Digital Commons Network^™

Promoting Equity By Scaling Up Summer Engineering Experiences: A Retrospective Reflection On Tensions And Tradeoffs, Walter C. Lee, David B. Knight, Monica E. Cardella

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

A central challenge in engineering education is providing experiences that are appropriate for and accessible to underserved communities. However, to provide such experiences, we must better understand the process of offering a geographically distributed asset-based out-of-school program. This paper focuses on a collaborative research project that examined the broad implementation of the Summer Engineering Experiences for Kids (SEEK) program organized by the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE). SEEK is a three-week summer program that engages participants in hands-on, team-based engineering design projects. NSBE’s goal is to make SEEK culturally sustaining, community-connected, and scalable. The purpose of this paper is …

Transnational Latinx Youths’ Workplace Funds Of Knowledge And Implications For Assets-Based, Equity-Oriented Engineering Education, Amy Wilson-Lopez, Jorge Acosta-Feliz

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

Due to economic inequality in society, millions of Latinx high school youth work after-school jobs and summer jobs in order to provide additional income for their families. The purpose of this qualitative study, conducted with transnational Latinx youth, was to identify the engineering-related skills and bodies of knowledge they developed and applied while in different workplaces. This study is framed in complementary theories of funds of knowledge, Vygotskian theories of mediated action, and theories of resistant capital. Specifically, this study is based in the premise that youth can develop engineering-related funds of knowledge through tool-mediated, goal-directed activities jointly conducted with …

The Ingenuity Of Everyday Practice: A Framework For Justice-Centered Identity Work In Engineering In The Middle Grades, Angela M. Calabrese Barton, Kathleen Schenkel, Edna Tan

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

Inequities in opportunities to learn and become in engineering, especially for minoritized youth, are enduring and systemic. How students experience engineering education, through curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher/student interactions, all shape opportunities for identity development. In this paper we draw upon cultural studies and critical ethnography to explore how and why students engage in engineering for sustainable communities and its relationship to their identity work. We ground our work in a justice-centered asset-based stance that centers how people’s lived lives and community wisdom yield powerful forms of cultural knowledge/practice relevant to learning and engaging in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. We …

Elementary Teacher Adaptations To Engineering Curricula To Leverage Student And Community Resources, Jennifer L. Chiu, Sarah J. Fick, Kevin W. Mcelhaney, Nonye Alozie, Reina Fujii

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

This paper addresses an important consideration for promoting equitable engineering instruction: understanding how teachers contextualize curricular materials to draw upon student and community resources. We present a descriptive case study of two 5th grade teachers who co-designed a Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)-aligned curricular unit that integrated science, engineering, and computational modeling. The five-week project challenged students to redesign their school grounds to reduce water runoff and increase accessibility for students with disabilities. The teachers implemented the project with one Grade 5 class with a large proportion of students having individualized learning plans and cultural backgrounds minoritized in science, technology, …

Clickbait Detection In Youtube Videos, Ruchira Gothankar

Master's Projects

YouTube videos often include captivating descriptions and intriguing thumbnails designed to increase the number of views, and thereby increase the revenue for the person who posted the video. This creates an incentive for people to post clickbait videos, in which the content might deviate significantly from the title, description, or thumbnail. In effect, users are tricked into clicking on clickbait videos. In this research, we consider the challenging problem of detecting clickbait YouTube videos. We experiment with logistic regression, random forests, and multilayer perceptrons, based on a variety of textual features. We obtain a maximum accuracy in excess of 94%.

Towards A Machine Learning Based Generalizable Framework For Detecting Covid-19 Misinformation On Social Media, Yuanzhi Chen

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus, online social media has become a conduit for the rapid propagation of misinformation. The misinformation is a type of fake news that is created inadvertently without the intention of causing harm. Yet COVID-19 misinformation has caused serious social disruptions including accidental death and destruction of public property. Timely prevention of the propagation of online misinformation requires the development of automated detection tools. Machine learning (ML) based models have been used to automate techniques for identifying fake news. These techniques involve converting text data …

Emergent Bilingual High School Students' Social And Emotional Experiences, Elizabeth Vera, Amy J. Heineke, Plamena Daskalova, Anna K. Schultes, Juan Pantoja-Patiño, Britt Duncan, Chelsea Yanuaria, Claire Furtado

Education: School of Education Faculty Publications and Other Works

High school students labeled as English learners, referred to in this paper as emergent bilinguals, participated in a mixed methods study of their social and emotional well-being. Relationships with school personnel, peer relations, and involvement in support activities were connected to well-being while experiences of microaggressions from teachers and peers, lack of access to advanced curricula, and poor integration with mainstream peers were related to negative well-being. A variety of school, peer, and family themes both promoted and compromised well-being. Students' sense of connection to mainstream students was positively related to school belonging and positive affect. A sense of connection …

Review Of: Cates, James. 2020. Serpent In The Garden: Amish Sexuality In A Changing World., Mark A. Yarhouse

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

James Cates offers a fascinating look at Amish views and experiences of marriage, family, sexuality, and gender in the book, Serpent in the Garden: Amish Sexuality in a Changing World. The analysis is based on “many years of interaction, informal interviews, and conversations with Amish confidantes…” (p. xiii). The upside of this approach is that the book has an “insider” feel to it. The downside is that the reader is not always sure how representative the stories are of the Amish community. From the opening story in the Preface to similar, colorful anecdotes throughout, the book may lend itself to …

Modest Dress Practices Through The Eyes Of Seven Conservative Mennonite Women, Megan L. Mong, John M. Clifton

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

How do Conservative Mennonite and Amish-Mennonite women conceptualize their religious dress practices? Do they unthinkingly conform to church dress practices or do they exercise some agency? Using an oral history research methodology, we explore the relationship between social structures and individual agency through the stories of seven women regarding their interaction with modest dress practices. These stories touch on the transmission of dress practices, the variety of influences that shaped their experiences, and changes in the expression of dress practices. The stories consist primarily of quotations from interviews conducted by Megan Mong, a former member of a Conservative Mennonite church; …

Contrasting Spaces In Plautdietsch: Language Variation And Change, Roslyn Burns

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

In this article, I explore linguistic variation in Plautdietsch through the lens of social variation and the resulting redistribution of linguistic forms across the community. Language change requires variation in a population and a social pathway for the variation to be distributed (or redistributed) across a community. This article explores two systems of variation in the Plautdietsch language as it is used across North America: the so-called traditional dialect system (based on descriptions from Thiessen 1977, Epp 1993, and Rempel 1995, among others), and the vowel system (based on Nieuweboer 1998, Burns 2016a,b, among others). I propose that linguistic diversification …

Vocal Art: Development Factors (From The History Of The Formation Of Fundamental Values), Marfua Khamidova

Eurasian music science journal

This article deals with the factors that played an essential role in the development of European Opera art and academic singing, which was formed by taking all the best that was developed over the centuries, forming criteria for the ideal sound image, starting with classical, romantic Opera and Opera verism and modernist concepts of the early twentieth century.

Malware Classification With Bert, Joel Lawrence Alvares

Master's Projects

Malware Classification is used to distinguish unique types of malware from each other.

This project aims to carry out malware classification using word embeddings which are used in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to identify and evaluate the relationship between words of a sentence. Word embeddings generated by BERT and Word2Vec for malware samples to carry out multi-class classification. BERT is a transformer based pre- trained natural language processing (NLP) model which can be used for a wide range of tasks such as question answering, paraphrase generation and next sentence prediction. However, the attention mechanism of a pre-trained BERT model can …

Fake News Analysis And Graph Classification On A Covid-19 Twitter Dataset, Kriti Gupta

Master's Projects

Earlier researches have showed that the spread of fake news through social media can have a huge impact to society and also to individuals in an extremely negative way. In this work we aim to study the spread of fake news compared to real news in a social network. We do that by performing classical social network analysis to discover various characteristics, and formulate the problem as a binary classification, where we have graphs modeling the spread of fake and real news. For our experiments we rely on how news are propagated through a popular social media services such as …

Wildfire Risk Prediction For A Smart City, Rekha Rani

Master's Projects

Wildfires are uncontrolled fires that may lead to the destruction of biodiversity, soil fertility, and human resources. There is a need for timely detection and prediction of wildfires to minimize their disastrous effects. In this research, we propose a wildfire prediction model that relies on multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) to explicitly evaluates multiple conflicting criteria in decision making and weave the wildfire risks into the city’s resiliency plan. We incorporate fuzzy set theory to handle imprecision and uncertainties. In the process, we create a new data set that includes California cities’ weather, vegetation, topography, and population density records. The model …

Classifying Illegal Advertisements On The Darknet Using Nlp, Karan Shashin Shah

Master's Projects

The Darknet has become a place to conduct various illegal activities like child labor, contract murder, drug selling while staying anonymous. Traditionally, international and government agencies try to control these activities, but most of those actions are manual and time-consuming. Recently, various researchers developed Machine Learning (ML) approaches trying to aid in the process of detecting illegal activities. The above problem can benefit by using different Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. More specifically, researchers have used various classical topic modeling techniques like bag of words, N-grams, Term Frequency, Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) to represent features and train machine …

Timing Of Home Health Care Initiation And 30-Day Rehospitalizations Among Medicare Beneficiaries With Diabetes By Race And Ethnicity., Jamie M Smith, Haiqun Lin, Charlotte Thomas-Hawkins, Jennifer Tsui, Olga F Jarrín

College of Nursing Faculty Papers & Presentations

Older adults with diabetes are at elevated risk of complications following hospitalization. Home health care services mitigate the risk of adverse events and facilitate a safe transition home. In the United States, when home health care services are prescribed, federal guidelines require they begin within two days of hospital discharge. This study examined the association between timing of home health care initiation and 30-day rehospitalization outcomes in a cohort of 786,734 Medicare beneficiaries following a diabetes-related index hospitalization admission during 2015. Of these patients, 26.6% were discharged to home health care. To evaluate the association between timing of home health …

Faculty Perspectives On Neuroscience Interdisciplinary Integration: A Descriptive Study From The American University In Cairo, Sondos Mohamed Moshtohry

Theses and Dissertations

The interdisciplinary approach and the science of the brain are successfully wedded. Globally, neuroscience is expanding and offering substantial advances and versatile applications within various domains affirming the worthiness of its investments; however, nationally, a similar engagement with the field is not evident. This study proposes the integrative research cloud model as a framework for interdisciplinary engagement. The American University in Cairo (AUC) is known for its forward-looking strategy and belief in interdisciplinarity that is why it was chosen as the setting for this study. Accordingly, the opinions and perspectives of its faculty from the different schools and departments on …

Multimodal Writing Of University Students: The Case Of Academic Posters, Noha Ibrahim Fouad

Theses and Dissertations

After having been marginalized for a long time as a second-class genre or “the poor country cousin of papers” (Swales & Feak, 2000), academic posters have recently received remarkable attention as a special multimodal genre that is indispensable for the membership of the academic community. In line with the currently growing interest in multimodal writing, the present study seeks to contribute to the limited body of knowledge on academic posters in two ways: first by investigating the textual and visual communicative strategies employed by novice multimodal writers to facilitate the comprehension of their multimodal texts and guide readers through their …

Visual Framing Effects Of News Coverage Of Police Use Of Deadly Force On Intergroup Relationships, Lucile Henderson, Riva Tukachinsky Forster, Leora Kalili, Simone Guillory

Communication Faculty Articles and Research

The study examines the effects of visual framing in news coverage of law enforcement use of lethal force. In a 2X2 online experiment, participants read one of four versions of a news story that included visual racial cues (images depicting a Black vs. a White victim) and a delinquent/normative frame—depicting the victim wearing attire that signifies either normative or delinquent behavior (regalia vs. a hooded sweatshirt). Both race and delinquency framing influenced the readers’ stereotype endorsement and feelings toward Black Americans. However, judgment of the police officer’s behavior solely depended on the victim’s race. These findings demonstrate the importance of …

Review Of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (Fasd) Among Aboriginal And Torres Strait Islander People, Sharynne Hamilton, Michael Doyle, Carol Bower

Australian Indigenous HealthBulletin

Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) is a preventable, lifelong disability that disproportionately affects Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This review provides a comprehensive synthesis of the available information on FASD among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, with reference to the limitations on population-based data and evaluated programs. The review outlines; the harms of alcohol use in the context of colonisation, cultural perspectives on assessment and diagnosis, effective prevention programs and a summary of state and national policies. Health impacts, educational outcomes and the effects of FASD on vulnerable populations such as children in protection and young people in …

Equitizing Engineering Education By Valuing Children’S Assets: Including Empathy And An Ethic Of Care When Considering Trade-Offs After Design Failures, Pamela S. Lottero-Perdue, John Settlage

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

The broad case being made in this paper is that recognizing student assets—rather than focusing on deficits—is essential for making engineering education more equitable. The paper begins with our exploration of an epistemic practice of engineering, ‘‘making trade-offs,’’ as enacted by kindergartners after experiencing design failure and during redesign. We then acknowledge through a reexamination of data that our understanding of children’s grappling about a trade-off was incomplete without considering another asset that children brought to the design experience: ‘‘enacting empathy and an ethic of care.’’ We argue for the inclusion of this asset as an epistemic practice of engineering. …

Young Brazilian Catholics Reaffiliating: A Case Study In The City Of Campos, Rj, Brazil, Cecilia L. Mariz, Wânia Amélia Belchior Mesquita, Michelle Piraciaba Araújo

Journal of Global Catholicism

Through a case study in Campos, a northern city of Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil, this article analyzes reports from young people who state that they have undergone a process of revival or reactivation of their Catholic faith. They all declared to have participated in the “St Andrew’s School of Evangelization.” They also mentioned having experienced an "encounter with God." Their narratives were similar to conversion accounts reported by practitioners of other religious traditions. The interviewees describe faith as a personal choice, and emphasize the need for religious study and the value of religious knowledge. To what extent these values …

Contemporary Brazilian Catholicism And Healing Practices: Notes On Environmentalism And Medicalization, Juliano F. Almeida

Journal of Global Catholicism

Anthropological studies on Brazilian Catholicism traditionally focused on popular variants of this religious practice and their relationship with the official Catholicism. Encouraged by recent anthropological perspectives, which highlight the relevance of devoting researches not only on the margins, but also on the center of social practices, this paper analyzes contemporary practices of Brazilian Catholic friars and priests on health promotion. The analysis of their publications (books that include practices and tips on health and that became best sellers etc.), as well as interviews, allows us to perceive a process of environmentalization on the contemporary Brazilian Catholicism. This process seems to …

Strong Church, Weak Catholicism: Transformations In Brazilian Catholicism, Carlos Alberto Steil, Rodrigo Toniol

Journal of Global Catholicism

In this paper we explore data on Catholicism from the 2010 census in Brazil, as well as other data from the Center for Religious Statistics and Social Investigation. Using these statistics, we question those arguments that explain the reduction in the number of Catholics in Brazilian society as a problem in the institution’s adaptation in response to the challenges of evangelization, or as a lack of ministerial vocations to meet the religious demands of the people. Pursuing an alternative argument, we consider the weakening of the relationship between the Catholic institution and traditional popular Catholicism to be a fundamental aspect …

Editor's Introduction, Marc Roscoe Loustau

Journal of Global Catholicism

No abstract provided.

Addressing Adolescents’ Syntactic Complexity And Overall Writing Skills Through An Online Writing Workshop: A Pilot Study With The Homeschool Population, Shelby Ann Hinrichs

Communication Disorders Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity

Writing development is an area of concern in adolescents across education platforms, including parents who homeschool their children. The current study evaluated the effect of providing an online writing workshop for adolescents who are homeschooled. The participants of the study were students who were homeschooled and their parent(s) who were recruited via social media. After receiving child assent and parental consent, nine adolescents (5 females; 4 males), ages ten to twelve years old, participated in a five-week online writing workshop. The workshop consisted of one pre-test week, three weeks of treatment, and one post-test week. At pre- and post-test, the …

Integrative Principles In Preparation Of Future Foreign Language Teachers For Pedagogical Practice, Ravshan Sayfulin Teacher, Dilafruz Sandibaeva Teacher

Central Asian Journal of Education

The article discusses that improving the quality of teaching foreign languages in higher education on the basis of integrated approach is an important component of successful socialization of the individual and development in the world community, the mechanisms of which are implemented in the educational process. Particular attention is paid to organizing the educational process at the level of international standards on the basis of integrated approaches, ensuring the quality of educational content in harmony with the culture of the country where the language is studied, and expanding pedagogical and didactic opportunities.

"Lexicography" And Dictionary Compilation, Sokhib Salimovich Sharipov

Scientific reports of Bukhara State University

Background. This article examines lexicography - a separate science that includes theoretical lexicography with its own theory, and since there is a theory, then there is practice, that is, practical lexicography. Lexicographic research combines both theoretical and practical aspects. The creation of innovative models of theoretical linguistic conclusions for new practical lexicographic products is the main task of lexicographic research. As a mirror reflecting the development of civilizations, the state and level of the people, relations in society, the development of scientifically progressive or orthodox thought, the dictionary covers a variety of fields of science and technology: from interpretation and …

The Allocation Of Particles In Translation Dictionaries And Ways To Express Them In Translation, Gulrukh Shavkatovna Kakhkhorova

Scientific reports of Bukhara State University

Introduction. In the languages of the peoples of the world, particles with their own logical-grammatical, semantic-stylistic features and functions, historical development and pragmatic features have an independent place as one of the auxiliary words. Although they do not have a separate lexical meaning, they are among the categories that provide a linguistic and speech relationship in terms of their ability to connect equally to each other by adding different meanings to words and sentences at the syntactic levels. The comparative study of particles within different systematic languages plays an important role in understanding and expressing objective reality through language tools. …

The Culinary Names In Texts Of National And Cultural Attitude, Mohira Rasulovna Saidova, Dilbar Gulyamovna Sharipova

Scientific reports of Bukhara State University

Introduction. By its very nature, a way of existence and potential possibility - language occupies a special place in the system of values and priorities of a cultures. Language and culture are seen as co-development factors enrichment - and existence. Participating in a single historical process, each nation in a special way perceives and evaluates the world around him, which depends on many factors: the peculiarities of historical development, lifestyle, geographic and climatic conditions of living, customs and traditions. National literature is worthy general - of people. Fiction reflects the historical era, with socio-political structure, geographical conditions, especially to - …