoted since the adoption of agile methods. However, these discussions might demote the contribution of software engineers who are introverts, possibly leading to sub-optimal solutions and creating work environments that benefit extroverts. Objective: We aim to evaluate whether providing software engineers with time to work individually and reason about a collective problem is a setting that makes introverts more comfortable to interact and contribute more, ultimately leading to better solutions. Method: We plan to conduct a between-subjects study, with teams in a control group that design a software …

Factors That Contribute To Success In The Remote English Classroom, Emily Stein

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Theses and Dissertations

in their classes? 2) Which factors do remote teachers believe contribute to success in their classes? In an increasingly technological world, remote classes are becoming more common. With this change in the modality of class also comes a change in teacher characteristics, teaching strategies, and more. Topics explored in the literature review include these changes to teaching due to the remote modality, the successes and challenges of remote teaching and learning, as well as descriptions of remote models in the elementary school language learning context. The study looks more closely at a particular remote English program located in a small, …

A Faith-Driven Protocol On Gratitude, Forgiveness, And Stress For Chin Refugees From Burma: An Exploratory Study, Sally Goh

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The influx of immigrants from a diverse cultural and religious tradition into the United States has renewed counselors’ and researchers' interest in how collectivistic populations from a refugee background experience pre-settlement and post-settlement stress in this country. Refugees who have experienced trauma before their settlement are more likely to experience increasing psychiatric pressure from daily stressors such as language barriers, employment difficulties, familial and generational conflicts, and dwindling psychosocial support. However, some refugee populations, such as the Chin people from Burma, have a low-uptake of help-seeking for their psychological problems, leading to more insufficient adjustment to the host culture. Since …

Aatj’S Role In Diversity And Inclusion: An Opportunity To Transform Into A Well-Integrated Organization, Suwako Watanabe

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

According to the survey results, 57% of the survey respondents said no to the question, “Is the Japanese language educator community in North America diverse one?” (Mori, Hasegawa, Park, and Suzuki, this volume). This result suggests that the American Association of Teachers of Japanese (AATJ) as a professional organization needs to improve diversity within the field. What is a more important question is whether or not our organization and its membership as a whole embrace the value of diversity and put it into practice in every aspect of their profession on a daily basis. The survey results make it clear …

Disrupting The Deficit Gaze: Equity Work With University Supervisors, Maika J. Yeigh

Education Faculty Publications and Presentations

Teacher candidates commonly experience tensions within their clinical field placement classroom. Recently, candidates have brought forward tensions around the use of a deficit gaze (Dudley-Marling, 2007) on students and their families by their mentor teachers. Where candidates of the past would ignore negative framing, current candidates want to disrupt the status quo. This conceptual article describes one EPPs attempt to support teacher candidates “disruption” of instances where a mentor teacher used a deficit-lens toward students and/or their families. Clinical supervisors were offered professional development to support teacher candidates and guide them to disrupt in ways that maintained the professional relationship …