Digital Commons Network^™

Evidence-Based Best Practices For Kindergarten Reading, Rachel Dolehanty

Master's Theses & Capstone Projects

This literature review aims to highlight evidence-based best practices for kindergarten reading instruction. Popular reading curriculums and instructional cueing strategies are discussed in relation to their effectiveness for kindergarten reading success. Meaning-emphasis versus code- emphasis reading curriculum philosophies are explored, and specific curriculums that fall into these categories are discussed. Metacognition strategies and their relation to successful reading instruction are underscored. Interventions are examined in the areas of kindergarten phonological awareness, phonics, comprehension, and writing. Successful interventions in each of these areas of literacy instruction are highlighted through current research.

Tier Ii Interventions: Utilizing An Interventionist At The Secondary Level, Sarah Ham

Master's Theses & Capstone Projects

The purpose of this action research was to determine the impact of an interventionist conducting Tier II interventions on student achievement. The research setting was a high school English language arts classroom in Iowa where the participants included 58 ninth-grade students. In previous years, interventions were taught by the ELA teacher in the classroom; this action research dictated that an interventionist teach the Tier II intervention lesson to non-proficient students during class. Quantitative data from these participants was collected to assess the impact of an interventionist on student achievement in two reading skills: identifying the main idea and summarizing. Assessment …

Teaching Early Literacy Skills In Preschool And Future Kindergarten Success, Amanda Wehrhan

Master's Theses & Capstone Projects

This literature review examines the importance and the effect of literacy on Kindergarten readiness and future school success for early childhood education, specifically on preschool students. Early Childhood Educators are feeling the pressure now more than ever to have their young students prepared to enter Kindergarten. In recent years there has been a shift away from a play-based classroom to more of a focus on academics. In this literature review, various research studies are examined to determine whether or not the real focus of the preschool curriculum should be play or literacy or both.

Historical-Critical Methods, James W. Barker

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

Historical criticism attempts to understand NT texts in their original contexts, free of later dogmatic presuppositions. This essay describes its traditional inquiries and methods as well as recent trends. The discussion divides into four sections: textual criticism, the Gospels and Jesus, Paul and his letters, and the limits of canon.

An Analysis Of The Roles And Responsibilities Of The Music Ministry In The African American Church, Jeffrey Leonta Wilson

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The perfect church does not exist. All churches have issues, and Church of Faith and Deliverance in Kinston, North Carolina, is no exception. The church has a problem within the music ministry. The purpose of this DMIN action research thesis is to teach and provide adequate training on the roles and responsibilities of the music ministry at Church of Faith and Deliverance. If the roles and responsibilities of individuals in the music ministry are taught at Church of Faith and Deliverance, then unity of worship may result. The church is a living and breathing organism. When parishioners gather in the …

How To Assess Obscenity: A Legal Realism Interpretation Of The Legal Standards For Obscenity

UBC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Second Language Learning In Elementary Years: Cognitive And Social-Emotional Benefits, Brooke Elenbaas

Masters Projects

All through the world bilingualism is a normal part of school, work, and culture creating cognitive and social-emotional benefits (Fan, 2016; Marian & Shook, 2012). The United States is a unique educational system, distinctly geared towards monolinguals, specifically English, especially in the elementary schools. The absence of second language learning at the elementary grades is a gap districts should seek to fill as research shows brain development positively effecting cognitive and social-emotional learning during this early stage of development (Abutalebi et al., 2011). This project is an in-service designed for elementary school districts pursuing a better understanding of why second …

Writing As A Vessel For Thinking: Incorporating Self-Regulation, Metacognition, And Formative Assessment In The Middle School Ela Classroom, Alyssha Ginzel

Masters Projects

Writing is not only a means of demonstrating what one knows, it is a vessel to knowing. Thus, secondary writing curricula should support students’ learning and knowing. Evidence from meta-analyses suggests that an emphasis on self-regulated instruction to teaching writing (Graham, 2018a; Graham, 2020; Graham & Perin, 2007), metacognitive strategies (Hacker, 2018; Madison et al., 2019), and an emphasis on formative assessment and feedback throughout the writing process (Black & Wiliam, 1998; Fleischer, 2013; Madison et al., 2019) are among the practices with the highest effect sizes on students’ thinking and writing. When purposefully integrating these approaches and practices, secondary-level …

Carpets As Signifiers Of Historical Change: The Azerbaijani Carpet Industry From The Mid-Nineteenth To Late Twentieth Century, Jill Boggs

Senior Theses

The Azerbaijani carpet industry, long recognized as an important piece of Azerbaijan’s cultural heritage, transformed dramatically between the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries in response to political, economic, and social changes that took place under the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. During this period, the carpet industry began to use modern weaving techniques and materials, favored factory production over traditional hand-woven designs, and created pieces for exportation rather than personal or community use. These developments contribute to two historical schools that view the Soviet Union as either a prison of nations, stifling non-Russian cultures, or a nursery of ethnic identities, …

The Pósa Method: Students' Perceptions Of Hungarian Mathematics Pedagogy, Lauren Seidl

Senior Theses

This study examines the reactions and experiences of students who are educated under the Pósa method, a Hungarian mathematics pedagogy previously employed in mathematics camps designed for gifted students. The focus of this research was to analyze the experiences of students in a Pósa method class in Budapest, Hungary. The holistic approach of gathering historical, qualitative, and analytical data pursued answers to the subsequent three research questions that guided the study: What do the students at Petrik School think about the Pósa method? What do the students in the Pósa method class think about math? What do the students’ and …

Keeping Them Honest: Promises Reduce Cheating In Adolescents, Patricia Kanngiesser, Jahnavi Sunderarajan, Jan K. Woike

School of Psychology

People frequently engage in dishonest behavior at a cost to others, and it is therefore beneficial to study interventions promoting honest behavior. We implemented a novel intervention that gave participants a choice to promise to be truthful or not to promise. To measure cheating behavior, we developed a novel variant of the mind game—the dice-box game—as well as a child-friendly sender–receiver game. Across three studies with adolescents aged 10 to 14 years (N = 640) from schools in India, we found that promises systematically lowered cheating rates compared with no-promise control conditions. Adolescents who sent truthful messages in the sender–receiver …

Bert Argues: How Attention Informs Argument Mining, Ting Chen

Honors Theses

Argument mining is the automatic identification and extraction of structure from argumentative language. Previous works have constrained the argument structure to forming strictly trees in order to utilize efficient tree-specific techniques. However, arguments in the wild are unlikely to exhibit this constrained structure. Given the recent trend of fine-tuning large pre-trained models to reach state of the art performance on a variety of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, we look to leverage the power of these deep contextualized word embeddings towards the task of non-tree argument mining. In this paper, we introduce a new pipeline which utilizes pre-trained BERT based …

Instructional Experiences: A Case Study Of Perceptions Of High School American Sign Language Teachers Who Are Hearing, Rhonda S. Leslie

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A significant gap has been identified in research-based findings and classroom instructional practices of hearing ASL teachers in high schools in the U.S. (Rosen, 2015). Research has shown the absence of standardized ASL instructional guidelines, rules, and procedures has created a significant gap in teaching and learning practices at the high school level, and research-based findings about the most suitable pedagogical approaches that should be used in ASL induction and immersion programs. This study aims to understand hearing teachers’ perceptions of their ASL instructional practices and choices, using a qualitative research approach and a case study design. Based on a …

Speech & Hearing Sciences 2021 Apr Self-Study & Documents, University Of New Mexico

UNM Academic Program Review

UNM Department of Speech & Hearing Sciences APR self-study and review team report for Spring 2021, fulfilling requirements of the Higher Learning Commission.

Enhancing Cultural Intelligence And Digital Literacy In Accounting Education: Insights From A University’S Global Student Consulting Programme, Clarence Goh, Yuanto Kusnadi, Gary Pan, Poh Sun Seow

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Recent literature has advocated for the use of project based learning to engage students in active learning. This study examines how students’ learning of cultural intelligence and digital literacy are enhanced through an overseas project-based learning (PBL) programme at a Singapore University (UNIS), called the UNIS-XO pedagogy. Specifically, this study provides a framework through which students, faculty members, and industry partner can collaborate through consulting programs with the aim to provide feasible recommendations to the clients. Our findings suggest that an experiential PBL with an overseas client is an important learning experience through which students can strengthen their digital literacy …

How Many Ways Can You Vocalize Emotion? Introducing An Audio Corpus Of Acted Emotion, Logan Ricks Kowallis

Theses and Dissertations

Emotion recognition from facial expressions has been thoroughly explored and explained through decades of research, but emotion recognition from vocal expressions has yet to be fully explained. This project builds on previous experimental approaches to create a large audio corpus of acted vocal emotion. With a large enough sample size, both in number of speakers and number of recordings per speaker, new hypotheses can be explored for differentiating emotions. Recordings from 131 subjects were collected and made available in an online corpus under a Creative Commons license. Thirteen acoustic features from 120 subjects were used as dependent variables in a …

Academic Assessment Update, Georgia Southern University

Institutional Assessment & Accreditation

There's a lot to wrap up at the conclusion of this academic year! Our news letter provides additional information about preparation for the upcoming reaffirmation of accreditation with SACSCOC, an overview of the results of peer-review of assessment documents for 2019-2020, an update on Gen Ed Redesign, a feature celebrating excellence in academic program assessment, and introductions to some of our newest team members.

The Puente Project: Bridging The Achievement Gap For Latinx Students, Nelly Fabiola Brashear

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Theses & Dissertations

For Latinx students, attaining a higher education is one the most important achievements they can pursue. According to Gándara and Moredechay (2017), Latinx students encounter many socio-economic struggles such as a lack of familial support and limited educational resources. In fact, many Latinx students come from low-income households, which further widens the minority education gap.

The Puente Project program aims to increase the number of Latinx student transfers from community colleges to four-year institutions thereby increasing the number of bachelor’s degrees earned by this underserved population of students. However, this program is not without its limitations. Surprisingly, the results of …

President Madison's Living Constitution: Fixation, Liquidation, And Constitutional Politics In The Jeffersonian Era, Saul Cornell

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

Interrupting The Propaganda Supply Chain, Kyle Hamilton, Bojan Bozic, Luc Longo

Conference papers

In this early-stage research, a multidisciplinary approach is presented for the detection of propaganda in the media, and for modeling the spread of propaganda and disinformation using semantic web and graph theory. An ontology will be designed which has the theoretical underpinnings from multiple disciplines including the social sciences and epidemiology. An additional objective of this work is to automate triple extraction from unstructured text which surpasses the state-of-the-art performance.

The Impact Of People Of The Dream Applied To Kingdom Authority Christian Center Lay Workers Church Plant: A Mixed Methods Approach, Kenneth Kief Davis

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Kingdom Authority Christian Center (KACC) is growing more attentive to the changing demographics in the world. It seeks to understand that as other countries and nations continue to diversify by race and ethnicity, change is needed. The problem is that KACC has no training curriculum designed to impact and employ change. A mixed-method approach will be applied to fix KACC’s problem and the proposal of correspondence from People of the Dream. This thesis project will provide research from individual interviews, a population group, and an inside viewpoint from one of the people in the dream. This project will also add …

Teaching In The Right Context: Textbook Supply Program, Language, And Vocabulary Ability In Vietnam, Tomoki Fujii, Maki Nakajima, Sijia Xu

Research Collection School Of Economics

While past two decades have witnessed a remarkable educational progress in Vietnam, ethnic minority children consistently lagged behind ethnic majority children in academic performance. The government of Vietnam has stepped up efforts to assist ethnic minority students in their learning by lowering the linguistic and cultural barriers they face. Among such efforts is the textbook supply program, and we examine its impact on the learning of children proxied by vocabulary test. We apply difference-in-differences estimation to four rounds of the Young Lives data between 2006 and 2015 in order to investigate how the textbook supply program narrowed the gap between …

The Contextualization Of Myth: Identification Of Myth In The Propagation Of Narrative Across Generational Boundaries, Joseph G. Ponthieux

Communication & Theatre Arts Theses

This thesis demonstrates the unique correlation between myth and the propagation of narrative across generational boundaries. It argues that myth occurs in the intersection of belief, semiotics, and context, and further enables a way of re-encoding a narrative with a dual contextuality. This dual context preserves a narrative’s literal context while endowing it with a new or modified myth context and affords the audience a selection of choices for how to receive a narrative experienced as myth. To demonstrate this correlation a Myth Context Reception Model is designed for the purpose of identifying ascendent, obscure or emergent myths evident in …

Uprising, Issue 11 [Spring 2021], University Of Northern Iowa. Northern Iowa Student Government.

Uprising

Contents:

One Mile Wear --- 6
Looking Inward to See Outward --- 12
Nourish --- 16
SPEAK UP: Words Matter --- 20
Color Theory --- 22
An Introduction to Enneagrams --- 32
Make Your Style More You: A How To --- 34
Blocking Self-Doubt --- 36
Just Like Magic --- 38
To Those Who Had Courage --- 44
Simply Tolerated --- 45
Pattern Play --- 42
The Power of the Mind --- 46

Creation Costs: Hermeneutical And Scientific Repercussions Through The Lens Of The Day Age And Young Earth Views, Mark Alan Langner

Doctor of Ministry (DMin)

Genesis’s creation narrative is crystal clear: God is eternal and preeminent, humankind is made in his image, and all nature results from God’s spoken word. Christocentric truth bursts forth from the opening words of creation, reality transcended by the Son of God. However, particularly in the years following the beginnings of Darwinian theory, questioning of the biblical creation narrative and variant versions of that narrative has exponentially expanded. This project is intended to biblically and systematically underscore the supernatural attributes of the Creator and the inerrancy of the Bible that God inspired, to determine hermeneutical and scientific costs associated with …

Governing The Global Public Square, Rebecca Hamilton

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Social media platforms are the public square of our era-a reality that has been entrenched by the widespread closure of physical public spaces in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This online space is global in nature, with over 3.6 billion users worldwide, but its governance does not fall solely to govern- ments. With the rise of social media, important decisions about what content does-and does not-stay online are made by private technology companies. Reflecting this reality, cutting-edge scholarship has converged on a triadic approach to understanding how the global public square operates-with states, users, and technology companies marking out three …

Spaces For Becomings? Heterotopic Fictions In Preciado’S Testo Yonqui, Caroline King

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

This article examines the possibilities and limits of gender becomings in Paul Preciado’s book Testo yonqui (Testo Junkie). A genre-fluid “body-essay,” his text theorizes a departure from gender through contemporary medicine. Following Preciado in his self-administration of testosterone, the book labels today’s reality a “pharmacopornographic era,” a new iteration of Foucault’s biocapitalism. After designating Preciado’s self-generated transformations as becomings, I explore how the book’s heterotopic spaces––including its genre––facilitate Preciado’s forward-moving gender identity. A Foucauldian term, heterotopia has not yet been applied to Testo Junkie, however it offers insight into the book’s potential to motivate individuals to …

The Use Of Egyptian Blue In Funerary Paintings From Roman Egypt, Margaret Sather

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

This paper explores the use of the synthesized pigment Egyptian blue in the encaustic and tempera funerary portraits of Graeco-Roman ruled Egypt in the 1st-3rd centuries CE. Recent developments in non-destructive imaging analysis technology have aided research institutions and museums in detecting the presence of this pigment. New questions have arisen based on these findings of Egyptian blue in the depiction of flesh and hair of these subjects, particularly because blue is so rarely used as a standalone pigment in works of this category. These analyses have challenged assumptions that Egyptian blue was a rare and valuable pigment during the …

Media Effects On Cultural Perceptions As Seen In Food Media And Food Cultures, David Williams Tortolini

Institute for the Humanities Theses

Everyday people all over the world watch food media. These engagements happen through multiple media outlets -- both new and old -- such as documentaries, streaming platforms, and television. Through these outlets, viewers can immerse themselves in a group’s culinary culture from the comforts of their residences. What happens when viewers engage with these cultures has been fabricated for consumerism and hegemonic balancing. This thesis will examine and critique how these platforms have created conditions for a change in cultural definitions and representations. Audiences in the United States are shown these changes when they are shown a specific group's cultural …

Automatic Speech Recognition For Low-Resource And Morphologically Complex Languages, Ethan Morris

Theses

The application of deep neural networks to the task of acoustic modeling for automatic speech recognition (ASR) has resulted in dramatic decreases of word error rates, allowing for the use of this technology in smart phones and personal home assistants in high-resource languages. Developing ASR models of this caliber, however, requires hundreds or thousands of hours of transcribed speech recordings, which presents challenges for most of the world’s languages. In this work, we investigate the applicability of three distinct architectures that have previously been used for ASR in languages with limited training resources. We tested these architectures using publicly available …