Digital Commons Network^™

Early Foundational Cultures Of Modern Spain, Emily Webre

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Democracy’S Effect On Attributes Of Transnational Terrorism, Alice Epley

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Effects Of Differentiated Literacy Instruction In A Kindergarten Classroom, Brenda Nagel

Master's Theses & Capstone Projects

The purpose of this action research was to determine if using differentiating literacy in kindergarten led to more successful student achievement. This included implementing multi-sensory learning, learning styles, positive relationships, and relevant, specific data. The researcher is a kindergarten teacher in her 6th year of teaching, where her own students participated in the class-wide intervention. The timeline for conducting this action research was eight weeks. This included the quantitative phonics pre-assessment through FAST (Formative Assessment System for Teachers), implementation of differentiated literacy activities tailored to various learning styles, collection of purposeful and relevant quantitative data, and a post-assessment on literacy …

Louisiana Social Studies: A Look Into The Culture, History And Business Of Our State, Ava Borksey

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Spring 2022 Catalog, Lsu Press

LSU Press Seasonal Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Financial Challenges And Capacity Among African Refugees In The Southern Usa: A Study Of Socio-Demographic Differences, Njeri Kagotho, Jennifer Scott, Mckenzie M. Ketchum, Youn Kyoung Kim, Arati Maleku, Younghee Lim

Faculty Publications

Refugees’ successful integration into US society requires adaptation to economic, financial and social norms. Despite the importance of considering financial challenges (financial stress and financial anxiety) and financial capacity (financial literacy and financial self-efficacy) in reaching personal financial goals, literature examining the relationship between financial challenges and capacity—critical in refugee resettlement and integration—is sparse and fragmented. This study explored financial challenges and capacity amongst resettled African refugees (N ¼ 130) in the southern USA using data from a larger community-based participatory research study that used a mixed-methods approach. We explored socio-demographic differences in financial stress, financial anxiety, financial literacy and …

Guthrie's Guide To Better Legal Writing, 2nd Ed, Hannah Steeves

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The second edition of Guthrie’s Guide to Better Legal Writing is Neil Guthrie’s revised anthology of email queries and blog posts. The scope of the book is in its title: it offers practical tips and advice to legal writers. Guthrie’s definition of “legal writing” addresses written communication between lawyers, law students, and the layperson, although legal drafting is addressed intermittently. The book is not intended to be a comprehensive review of grammar and punctuation. Instead, it has an approximate agenda that is enhanced by the author’s personal narrative.

The author follows their own advice as outlined in the suggestions for …

Few-Shot Object Detection Via Baby Learning, Anh-Khoa Nguyen Vu, Nhat-Duy Nguyen, Khanh-Duy Nguyen, Vinh-Tiep Nguyen, Thanh Duc Ngo, Thanh-Toan Do, Tam Nguyen

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Few-shot learning is proposed to overcome the problem of scarce training data in novel classes. Recently, few-shot learning has been well adopted in various computer vision tasks such as object recognition and object detection. However, the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods have less attention to effectively reuse the information from previous stages. In this paper, we propose a new framework of few-shot learning for object detection. In particular, we adopt Baby Learning mechanism along with the multiple receptive fields to effectively utilize the former knowledge in novel domain. The propoed framework imitates the learning process of a baby through visual cues. The …

Doing More With Less: Racial Diversity In Nonprofit Leadership And Organizational Resilience, Steven W. Mumford

Political Science Faculty Publications

Racial diversity in nonprofit leadership presents a variety of benefits crucial for responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, leadership remains predominately white. Practitioner-oriented studies decry racial disparities in nonprofit funding, but academic literature offers mixed conclusions on how diversity influences resource acquisition. This article examines associations between racial composition of nonprofit leadership and organizational resilience to the pandemic, based on a survey of New Orleans-based nonprofits in winter 2021. Logistic regressions assess whether leadership diversity increases the likelihood of organizational resilience in both service delivery and financial health, finding that greater board diversity is associated with targeted programming and advocacy …

Research On The Model To Evaluate Intellectual Capital Of University Affiliated Think Tanks, Shuangqing Shi, Renjie Xu, Tianqi Shen

Journal of Scientific Information Research

[Purpose/significance]Intellectual capital represents the core competitiveness of university affiliated think tanks,therefore the evaluation of intellectual capital can intuitively reflect the development of think tanks,helping them work out an overall plan to achieve specific construction goals and promote innovative developments.[Method/process]Based on the intellectual capital theory and the orientation of university affiliated think tanks,this paper selects the evaluation indicators from the three aspects of human capital, structural capital and relational capital respectively,and uses fuzzy analytic hierarchy process(FAHP) to weigh the evaluation indicators with qualitative data dealt with 2-tuple linguistic assessment method,and then takes some Chinese university affiliated think tanks for example to …

Surviving Covid19 (Increased Domestic Violence, Marginalized Communities, And Innovative Solutions), Anjerrika R. Bean

Journal of Family Strengths

Surviving COVID19 (Increased Domestic Violence, Marginalized Communities, and Innovative Solutions) Domestic violence generally refers to violence occurring between residences within one single location. Intimate partner violence is domestic violence by a current or former spouse or partner in an intimate relationship against the other spouse or partner. IPV can take several forms, including physical, verbal, emotional, economic, and sexual abuse. According to the Center for Disease Control, 1 in 4 women and 1 in 9 men experience severe intimate partner physical violence, intimate partner contact sexual violence, and/or intimate partner stalking with impacts such as injury, fearfulness, post-traumatic stress disorder, …

Entropic Interactionist Theory: Reading Social Constructionism Through Thermodynamics And Samuel Beckett, Brie Barron

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This essay aims to explain the breakdown of social constructs through the concept of Entropic Interactionist Theory. EIT argues that it is the nature of creations to be vulnerable to the same forces as their creator, and that social constructions (like identity, for example) are subject to the very same physical forces that give rise to humanity’s creative impulse. At its core, EIT is informed by social constructionism and Nietzschean sociological theory, but it names the second law of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy as the driving force behind societal disintegration. The complication with this theory is that it …

Language Barriers In The U.S.: Exploring The Protection Of Human Trafficking Victims Whose Native Language Is Spanish, Rachel Klien-Hart

Honors College Theses

Human trafficking exists as a multi-billion-dollar industry that impacts millions of people around the world, mainly targeting vulnerable populations. In the United States, one vulnerable population includes non-English speaking victims trafficked for labor, agriculture, domestic, or sex purposes. Protecting trafficking victims involves providing justice, medical assistance, identification, therapy, rehabilitation, and reintegration tools which often falls within the purview of nonprofit organizations. Research on human trafficking has underscored language barriers as a key obstacle in the protection of trafficking victims. However, little is known about the role of language barriers in the nonprofit sector, and specifically the experiences of nonprofit organizations …

The Gay Agenda: Being Accepted In Children’S Media, Tiffany Wells

Honors College Theses

For many LGBTQ+ children, there is a lack of representation of their identities in the television shows they see growing up. We turn to objects, like television characters, to help “find our way,” which becomes limited for individuals who are part of the minority (Ahmed 1). When television shows reflect a variety of lived experiences, they can increase cultural competence in their viewers. While LGBTQ+ representation in children’s media has increased, it is still difficult to implement such representation. This thesis we will discuss three shows, Gravity Falls, Steven Universe, and The Owl House, that have struggled with the implementation …

The Importance Of Learning Deaf Culture Through A Black Deaf Perspective In The Field Of Communication Sciences And Disorders, Lindsay Lee

Honors College Theses

As the diversity in the demographics of clinical populations increases in the United States, clinicians must also be accountable for learning the culture of their patients. The Deaf community, specifically individuals who identify with Deaf culture and Black Deaf culture, is a multifaceted, cultural group that has been marginalized within various settings including social, political, and employment settings, including academic and clinical research. This review will examine the historical developments within Deaf History in the United States, the injustices related to Deaf culture, and more specifically Black Deaf culture, and discuss the critical need for Deaf research and tools that …

Are People In Federal Territories Part Of “We The People Of The United States”?, Gary S. Lawson, Guy Seidman

Faculty Scholarship

In 1820, a unanimous Supreme Court proclaimed: “The United States is the name given to our great republic, which is composed of states and territories.” While that key point is simple, and perhaps even obvious, the constitutional implications of such a construction of “the United States” as including federal territories are potentially far reaching. In particular, the Constitution’s Preamble announces that the Constitution is authored by “We the People of the United States” and that the document is designed to “secure the Blessings of Liberty” to the author and its “Posterity.” If inhabitants of federal territory are among “We the …

Cultural Healing Practices: Incorporating Cultural Healers Into Minnesota's Mental Health Care System, Raymond Shoup, Allyson Endersbe, Nayeli Hernandez Moctezuma, Patty Balderas-Johnson

Master of Social Work Student Policy Advocacy Briefs

Minnesota’s approach to health and mental health is based on western cultural traditions of illness, help seeking behaviors, healing and wellness. This approach does not work for many of the cultural communities in Minnesota, especially those with a deep history of generational trauma, oppression, and discrimination. We need to make mental health a priority for Minnesotans by expanding the availability of holistic approaches rooted in the cultural traditions of Minnesota’s diverse cultural communities. We must address the impact of generational trauma and work to lessen the harm by incorporating cultural healing practices into our mental health care system, including the …

Asian Americans And The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Multi-Lingual Survey In Greater Boston, Carolyn Wong, Ziting Kuang

Institute for Asian American Studies Publications

This report on Asian Americans and the Covid-19 Pandemic describes lessons from a multilingual survey administered in Greater Boston during the Fall, Winter, and early Spring of 2020-21. The Institute for Asian American Studies (IAAS) at UMass Boston designed and administered the IAAS Covid-19 Survey on the health, economic, and social impacts of the pandemic for Asian Americans. The IAAS Covid-19 Survey was designed to fill significant gaps in data available from a previous Spring 2020 survey, Living in Boston During Covid-19, which was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and administered by UMass Boston’s Center for Survey Research …

A New South Tyrol: The Multilingual, Multicultural Society, Alec Lee Parry

Theses and Dissertations

Identity formation is a reoccurring theme in an increasingly global world. Monolingualism and monoculturalism is no longer a possible in a global world. Like greater society, should contemporary literature not also argue for a multilingual, multicultural society? South Tyrol, a province that experienced Nazism and Fascism, control by both Mussolini and Hitler, pitted ethnic German and ethnic Italian speakers against one another. Today, since the founding of Schengen Europe eradicated border controls between Austria and Italy in 1997. South Tyrol is officially trilingual, with German, Italian, and Ladin1 being the official languages, and in recent years, has taken in a …

Effectively Integrating Technology To Engage Students And Meet Learning Objectives In Language Arts Classrooms, Jessica L. Austin

Theses and Dissertations

Technology is an ever-changing resource that is more advanced now than it has ever been. This action research project explored how teachers intentionally plan the use of technology in their classroom based on the objectives that need to be taught. The main study that this action research explores is how teacher align objectives to integrate intentional technology that engages students in the middle school ELA classroom? By collecting data via questioning, interviewing, observing and collaboration among participants, the findings show that the use of technology in the classroom is most efficient when implementing a backwards design approach to lesson planning.

“Whoz Ya People?”: Defining Lumbee Citizenship And Belonging In The 21St Century, Timothy Blake Hite

Theses and Dissertations

The Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina is a state-recognized tribe with an estimated 60,000 citizens. From 2018-2020, the tribe closed their enrollment office so that the tribe could reexamine enrollment policies, particularly the criterion for appropriate contact with the tribal homeland. During this closure, the tribe was continuing its long journey for federal recognition, with a bill passing the U.S. House of Representatives and receiving support from then President Donald Trump and current President Joseph Biden. During the summer of 2021, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with the tribe’s enrollment department, located in Pembroke, NC, to answer the question of how …

On Explaining Multimodal Hateful Meme Detection Models, Ming Shan Hee, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Wen Haw Chong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hateful meme detection is a new multimodal task that has gained significant traction in academic and industry research communities. Recently, researchers have applied pre-trained visual-linguistic models to perform the multimodal classification task, and some of these solutions have yielded promising results. However, what these visual-linguistic models learn for the hateful meme classification task remains unclear. For instance, it is unclear if these models are able to capture the derogatory or slurs references in multimodality (i.e., image and text) of the hateful memes. To fill this research gap, this paper propose three research questions to improve our understanding of these visual-linguistic …

Ampsum: Adaptive Multiple-Product Summarization Towards Improving Recommendation Captions, Quoc Tuan Truong, Hady Wirawan Lauw, Changhe Yuan, Jin Li, Jim Chan, Soo-Min Pantel, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In e-commerce websites, multiple related product recommendations are usually organized into “widgets”, each given a name, as a recommendation caption, to describe the products within. These recommendation captions are usually manually crafted and generic in nature, making it difficult to attach meaningful and informative names at scale. As a result, the captions are inadequate in helping customers to better understand the connection between the multiple recommendations and make faster product discovery.We propose an Adaptive Multiple-Product Summarization framework (AmpSum) that automatically and adaptively generates widget captions based on different recommended products. The multiplicity of products to be summarized in a widget …

Victor: An Implicit Approach To Mitigate Misinformation Via Continuous Verification Reading, Kuan-Chieh Lo, Shih-Chieh Dai, Aiping Xiong, Jing Jiang, Lun-Wei Ku

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We design and evaluate VICTOR, an easy-to-apply module on top of a recommender system to mitigate misinformation. VICTOR takes an elegant, implicit approach to deliver fake-news verifications, such that readers of fake news can continuously access more verified news articles about fake-news events without explicit correction. We frame fake-news intervention within VICTOR as a graph-based question-answering (QA) task, with Q as a fake-news article and A as the corresponding verified articles. Specifically, VICTOR adopts reinforcement learning: it first considers fake-news readers’ preferences supported by underlying news recommender systems and then directs their reading sequence towards the verified news articles. To …

“Native Speakers Do Not Understand Me”: A Phenomenological Study Of Student Experiences From Developing Asian Countries At An American University, Wolayat Tabasum Niroo, Mitchell R. Williams

Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education

International students from developing Asian countries where English is the second and foreign language are marginalized in some American Universities due to language barriers. Native English speakers often assume that whoever comes to the United States should be able to speak and write English perfectly. In developing Asian countries, such as South Asia, however, the English language belongs to the families of the Middle and Upper classes. They can get admission in English spoken countries’ higher education institutions. However, when those students come to English-speaking countries, they feel othered, left alone, and disappointed. This study utilizes a phenomenological research method …

International Student Mobility And Internationalization Of Higher Education In Hungary And China: A Comparative Analysis, Feifei Wang, Yi Wang

Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education

Global competition is currently reshaping higher education worldwide. Hungarian and Chinese higher education institutions are increasingly channeling resources to higher education development to promote the internationalization of higher education. There have been few studies specified differences between Hungarian and Chinese higher education internationalization. Over the past few years, both Hungarian and Chinese governments have started to prioritize raising international student mobility to enhance countries’ competitiveness at the global level. This article outlines the definition of higher education internationalization to provide a comprehensive understanding of this term. This article also briefly describes the background of higher education in Hungary and China …

International Student Mobility And Internationalization Of Higher Education In Hungary And China: A Comparative Analysis

Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Language Attitudes On The Bilingual And Bicultural Self-Perceptions Of Fifth-Grade Latino Students, Abigail Winnes

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated the impact of language attitudes on the bilingual and bicultural self-perceptions of fifth-grade Latino students. The research questions posed in this study included: 1) What are the language attitudes (specifically toward English, Spanish, and Spanish-English bilingualism) held by Spanish-speaking English learners in Fifth Grade? and 2) How do these attitudes interact with students’ developing bilingual and bicultural self-perceptions? The literature review includes research related to heritage language maintenance; societal attitudes toward minority languages and their speakers; Latino language attitudes; language attitudes in multilingual educational settings; and the development of bilingual and bicultural self-perceptions. Participants in this study …

Factors Of Persistence In Multilingual Abe Secondary Credential Participants, Sherry Smith

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Theses and Dissertations

The research question addressed in this study is What factors contribute to multilinguals’ persistence in adult secondary credential programs? ABE participants in general have a high rate of stopping out of programs. For those trying to earn a secondary credential in a second language, the goal of earning a secondary credential may be more complex. There was little research focusing on this population of ABE participants with this goal. This mixed methods retrospective case study examines which factors supported the persistence of three multilingual participants in Adult Basic Education (ABE) who earned their GED®. The supports are categorized into individual, …

Perceived Effectiveness Of Legal English Teachers With Differing Qualifications, Frederick Mason

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Theses and Dissertations

The research question addressed in this study was: what qualifications do Brazilian English as a Foreign Language teachers and students perceive Legal English teachers should possess if the objective is to prepare Brazilian legal practitioners whose first language is not English to be academically or professionally competitive within the world of Legal English? Topics explored in the literature review include distinctions between ESL and ESP, needs analysis in Legal English programs, and qualifications for teaching Legal English. A mixed methodology approach was utilized. Both quantitative and qualitative data collection tools were used, and consisted of a survey and interviews of …