Digital Commons Network^™

Expanding Conversations: Experiential Learning Through Film In Asynchronous Online World Language Courses, Kelly F. Davidson, Karen Acosta

Dimensions

Many educators face challenges with online learning since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Online modalities became common in world language courses; however, challenges remain in creating communicative contexts. This study examined university student perceptions of an experiential learning sequence using films in Spanish and French at the intermediate level in an asynchronous online environment. Students were required to watch a movie and complete activities related to language and culture learning goals, followed by an in-depth survey about the experience. Participants expressed positive perceptions of the activities, finding them helpful in increasing interest and motivation, as well as in expanding their thinking …

Bridging Instruction Of The Spanish Subjunctive: Exploring Task Types For Heritage And L2 Learners, Sara Fernández Cuenca

Dimensions

To this day, there are only a few studies that have used a controlled instructional intervention on specific linguistic structures to investigate if language instruction is beneficial for heritage learners (HLs), in the same way it is for second (L2) language learners, and more research in this area is rapidly needed (Bowles, 2018). The results from this small body of research suggest that explicit language instruction can be beneficial for HLs, but overall L2 learners still appear to benefit from language instruction more than their HLs counterparts (Potowski et al., 2009; Torres, 2018, inter alia). The present study seeks to …

Dimensions Volume 59 - Full Issue, Paula Garrett-Rucks, Jason A. Kemp

Dimensions

SCOLT Dimensions Volume 59

Fostering Novice L2 Pleasure Reading: The Role Of Comprehension, Text Difficulty, And Enjoyment, Victoria Rodrigo

Dimensions

This study reviews the effect of comprehension and perceived text difficulty in promoting reading enjoyment and interest to read more among novice learners practicing extensive and pleasure reading. Sixty-seven college students in their first semester of Spanish were asked to read a children-like story picture book in Spanish and were then given both a comprehension test and a brief perception questionnaire about how much they had enjoyed the story, how difficult they thought the reading had been, and whether they had interest to read more. Descriptive and inferential statistical analyses show that (1) students’ perception on the level of difficulty …

Problem-Solving Courts And The Outcome Oversight Gap, Erin R. Collins

UMKC Law Review

The creation of a specialized, “problem-solving” court is a ubiquitous response to the issues that plague our criminal legal system. The courts promise to address the factors believed to lead to repeated interactions with the system, such as addiction or mental illness, thereby reducing recidivism and saving money. And they do so effectively – at least according to their many proponents, who celebrate them as an example of a successful “evidence-based,” data-driven reform. But the actual data on their efficacy is underwhelming, inconclusive, or altogether lacking. So why do they persist?

This Article seeks to answer that question by scrutinizing …

Desettling Fixation, Emily Behzadi Cárdenas

North Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reinventing The “Inventive Concept”: Applying Copyright’S Merger Doctrine To Patent Eligibility, Kengyeh Chu

North Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

No. 14, March 2024: Advancing Coherence: Aligning Educator Preparation With California’S English Learner Roadmap Policy, Magaly Lavadenz, Ph.D., Anaida Colón-Muñiz, Ed.D., Elvira G. Armas, Ed.D.

Education and Policy Briefs

The purpose of this brief is to support English Learner success by encouraging stronger alignment between educator preparation efforts in IHEs and TK-12 policies and practices The current study explores the implementation and alignment of core concepts of the California English Learner Roadmap (ELR) in institutions of higher education (IHEs) – where the majority of California’s future educators are being prepared to serve our students. Researchers conducted a rigorous inquiry process to analyze the degree to which educator program expectations for teaching, school counseling, and administration/leadership are aligned to the ELR. Findings reveal that that there is currently insufficient alignment …

Using Ubuntu As A Research Paradigm To Unpack How Ghanaian Novice Teachers And Their Collaborators Engaged Virtually In Collaborative International Qualitative Research, Adeline M. Borti, Rakesh K. Maurya, Ivy S. Jones-Mensah, Thilina I. Wickramaarachchi

Open Access Publishing Support Funded Articles

The article details how Ubuntu was incorporated into each step of the research project, shares the authors’ experiences and key learnings, and provides recommendations for researchers utilizing Ubuntu as a research paradigm. Ubuntu is an ancient African philosophy emphasizing a way of life grounded in interdependence, collaboration, harmony, and community. In recent years, researchers have incorporated Ubuntu as a research paradigm to decolonize research in a sub-Saharan African context. The present article used international collaborative qualitative research conducted virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic to demonstrate the application of Ubuntu as a research paradigm for conducting research in the African context. …

Uncompelled: Circuits Split Over The Pre-Hearing Discovery Powers Of Arbitrators, Maya Rashid

Arbitration Law Review (2009 - Present)

No abstract provided.

Readers’ Workshop Model Impact Urban Primary Students’ Motivation And Reading Progress, Narissa Waller

Dissertations

In order to assess the impact of the Readers' Workshop on academic success and literacy progress of primary students in an urban Midwest primary school, the researcher conducted a study. Through this study, the researcher aimed to determine whether the implementation of the Readers' Workshop positively affected the academic and literacy progress of primary students in an urban setting. Student progress was analyzed by comparing their assessment scores and reading levels in fall 2022 and spring 2023. The study aimed to identify effective teaching practices that can be implemented to bridge the achievement gap between urban students and their counterparts. …

Measuring The Effects Of Selective And Divided Attention Conditions On Language Production: Comparing Across Age Groups For Aphasia Assessment, Emily Mcdonald

Theses and Dissertations

This study was divided into two parts. Study 1 examined the spoken language production of neurologically healthy adults (NHA) in selective and divided attention conditions during a story retell task. NHA participant groups consisted of 21 younger (26–54), 19 older (55–69), and 20 elderly (70–85) adults. Study 2 investigated how the language production of four people with aphasia (PWA) compared to their respective NHA group. All participants retold stories in a silent baseline condition, three background noise conditions (cocktail party, conversation, phone call), and one dual-task condition (tone discrimination). Language production measures (speech rate, disfluent verbalizations, language efficiency, lexical diversity, …

The “System” Was Never For Us: Redefining Middle School Discipline To Empower Black Girls, Kenesha Johnson, Dywanna Smith, Kamryn Griffin, Jada Williams

South Carolina Association for Middle Level Education Journal

This manuscript addresses the need for a transformative redefinition of school discipline, focused on empowering Black girls. It highlights the heightened likelihood of suspension and expulsion faced by Black girls, exposing flaws in traditional practices. Advocating for a paradigm shift, the manuscript emphasizes adopting restorative practices, centered on healing and collaboration to address behavioral issues at their core. It explores the impact of implicit biases and systemic racism on Black girls’ experiences, proposing a comprehensive, inclusive approach. Through transformative measures, schools create environments that actively empowers and supports the academic journey of Black girls, fostering a more equitable educational experience.

And Then The Black Birthed Me: Celebrating Black Girlhood In Middle Level Ela Classrooms Through Afrofuturism, Dywanna Smith, Kenesha Johnson, Kiana Eaddy

South Carolina Association for Middle Level Education Journal

The manuscript delves into the dynamic interplay between Afrofuturism and young adult literature and Middle Level English pedagogical inspiration to offer fresh perspectives on intersectionality, agency, and empowerment among marginalized youth. The authors explore how Afrofuturistic young adult literature authors are employing characters who navigate a multitude of identities, challenging traditional power dynamics, and dismantling oppressive structures. Through its incorporation of technological innovation, speculative visions, and the reclaiming of historical narratives, Afrofuturistic young adult literature creates new paradigms of empowerment and self-realization for all students, but especially Black girls. Works such as Kalynn Bayron’s The Poison Heart (2021), Namina Fornas’ …

A Profile Of Spatial Abilities In People With Down Syndrome, A. Bracken, J. Hauss, S. Grinshpun, D. Lasc, A. Hershkovich, Y. Yang

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Background: Spatial abilities are fundamental cognitive abilities, have direct applications in daily life, serve as a cognitive foundation for many other complex skills and are used in many specialty jobs. The current study aimed to systematically and comprehensively evaluate the spatial abilities of individuals with Down syndrome (DS) relative to mental ability-matched typically developing (TD) children based on Newcombe and Shipley's double-dimension theoretical framework for classifying spatial abilities. Methods: Forty adolescents and young adults with DS and 40 TD children completed a nonverbal intelligence test (Raven's), two measures of static–extrinsic skills (water-level task and cart task), two measures of static–intrinsic …

Beyond Borders: Towards A Theology Of ‘Synodality’, Rica Delos Reyes Ancheta

Theology Department Faculty Publications

Pope Francis’ call to pave the way for a synodal Church is revolutionary. While ‘synodality’ has long been a promising Church trajectory, it disrupts and challenges the current status quo in local churches. Moreover, the process of ‘synodality’ is transformative and enriching as it fosters greater engagement of the people at the peripheries of the Church’s life and mission.

People in the margins are often perceived as passive participants in the life of the Church and, as it were, on the receiving end. However, the Church’s plans, thrusts, and decisions, whether on a personal level or socio-political and economic affairs, …

"How Nicely You Talk; I Love To Hear You": Speech As Cultural Capital In Emma, Middlemarch, And The Portrait Of A Lady, Rosetta Young

Dartmouth Scholarship

In this essay, I examine how, in Emma, Middlemarch, and The Portrait of a Lady, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Henry James craft heroines who unite a precarious relationship to the British gentry with a talent for conversation. I argue that, through this glorification of their heroines’ eloquence, Austen, Eliot, and James align this socioeconomic positionality—what I term “precarious affluence” or “gentry-adjacence”—with novelistic protagonicity. Through this analysis, I study the differing degrees to which these three major nineteenth-century novelists use their smooth-talking heroines to imagine an emerging, alternative elite to the gentry and the aristocratic upper classes. …

Face Peace Design Brief #4: Negotiation And Consensus Building In Hybrid Environments, John Porten

Kroc IPJ Research and Resources

This FACE Peace Design Brief considers negotiation and consensus-building programs using a mix of in-person and distanced elements. Recent advances in technology and cultural shifts brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic have allowed program and event designers to consider a wide variety of tools and practices that allow negotiations and bargaining to happen at a distance or asynchronously.

Trans-Disciplinary Communication In Collaborative Co-Design For Knowledge Sharing, James Lipuma, Cristo León

STEM for Success Resources

Explore the transformative power of Trans-Disciplinary Communication in Collaborative Co-Design for effective knowledge sharing.

Rights
All content in this magazine is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License. Attribution-Non-Commercial-Non-Derivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

Prediction In Bilingual Sentence Processing: Is It Linked To Production?, Meir Natalia, Olga Parshina, Irina A. Sekerina

Publications and Research

The Unified Competition Model (MacWhinney, 2012) accounts for cross-linguistic differences in thematic role mapping. We investigated production and predictive use of accusative case morphology in Russian-Hebrew bilingual children. We also investigated the role of production in predictive processing testing the Prediction-by-Production Account (Pickering & Garrod, 2018) vs. the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (Prévost & White, 2000). Three groups of children aged 4–8 participated: Russian-Hebrew-speaking bilinguals, Russian-speaking and Hebrew-speaking monolingual controls. All children participated in the accusative case production and Visual-World eye-tracking comprehension experiments. Bilinguals were tested in both of their languages. The results of the study confirmed the predictions of …

Reflections On Linear B, (Part 2): More On A Possible Egyptian Hieroglyphic Component, Gerald Leonard Cohen

Arts, Languages and Philosophy Faculty Research & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Active Discovering New Slots For Task-Oriented Conversation, Yuxia Wu, Tianhao Dai, Zhedong Zheng, Lizi Liao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing task-oriented conversational systems heavily rely on domain ontologies with pre-defined slots and candidate values. In practical settings, these prerequisites are hard to meet, due to the emerging new user requirements and ever-changing scenarios. To mitigate these issues for better interaction performance, there are efforts working towards detecting out-of-vocabulary values or discovering new slots under unsupervised or semi-supervised learning paradigms. However, overemphasizing on the conversation data patterns alone induces these methods to yield noisy and arbitrary slot results. To facilitate the pragmatic utility, real-world systems tend to provide a stringent amount of human labeling quota, which offers an authoritative way …

T-Sciq: Teaching Multimodal Chain-Of-Thought Reasoning Via Large Language Model Signals For Science Question Answering, Lei Wang, Yi Hu, Jiabang He, Xing Xu, Ning Liu, Hui Liu, Heng Tao Shen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated exceptional performance in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. They have also shown the ability to perform chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to solve complex problems. Recent studies have explored CoT reasoning in complex multimodal scenarios, such as the science question answering task, by fine-tuning multimodal models with high-quality human-annotated CoT rationales. However, collecting high-quality COT rationales is usually time-consuming and costly. Besides, the annotated rationales are hardly accurate due to the external essential information missed. To address these issues, we propose a novel method termed T-SciQ that aims at teaching science question answering with …

Growing Into Kusang-Loob And Ka-Kristong Loob: Some Implications Of Exploring Loob As The Filipino’S Understanding Of Conscience In Today’S Times, Patrick Vance S. Nogoy

Loyola Papers

This paper explores the Filipino concept of loob as a culturally rooted understanding of conscience, building on earlier inculturation efforts. It proposes the development of kusang-loob and ka-Kristong loob as pathways for orienting conscience toward Christ. Emphasizing that conscience formation is both personal and communal, the article highlights the importance of dialogue and attentive listening within th Church. It argues that such formation unfolds within a synodal process that fosters maturity, discernment, and deeper Christian identity.

When All Else Fails: The Doctrine Of Foreign Equivalents As A Bar To Cultural Misappropriation, Stephanie H. Soh

William & Mary Law Review

This Note argues that under trademark law, the doctrine of foreign equivalents can be utilized to prevent some aspects of legally enforced cultural misappropriation. While it would be impossible to solve cultural misappropriation in one written piece, this Note proposes that the doctrine can serve to prevent applicants from obtaining trademark protections for certain foreign words.

Part I of this Note provides background on cultural misappropriation and the doctrine of foreign equivalents. Part II argues why the doctrine of foreign equivalents is poised to solve some of the harms of cultural misappropriation both in its structure and purpose. Part III …

Doing Things With The Language Of Law And Gender: Using Speech Act Theory To Understand The Meaning And Effect Of The Gender Identity Backlash, Susan Etta Keller

Nevada Law Journal

A significant legal backlash against transgender individuals is currently under way. This movement--which includes state legislation, state executive action, and federal cases--seeks to limit access and participation by transgender individuals in school sports, use of bathrooms, access to appropriate care, and even the right to be addressed appropriately in the classroom. Properly understood as a political backlash in response to previous political gains by transgender individuals, this movement is composed of a series of speech acts: language that makes change in the world and alters human relations. This article identifies the features of the backlash and the power dynamics that …

Collaborative System Usability In Spaceflight Analog Environments Through Remote Observations, Shivang Shelat, Jessica J. Marquez, Jimin Zheng, John A. Karasinski

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

The conventional design cycle in human–computer interaction faces significant challenges when applied to users in isolated settings, such as astronauts in extreme environments. Challenges include obtaining user feedback and effectively tracking human–software/human–human dynamics during system interactions. This study addresses these issues by exploring the potential of remote conversation analysis to validate the usability of collaborative technology, supplemented with a traditional post hoc survey approach. Specifically, we evaluate an integrated timeline software tool used in NASA’s Human Exploration Research Analog. Our findings indicate that voice recordings, which focus on the topical content of intra-crew speech, can serve as non-intrusive metrics for …

Re-Thinking L1-L2 Similarities And Differences In English Proficiency: Insights From The English Reading Online (Enro) Project., Noam Siegelman, Irina A. Sekerina, Victor Kuperman

Publications and Research

This article presents the ENglish Reading Online (ENRO) project that offers data on English reading and listening comprehension from 7,338 university-level advanced learners and native speakers of English representing 19 countries. The database also includes estimates of reading rate and seven component skills of English, including vocabulary, spelling, and grammar, as well as rich demographic and language background data. We first demonstrate high reliability for ENRO tests and their convergent validity with existing meta-analyses. We then provide a bird's-eye view of first (L1) and second (L2) language comparisons and examine the relative role of various predictors of reading and listening …

Coralai: Emergent Ecosystems Of Neural Cellular Automata, Aidan A. Barbieux, Aidan A. Barbieux

Master's Theses

Artificial intelligence has traditionally been approached through centralized architectures and optimization of specific metrics on large datasets. However, the frontiers of fields spanning cognitive science, biology, physics, and computer science suggest that intelligence is better understood as a multi-scale, decentralized, emergent phenomenon. As such, scaling up approaches that mirror the natural world may be one of the next big advances in AI. This thesis presents Coralai, a framework for efficiently simulating the emergence of diverse artificial life ecosystems integrated with modular physics. The key innovations of Coralai include: 1) Hosting diverse Neural Cellular Automata organisms in the same simulation that …

Improving Automatic Transcription Using Natural Language Processing, Anna Kiefer

Master's Theses

Digital Democracy is a CalMatters and California Polytechnic State University initia-
tive to promote transparency in state government by increasing access to the Califor-
nia legislature. While Digital Democracy is made up of many resources, one founda-
tional step of the project is obtaining accurate, timely transcripts of California Senate
and Assembly hearings. The information extracted from these transcripts provides
crucial data for subsequent steps in the pipeline. In the context of Digital Democracy,
upleveling is when humans verify, correct, and annotate the transcript results after
the legislative hearings have been automatically transcribed. The upleveling process
is done with the …