Digital Commons Network^™

Does A District Mandate Matter For The Behavior Of Politicians? An Analysis Of Roll-Call Votes And Parliamentary Speeches, Andreas Born, Aljoscha Janssen

Research Collection School Of Economics

In most democracies, members of parliament (MPs) are elected either through a party list or by a district. We use a discontinuity in the German electoral system to investigate the causal effect of a district election on an MP’s conformity with the party line. A district election does not affect roll-call voting behavior causally, possibly due to overall high adherence to party-line voting. Analyzing the parliamentary speeches of each MP allows us to overcome the high party-line discipline with regard to parliamentary voting. Using textual analysis and machine learning techniques, we create two measures of closeness of an MP’s speeches …

The Socio-Economic Factors Of Poverty: Empirical Evidence From District Lasbela, Balochistan, Fida Muhammad, Parvez Ahmed Shaikh, Hazrat Yousaf

Business Review

Poverty is defined as a lack of basic necessities for survival. The current study examines the socio-economic factors that contribute to poverty in five of the district of Lasbela's nine tehsils, namely (Bela, Dureji, Hub, Sonmiani, and Uthal. Lasbela is Balochistan's tenth most deprived district, located near Karachi. The data for this study is cross-sectional and contributed from the project's 2014 Base Line Survey (BLS, 2014). The Logit model was used to evaluate the variables under study in order to achieve the study goal. According to our empirical findings, the average daily income in this district was less than $1.50. …

Southern Humboldt Indians, Jerry Rohde

Trade & Scholarly Monographs

More than a century after they had spoken, these early day Indians will be heard. All of us who make Humboldt County our home deserve to have access to this information. We deserve to know the many, many names of the tribal groups that were once here and to learn the story of these groups. And we deserve to know the names of the Indian elders who transmitted these names and told these stories, just as we deserve to know the stories about the elders themselves.

This is the 2024 second printing, which includes minor updates.

Social Media Use, Acculturation, And Self-Esteem Of Deaf And Hard-Of-Hearing Adults, Taylor A. Paglieri, Caroline Kobek Pezzarossi Ph.D, Deborah Schooler

JADARA

Social networking sites (SNSs) have become increasingly popular in modern society; however, research into the impacts of SNS use on Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (D/HH) individuals is lacking. Through an online survey completed by 217 D/HH adults, we examined the demographic predictors of SNS use and how frequent SNS use relates to self-esteem. Deaf acculturation, age, attending a mainstream school with support services, and education level were significant predictors of SNS use for D/HH adults. Furthermore, D/HH adults with increased Deaf acculturation and frequent SNS use reported higher self-esteem.

Quality Of Life For Deafblind Individuals: Comparing The Effect Of Living With And Without Support Service Providers, Sheridan K. Whitworth, Jaime Wilson

JADARA

The current study examines the quality of life for DeafBlind individuals who have support service providers (SSPs) compared to those who do not have SSPs. A measure of quality of life (KIDSCREEN Survey, 2004) was administered to 56 DeafBlind individuals (N=58), ages 18 years and older. Half of the individuals (n = 28) participated in the group with SSPs, and the other half participated in the group without SSPs. Results from the quantitative survey indicate that DeafBlind individuals with SSPs have consistently higher positive responses than those without SSPs.

Book Review: Deaf People In The Criminal Justice System: Selected Topics On Advocacy, Incarceration, And Social Justice, Neil S. Glickman

JADARA

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The Lives Of Late Soviet Science, 1945-1991, Grégory Dufaud, Ksenia Tatarchenko

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This study explores the multifaceted landscape of Soviet science from the end of World War II to the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. It examines the interplay between scientific innovation and political ideology, highlighting how the state shaped research agendas and scientific practices during a period marked by both significant achievements and profound challenges. Through an analysis of key scientific institutions, prominent figures, and pivotal projects, the study illustrates the tensions between ideological constraints and the pursuit of knowledge. Additionally, it addresses the impacts of international collaboration and competition during the Cold War, revealing how these dynamics influenced scientific …

Ecstasy, Confession, Image, And Silence In Buber, Bergman, And Godard, Karl E. Toepfer

Open Educational Resources

This essay discusses the contrasting attitudes toward ecstatic experience as described in Martin Buber's book Ekstatische Konfessionen (1909). Ingmar Bergman's film Persona (1966), and Jean-Luc Godard's film Weekend (1967). The attitude toward ecstasy depends heavily on the use of language and confidence in language to represent ecstatic experience. Buber, Bergman. and Godard share little, if any, perception on the relation between language, speech, and ecstasy.

"Second-Class" Rhetoric, Ideology, And Doctrinal Change, Eric M. Ruben, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

A common refrain in current constitutional discourse is that lawmakers and judges are systematically disfavoring certain rights. This allegation has been made about the rights to free speech and free exercise of religion, but it is most prominent in debates about the right to keep and bear arms. Such “second-class” treatment, the argument goes, signals that the Supreme Court must intervene aggressively to police the disrespected rights. Past empirical work casts doubt on the descriptive claim that judges and policymakers are disrespecting the Second Amendment, but that simply highlights how little we know about how the second-class argument functions as …

The Text(Tiles) Of Adinkra Symbols: West African Art, Gender, & Poetic Translations, Rachel A. Ansong

Open Access Dissertations

The Text(tiles) of Adinkra Symbols: West African Art, Gender, & Poetic Translations is a critical and creative dissertation that interrogates Adinkra symbols from West Africa. These symbols, rediscovered in the nineteenth century, serve as codes, communicating warnings and meanings of proverbs to recipients. Many individual Adinkra symbols are abstract ideographs of the philosophical ideas they represent. My work expands on existing scholarship and further elaborates how Adinkra symbols moved from Ghana to the United States (U.S). Specifically, I trace how these creative-pictorial-philosophical symbols evolved in use as artistic mediums of expression of African/Black tradition and identity for the migrant African/Black …

Learning To Visualize: Middle-Level Learners Analyzing And Designing Science Infographics, Mark Davis

Open Access Dissertations

Infographics are part of daily life because of the rise of digital media and technology, as learners now encounter a barrage of images carefully designed to convey data and information through social media. But what happens in the classroom when young learners first encounter this expressive genre? This case study examined a unit of instruction on analyzing and creating infographics in a content-area middle school classroom. Data included classroom observations through video and audio recording, examination of a student graphic organizer and student-designed infographics, and semi-structured interviews with students and the facilitating teacher. Results show that students learned how to …

Broken Dozer, Haunted Vale: The Ecopoetics Of Ambient Language, Andrew Merecicky

Open Access Dissertations

Broken Dozer, Haunted Vale is a collection of poetry that explores the principles of ambient language poetics as articulated in its critical introduction. Rather than a poetic focused on a set of thematic concerns, ambient language poetics is an ecopoetic that addresses the writing process itself and proposes an alternative to the internal/external spatial metaphor that inspires creative writing pedagogy premised on the urgency of self-expression. The poems within the collection are an experimental inquiry into what might be possible in making poems if the activity of reading/writing is not motivated primarily by representational and mimetic aims that are described …

Black Feminist Autoethnography: How Identity Can Affect Peer Review Practices In The College Writing Classroom, Eileen M. James

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation explores the importance of embodied teaching pedagogy as it relates to peer review practices in the college writing classroom. This work uses autoethnography as a research method, exploring issues of (dis)embodiment and experiences with collaborative learning in classrooms. In addition to a review of applicable literature focused on peer review practices, writing pedagogy, and Black Feminist Autoethnography, this dissertation contains narrative sections from the viewpoint of the subject--a Black woman--as a student, an instructor, and a researcher working to examine her experiences and how they demonstrate the need for embodied approaches in the classroom. The purpose of this …

Representation Of Muslims In Time Magazine: A Corpus Linguistic Study, Constantia Rhinehart

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This thesis sought to explore the representation of Muslims in US-American

Press. In order to do this, the Time Magazine Corpus was used to observe words that collocate with the word “Muslim” in Time Magazine. The frequency of the word “Muslim” was observed for each decade and coded to determine the semantic prosody of each token. The 1960s-2006 were observed in order to provide a more comprehensive view of Muslim representation in Western media and how this representation has changed over time. The majority of collocations were considered to be neutral, however, a large number of collocations were considered …

“The Illusion Of Collaboration”: An Integrated Examination Of The Antecedents, Processes, And Consequences Of Online Group Work, Jill Cathleen Woods

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) presents postsecondary educators with a conundrum: how to design and support small-group activities without stifling deep and meaningful learning. The literature indicates that students are not consistently practicing higher-order cognitive activities, educators are not reliably designing or facilitating them, and/or researchers are not locating or identifying them where they are occurring. The aim of this dissertation is to explore these deficits by identifying the antecedent conditions that most affect collaboration. Specifically, I answer the question, how do learner’s prior knowledge, characteristics, and experiences manifest in their collaborative processes. Addressing a gap in the literature, this study …

Knowledge And Training In Language Sample Analysis Of Us Speech-Language Pathology Graduate Students, Allegra Cornaglia

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Purpose: Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) play an integral role in identification and treatment of developmental language disorders (DLD). Best practices include the use of language sample analysis (LSA) as part of a comprehensive evaluation. However, LSA requires a specific set of foundational morphological and syntactic knowledge. Previous studies have shown a knowledge gap for both SLPs and SLP graduate students for other areas of morphosyntax and phonology. This study examined the language analysis skills of current SLP graduate students on a test of Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) analysis and Clausal Density (CD) and whether there were possible factors associated with …

Teachers’ Perceptions Of Causes Of Academic Difficulties Experienced By Students Who Are Culturally And Linguistically Diverse, Courtney D. Miller

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The purpose of the study was to identify in-service general and special educators’, counselors’, and English as a Second Language educators’ perceptions of the cause of academic difficulties for students who are culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD). A mixed-methods sequential explanatory design was used to initially collect quantitative data though an online survey with more in-depth qualitative data collected through subsequent focus groups. This design allowed the researcher to better interpret and explain the quantitative data by exploring general and special educators’, counselors’, and ESL teachers’ perceptions of the causes of academic difficulties experienced by students who are CLD, to …

Standardizing Assessment Of Spoken Discourse In Aphasia: A Working Group With Deliverables, Tyson G. Harmon, Brielle C. Stark, Manaswita Dutta, Laura L. Murray, Lucy Bryant, Davida Fromm, Brian Macwhinney, Amy E. Ramage, Angela Roberts, Dirk B Den Ouden, Kris Brock, Katy Mckinney-Bock, Eun Jin Paek, Si On Yoon, Charalambos Themistocleous, Hyunsoo Yoo, Katharine Aveni, Stephanie Gutierrez, Saryu Sharma

Faculty Publications

Purpose: The heterogeneous nature of measures, methods, and analyses reported in the aphasia spoken discourse literature precludes comparison of outcomes across studies (e.g., meta-analyses) and inhibits replication. Furthermore, funding and time constraints significantly hinder collecting test-retest data on spoken discourse outcomes. This research note describes the development and structure of a working group, designed to address major gaps in the spoken discourse aphasia literature, including a lack of standardization in methodology, analysis, and reporting, as well as nominal data regarding the psychometric properties of spoken discourse outcomes. Method: The initial initiatives for this working group are to (a) propose recommendations …

Interest Points Analysis For Internet Forum Based On Long-Short Windows Similarity, Xinghai Ju, Jicang Lu, Xiangyang Luo, Gang Zhou, Shiyu Wang, Shunhang Li, Yang Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

For Internet forum Points of Interest (PoI), existing analysis methods are usually lack of usability analysis under different conditions and ignore the long-term variation, which lead to blindness in method selection. To address this problem, this paper proposed a PoI variation prediction framework based on similarity analysis between long and short windows. Based on the framework, this paper presented 5 PoI analysis algorithms which can be categorized into 2 types, i.e., the traditional sequence analysis methods such as autoregressive integrated moving average model (ARIMA), support vector regressor (SVR), and the deep learning methods such as convolutional neural network (CNN), long-short …

A Risk-Averse Mechanism For Suicidality Assessment On Social Media, Ramit Sawhney, Atula Tejaswi Neerkaje, Manas Gaur

Publications

Recent studies have shown that social media has increasingly become a platform for users to express suicidal thoughts outside traditional clinical settings. With advances in Natural Language Processing strategies, it is now possible to design automated systems to assess suicide risk. However, such systems may generate uncertain predictions, leading to severe consequences. We hence reformulate suicide risk assessment as a selective prioritized prediction problem over the Columbia Suicide Severity Risk Scale (C-SSRS). We propose SASI, a risk-averse and self-aware transformer-based hierarchical attention classifier, augmented to refrain from making uncertain predictions. We show that SASI is able to refrain from 83% …

Ksat: Knowledge-Infused Self Attention Transformer - Integrating Multiple Domain-Specific Contexts, Kaushik Roy, Yuxin Zi, Vignesh Narayanan, Manas Gaur, Amit P. Sheth

Publications

Domain-specific language understanding requires integrating multiple pieces of relevant contextual information. For example, we see both suicide and depression related behavior (multiple contexts) in the text “I have a gun and feel pretty bad about my life, and it wouldn’t be the worst thing if I didn’t wake up tomorrow”. Domain specificity in self-attention architectures is handled by fine-tuning on excerpts from relevant domain specific resources (datasets and external knowledge - medical textbook chapters on mental health diagnosis related to suicide and depression). We propose a modified self-attention architecture Knowledge infused Self Attention Transformer (KSAT) that achieves the integration of …

Wise Causal Models: Wisdom Infused Semantics Enhanced Causal Models - A Study In Suicidality Diagnosis, Kaushik Roy, Yuxin Zi, Vignesh Narayanan, Manas Gaur, Sanjay Chandrasekar, Amit Sheth

Publications

The COVID-19 Pandemic has highlighted the gap between the number of mental health care seekers and care providers. Netizens have taken to internet-based platforms such as Reddit to express their experiences. Mental illness diagnosis processes have clinically accepted causal interpretations and semantics. Curiously, mental illness diagnosis accuracy is low relative to similar well-studied illnesses. Motivated by this discrepancy, we propose Wisdom Infused Semantics Enhanced (WISE) causal models, inspired by the wisdom of the crowd idea that learns from a collective agreement among causal models and their semantics for mental illness diagnoses. We use suicidality diagnosis task descriptions, datasets, and baseline …

Are We Dialogical Or Sociomaterial In Our Written Corrective Feedback? A Reflection By Two Academic Writing Instructors, Daron B. Loo, Rowland Anthony Imperial

International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning

Despite the growing movement to embrace sociomaterial approaches to feedback practices (e.g. Gravett, 2020), dialogicity remains the prominent and dominant approach, especially in the teaching of introductory or compulsory writing courses at the tertiary level. To examine this in our own practice, we reflected on and compared our written corrective feedback (WCF) provided to our students. Based on our WCF practices, we contend that feedback practices may range from dialogic to sociomaterial. The former aims to ensure students’ learning of expected academic skills or objectives of a module, while the latter promotes students’ pursuit of content knowledge. These observations are …

The Scholarship Of Teaching And Learning Critical Thinking: Finding A Way Forward With Evidence From A Medical Teaching Context, Althea Jane Gamble Blakey Dr, Clinton Golding Professor, Tim J. Wilkinson Professor

International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning

The scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) in higher education has a deep- seated concern with developing critical thinking, now a common learning outcome and desired graduate attribute. The prolific inquiry into what critical thinking might be has, however, resulted in a complex literature, with multiple definitions used both explicitly, and implicitly, in practice. Unfortunately, this lack of shared meaning creates barriers for those who need to develop thinking in the classroom. In a year-long action research project, six teacher participants developed a three-part strategy to overcome these barriers in undergraduate small group medical teaching. Iterative thematic data analysis revealed …

Influence Of Discussion Prompts On Fostering Student Teachers’ Competence In Knowledge Of English Instruction, Chin-Wen Chien

International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning

This study analyzed questionnaire, pre-test, post-test, and online posts to explore influence of discussion prompts on the competence in English instruction of seven student teachers of elementary school EFL (English as a Foreign Language) in a practicum in Taiwan. This study reached the following conclusions. First, student teachers had good perceptions of the discussion prompts, particularly their effects on reflection on and relevance of English instruction. Secondly, student teachers had good perceptions of discussion prompts because of their clarity; however, they were not satisfied with inactive discussions among participants. Finally, participants’ education background and teaching experience affected their perceptions and …

Mathematics Learning, Teaching, And Equity In Policy And Programs: The Case Of Secondary Mathematics Teacher Education In The United States, Eryn M. Stehr Maher, Hyunyi Jung, Jill Newton

Mathematical Sciences: Faculty Publications

Professional organizations have provided recommendations for mathematics teaching and learning; however, few studies have investigated the practical integration of those recommendations into mathematics teacher education programs. In this study, we examine how the reported “big ideas” of courses in secondary mathematics teacher education programs emphasized the content and teaching practices necessary for future mathematics teachers, as recommended by policy documents. As part of a larger study, we conducted a series of interviews in secondary mathematics teacher education programs at four universities (names are descriptive pseudonyms): Great Lakes University (GLU), Midwestern Research University (MRU), Midwestern Urban University (MUU), and Southeastern Research …

Intervention Research To Increase Pediatric Hearing Device Use: A Scoping Review, Karen F. Munoz, Diana Ortiz, Cameron Bolinger, Michael P. Twohig

Psychology Faculty Publications

Purpose: This study is a scoping review examining interventions to increase hearing device use for children.

Method: Online databases were used to identify peer-reviewed journal articles published prior to November 1, 2021, yielding 1,288 after duplications were removed. Four articles met the inclusion criteria after articles were screened by title name and abstract and subsequent full-text screening of six articles. A qualitative analysis was conducted to identify features of the intervention studies related to the participants, design, intervention, key findings, and limitations.

Results: The included studies were published between 1982 and 2021, and in all four studies, the children used …

The Textual Canons In Contract Cases: A Preliminary Study, Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay is a first effort to explore how linguistic canons function in contract cases. Most lawyers know about ejusdem generis, expressio unius, and noscitur a sociis from their work in statutory interpretation, but no one has attempted any systematic inquiry into how these canons figure in contract interpretation. Looking at two jurisdictions’ use of textual canons in contract cases over time and in careful detail, this Essay reports findings and offers preliminary conclusions, about the specific jurisdictions under review and more generally in a comparative vein, both inter-jurisdictionally and as compared to what we know about the same canons’ …

Covid-19 Stressors, Ethnic Discrimination, Covid-19 Fears, And Mental Health Among Latinx College Students, Lucas Torres

Psychology Faculty Research and Publications

This study examined the links between COVID-19 psychosocial stressors, ethnic discrimination, COVID-19 fears, and their combined effects on mental health outcomes among U.S.-based Latinx college students (N = 148; M_age = 20.68, SD = 2.53). Findings showed that sleep and eating disturbances, emotional distress, and work disruptions were linked with fear of contamination, fear of social distancing, and fear of pandemic impact. Further, ethnic discrimination was found to uniquely contribute to COVID-19 fears above and beyond COVID-19 psychosocial stressors. Finally, COVID-19 emotional distress and COVID fear of pandemic impact were significantly linked to anxiety and depression symptomatology. Recommendations …

Plain Language Or Anything But?, Jennifer F. Drayton, Averil Coxhead

Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education & Research

This paper focuses on what language needs to be used in emergencies by air traffic controllers based on an investigation of plain language definitions and descriptions in International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) publications and in the beliefs of nine air traffic controllers in the United Arab Emirates. The aim of the study is pedagogical, in that it is important to establish what language trainee air traffic controllers need to use during emergencies, but there is little in the way of course books or materials that can inform course development. Findings suggest there are contradictions in the ICAO documentation, and differences …